BREITBART2

==BB2bak -->THREE:

{6/16}:

see main and bannon

tag brbrt

andrew bak 619

no merri

perhaps neglected a bit // to fox jrnl fail b/c it's constant

this bak 1019

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vaxx grift

mma 1 24

Following news that a session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting would be focused on the World Health Organization’s preparations for a potential epidemic of a currently unknown pathogen dubbed “Disease X,” right-wing media figures pushed conspiracy theories about a supposed plan to kill off “excess population” and fearmongered over the possibility of another pandemic and lockdowns. Some sought to capitalize on the fear by selling “medical emergency kits” that contain an unproven COVID-19 treatment.

• For years, the WHO has been preparing for so-called “Disease X” — a potential undetermined pathogen that could cause a future epidemic

• • At the World Economic Forum’s January 2024 annual meeting at Davos, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus spoke about the need to prepare for an “unknown Disease X.” In the lead-up to the event, Ghebreyesus and the WHO claimed that Disease X could potentially result in “20 times more fatalities” than COVID-19. World Economic Forum, accessed [1/17/24]

• • Disease X is a placeholder name for a currently unknown pathogen that the WHO uses for hypothetical epidemic prevention planning. The WHO adopted the moniker “Disease X” in 2018. It stems from a series of epidemic prevention plans that began in 2015 in response to the 2014 Ebola crisis. WHO, accessed [3/1/20; The Economist, 3/23/18]

• ## Right-wing figures and social media users have fearmongered and spread conspiracy theories about Disease X

• • On his Infowars show, Alex Jones claimed that Disease X was a “virus scare power grab” by entities that he claimed “want control of our bodies.” In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Jones suggested there is a “Globalist Plan to Launch #DiseaseX to Install World Government.” Twitter/X, [1/17/24; Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 1/17/24]

• • On Newsmax, disgraced Conservative Political Action Conference chair Matt Schlapp speculated that Disease X was a scheme to kill off “excess population”

because they “want less people.” Schlapp stated: “I think they must know something, and I’m not going to discount the fact that probably Disease X is a thing and could happen, and some people — as evil and dastardly as it sounds — thinks killing millions of people actually could be good for the rest of us who survive.” Additionally, host Chris Plante said that at the meeting, “globalists at Davos ... might not be preparing for imaginary situations, but rather assembling their next global power grab.” Newsmax, *Chris Plante The Right Squad*, [1/17/23; CNN, 12/16/23]

• • Conspiracy theorist Russell Brand posted an episode of his Stay Free livestream titled “‘Disease X Is Imminent!!’ The Next Pandemic Is Here?!” In the episode, Brand claimed that a supposed vaccine for Disease X was being developed “using technology that potentially caused the last pandemic, in a facility that also produces bioweapons.” Rumble, *Stay Free*, [1/15/24]

• • Conservative podcast host Graham Allen, whose show Dear America is exclusively on Rumble, suggested in a livestream that Disease X is a plan “to stop a Trump presidency and/or possibly take over the world.” Later in his stream, Allen’s co-host highlighted a user comment reading “COVID was a test run” for Disease X, and Allen agreed. Rumble, *Graham Allen’s Dear America*, [1/17/24, 1/17/24, accessed 1/10/24]

• • Users in private right-wing Facebook groups spread conspiracy theories about Disease X, sharing right-wing media coverage and claiming that “genocidal depopulation” and “lockdowns” are coming. Users shared right-wing articles and videos — including from The Gateway Pundit, Russell Brand, and Rumble videos — stoking fears about Disease X in groups with tens of thousands of members. Facebook, accessed [1/18/24]

• • Conspiracy theories about Disease X and imminent lockdowns also spread on far-right platforms such as Truth Social, Telegram, and 4chan. Conspiracy theorists and QAnon figures fearmongered that “Preparing for Disease X” was a top priority of the meeting in Davos, with QAnon influencer Jordan Sather writing on Truth Social, “TRY ANOTHER SCAMDEMIC YOU GLOBALIST SCUM.” On 4chan, users claimed that “Disease X is officially spreading, lockdowns incoming” and that “this time … restrictions will never be lifted.” On Telegram, anti-vaccine figure Sherri Tenpenny suggested that a vaccine for Disease X is under development. Truth Social, [1/11/24; 4chan, 1/16/24, 1/16/24; Telegram, 1/15/24; PolitiFact, accessed1/18/24]

• ## Right-wing figures are using fear of Disease X to sell “medical emergency kits”
  • Dr. Peter McCullough, who has spread conspiracy theories about COVID-19, used Disease X to promote an “emergency kit” that sells for $300 and includes ivermectin, which is an unproven COVID-19 treatment.McCullough is the “chief science officer” for The Wellness Company, a right-wing media-associated company that sells supplements. Discussing Disease X during a media appearance, McCullough said, “Wellness Company’s got a wonderful kit at home you can have.” Twitter/X, [1/17/24; The Daily Beast, 12/1/23; The Wellness Company, accessed 1/18/24; NIH, accessed 1/18/24]

• • The Gateway Pundit used Disease X to promote The Wellness Company’s “medical emergency kits.” In a “sponsored message” titled “‘DISEASE X’ — Are The Globalists Planning Another Pandemic?” The Gateway Pundit urged readers, “Don’t be caught unprepared for whatever the WEF has in mind” and “Don’t regret not acting today” in purchasing The Wellness Company’s emergency kits. The post stated, “The Wellness Company and their doctors are medical professionals that you can trust and their new medical emergency kits are the gold standard when it comes to keeping you safe and healthy.” The article also noted that Gateway Pundit would benefit from the sale of emergency kits. The Gateway Pundit, accessed [1/17/24]

• • The Wellness Company also sponsored an article in Breitbart, which encouraged readers to start “stocking up” on medications included in the “medical emergency kits.” The article urges readers to “protect you and your family from drug shortages, ‘Disease X,’ or whatever comes your way,” and it quotes anti-vaccine figure Dr. James Thorp, who claims that the WEF is “threatening us that there’s another pandemic coming.” Breitbart, accessed [1/18/24; Real Clear Politics, 2/24/23]

• • The Telegram channel for Steve Bannon’s War Room promoted a Gateway Pundit article that included promotion of The Wellness Company’s emergency kits. The post urges readers: “Before The Next Crisis Hits – Prepare With A Medical Emergency Kit (Includes Ivermectin and Z-Pak).” Telegram, [1/12/24; The Gateway Pundit, 1/12/24]

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SEE DOMESTIC TERROR GORKA FAIL WHT SUPR NEO-NAZI

an 525

no lnx

'Sad white boys': Fear as Trump terror adviser shrugs off threat from 'inside the house'

Members of a neo-Nazi group pose with shields during 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, in 2017. (Karla Cote/Flickr)

Jordan Greenand Raw Story May 03, 2025

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was removed this week but a key Trump counterterrorism official remains in place at the White House — and he's planning a change in strategy to focus on jihadists rather than white supremacist groups that one leading expert said remain a significant domestic threat.

"The call is coming from inside the house," said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. "We all understand why the right doesn't want to tackle domestic violent extremism — it's their base."

The Trump official is Sebastian Gorka, an Anglo-Hungarian-American academic who spent seven months in the first Trump White House as a national security strategist before being removed. Closely connected to Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Gorka's far-right views have proved consistently controversial. His return to the White House generated protests from former Trump advisers, who called him names including “conman” and “clown.”

Regardless, Gorka is promising a new policy focused on “killing jihadis,” thereby downplaying, if not altogether abandoning, a Biden-era emphasis on white supremacist threats.

Now deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism in the National Security Council, Gorka is by his own estimation an expert on “Middle Eastern jihadism, al-Qaida [and] ISIS.” His X biography includes the acronym “WWFY&WWKY,” which stands for “we will find you and we will kill you.”

This week, Gorka wrote for Breitbart News that Trump has “already engineered a complete reversal in American counterterrorism policy.”

Gorka recounted a meeting with Trump and Waltz during the second week of the new administration. Gorka and Waltz laid a map on the Resolute Desk, showing a cave complex in northern Somalia that was being used as a base by ISIS, Gorka said.

“Kill them, and kill them now,” Trump said, according to Gorka. Thirty hours later, he said, the men were in the Situation Room “watching living hell rain down” on the caves.

'Back to the basics'

Speaking last week at Semafor’s World Economy Summit, Gorka said the new counterterrorism plan, expected to be ready in the coming month, will be “utterly, completely” different from the strategy under Joe Biden. Gorka said the new plan will “go back to the basics,” as “the majority of threats we face are jihadi terrorists.”

In his preface to the 2021 National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, Biden highlighted white supremacist attacks: the 2015 massacre of Black worshipers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that was targeted for supporting immigrants, and the 2019 slaughter of Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex. by a gunman who echoed the Trump epithet “invaders.”

Though it cited an array of violent ideologies, the national strategy asserted that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (principally those who promote the superiority of the white race) and militia violent extremists are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats.”

Like other officials in the Trump administration, Gorka has said little if anything publicly about the threat posed by violent neo-Nazi accelerationists, who seek to bring about the collapse of society through mass shootings and industrial sabotage.

But Gorka has in the past downplayed white supremacy. In 2017, as an adviser in the first Trump White House, he told Breitbart, where he was previously a national security editor, that where terrorism was concerned, white supremacy was not a problem. Three days later in Charlottesville, Va. a man who had rallied with the white supremacist group Vanguard America drove a car into a group of peaceful anti-racist protesters, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the attack “domestic terrorism.”

Gorka could not be reached for comment for this story. Lewis, from George Washington University, worried that a national strategy on terrorism that erases references to racial motivation might discourage FBI agents from seeking authorization to investigate white supremacist plots.

“In the face of overwhelming statistical evidence, there is a complete unwillingness to acknowledge the reality, because it would fly in the face of their narrative,” Lewis told Raw Story. “It’s not going to go away. We can put our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not happening. There’s still going to be mass shootings, even if we don’t acknowledge that they’re motivated by white supremacy, and the FBI just calls them ‘sad white boys.’

“If anything, the complete inability of the administration to even acknowledge the problem will afford these individuals a more permissive environment to recruit, radicalize and carry out attacks.”

'Growing threat'

In his recent article for Breitbart, Gorka charged that the Biden administration “ignored the growing threat of global jihadism.”

Under the Biden administration, the FBI arrested an Afghan national who allegedly planned a mass casualty attack on Election Day in the name of ISIS. In total, Lewis said, 10 ISIS supporters were arrested in the U.S. in 2024.

On New Year's Eve, a man inspired by ISIS used his truck to attack revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people. Before that, Lewis said, the last lethal jihadi attack on U.S. soil occurred in 2019, when a Saudi airman taking courses at Naval Air Station Pensacola murdered three U.S. sailors.

Since then, avowed white supremacists have carried out mass shootings targeting African Americans in Buffalo, N.Y., resulting in 10 deaths, and Jacksonville, Fla., with three deaths.

In terms of disrupted plots, a review by Raw Story found that since 2021, the FBI has disrupted at least three attempts to attack the power grid by white supremacists affiliated with the Terrorgram Collective, a group recently designated by the State Department as a global terrorist entity. In the same period, the FBI disrupted at least six plots by white supremacists to carry out lethal attacks against police officers and LGBTQ+ people.

Gorka has also promised changes in emphasis on resources used to counter terror groups. For Breitbart, he wrote that the centerpiece of Trump’s counterterrorism approach will be “allowing our special operators, the intelligence community, and the bravest warfighters in the world to deal death to those who have the blood of Americans on their hands or who are plotting to murder our citizens.”

ProPublica, however, has reported that the new administration has cut nearly 20 percent of the workforce at a Department of Homeland Security center responsible for “strengthen[ing] the nation’s ability to prevent targeted violence and terrorism nationwide, through funding, training, evidence-based resources and increasing public awareness across every level of government, the private sector, and local communities.”

NOW READ: Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff

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wannabe trolls?

an 12 23

Since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled last week that Donald Trump is ineligible to appear on the 2024 Republican primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which says an "officer" cannot participate in an insurrection — three GOP lawmakers have worked to keep President Joe Biden off the 2024 ballot as well, Truthout reports.

Per the report, "In a statement to the far right website:(style="background-color:#e0e000ff"):}: **:{Breitbart, Rep. Aaron Bernstine (R-Pennsylvania), Rep. Charlice Byrd (R-Georgia) and Rep. Cory McGarr (R-Arizona) explicitly cited the court ruling from last week as their motivation. The GOP representatives described the court's decision as 'lawfare,' despite strong evidence demonstrating Trump did indeed engage in insurrectionist behavior."

Furthermore, the news outlet reports the Republican lawmakers' rationale "has nothing to do with insurrection," but with "disagreements over policies on immigration and border security, as well as" Biden's "'alleged corrupt family business dealings with China,' which Republicans have yet to actually demonstrate beyond innuendo and unsubstantiated assertions.'"

The lawmakers wrote, "The absurdity of radical Democrat judges removing Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado will be a stain on the American political system for decades. By their very own interpretation of the law, Joe Biden is 100% not eligible to run for political office."

The news outlet reports, "This effort to disqualify Biden from being able to run isn't the only action being taken by Republicans in the wake of the Colorado ruling — Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), for instance, has similarly said he may try to block Biden from his state’s ballot, citing the same dubious claim that Biden’s border policies make him an insurrectionist."

Truthout also notes, "A snap poll from YouGov the day after the Colorado Supreme Court ruling found that 54 percent of Americans approved of the court's action, with only 35 percent opposed to it. Although quick turnaround polls such as this one aren't the most scientifically accurate, the poll suggests that a significant portion of the U.S. electorate likely approves of pursuing this option in other states to block Trump from being president again."

READ MORE:The one crucial element Lindsey Graham ignored with his 'flimsy' attack on Colorado ruling: analysis

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/youre-not-supposed-to-understand-the-hunter-biden-smear-chaos-is-the-point

kos

Acclaimed journalist and historianAnne Applebaumunderstands the universe of propaganda as well as anyone alive today. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she has devoted the past three decades to studying Russia and Eastern and Central Europe, with an emphasis on disinformation and propaganda so acute that she washerself targeted—by a Russian-originated smear campaign in retaliation for her writings about Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea. She now contributes her cache of knowledge toThe Atlantic, among other publications.

For someone so well-versed, analyzing the blatant behavior of propagandist right-wing media outlets such as Fox News is something akin to a chess master analyzing the strategy of Tic-Tac-Toe—simple, and even relaxing. So after watching the antics of Donald Trump during his final debate with Joe Biden, she wrote a piece for *The Atlantic*on Friday that explains what millions of Americans are still shaking their heads in bewilderment about today: the source—and more importantly, the purpose—of Trump's bizarre accusations about Hunter Biden and his allegedly nefarious dealings with certain obscure individuals.

Of course the direct conduits of this nonsense are what we in the sane world regard as the fever swamps of paranoiac right-wing conspiracy thinking, most visibly manifested on the Fox News channel. As Applebaum notes, the actual storyline, spun out of whole cloth, is purposefully designed to be opaque, leading someone trying to divine the actual facts to become frustrated and give up trying to make sense of them. In fact, as her article's title suggests, "You're not supposed to understand the rumors about Biden."

Because the story is not intended to make sense, but to create a fog of doubt.

Just like the fictional legend these same people wove around "Hillary's emails," the Hunter Biden fiction also concerns emails—these ones allegedly kept by a former business partner of Hunter Biden, and miraculously disclosed to a peripheral former and supposed "investigative journalist" named Matthew Tyrmand. Tyrmand, notably, was formerly (and peripherally) associated with the right-wing fraudster and provocateur James O'Keefe.

That piece of critical information would lead most knowledgeable people to immediately shelve the unfounded Hunter Biden scheme in that mental compartment where bad ideas go to eventually die. But the Fox News audience is by definition anything but "knowledgeable people." On that network, the Hunter Biden nonsense is not something analogous to the disappointingly empty caverns of "Al Capone's vault," but rather an ever-opening flower, chock full of conspiracy-thinking goodness.

In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened. They are alsoproviding the raw material from which more elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible reference in last night's debate to "the mayor of Moscow's wife," from whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this works.A name surfaces in a large collection of data; it is detached from its context; it is then used to make an insinuation or accusation that cannot be proved; it is then forgotten, unless it gains some traction, in which case it is repeated again.

Applebaum provides some basic background for the uninformed and uninitiated (i.e., normal Americans).

Those who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need to learn any of this stuff. Judging by what has been published, the very worst thing that Tyrmand's email cache could reveal (if it is authentic) is that some unattractive people sought to use Hunter Biden's surname and connections to get business deals or score a visit to the White House for their clients. But we already know about Hunter Biden's involvement with unattractive people, and his struggles with addiction; we also know that, under normal circumstances, dozens of people visit the White House every day. On the grand scale of misdeeds committed by politicians and their relatives, this kind of thing barely registers.

Applebaum then helpfully includes a laundry list of Trump's corruption that puts to shame whatever the right hopes to spin out of this email concoction. As readers of Daily Kos, you're more than familiar with these.

But there is a purpose lurking here in the mind of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch. The first and most obvious? To assist Trump in deflecting attention—for these final 10 days—from his horrific malfeasance in the face of a pandemic whose vicious resurgence is soon likely to be the sole focus of the nightly newscasts. The second reason is to provide a ready well of sludge to draw upon in the seemingly likely event (as Murdoch himself has acknowledged) that the polls turn out to be correct, and Trump loses the election.

They will continue to serve a function after the election as well. If Biden wins, Foxworld will need some way to keep its audience focused on something other than the Cabinet he appoints, the new legislation he passes, and all the other events, decisions, and changes that used to constitute "news." Instead of all that real-life stuff—laws and regulations, statistics and investigations, debates about the economy and health care—the leading figures of the right-wing conspiracy bubble will,over the next months and years, dip into the email caches to keep their followers focused on an alternate reality in which Joe Biden is a secret oligarch, his son is an important figure in the Chinese mafia, and LOL nothing matters. Just as you need to know the backstories of the stars in the DC Comics universe in order to understand the nuances of a Batman movie, six months from now you might also need to know all about Cooney and Archer and the wife of the mayor of Moscow if you want to understand Ingraham's monologues.

Applebaum, a rapt student of propaganda, knows that outside of hosting the inevitable guest appearances (between court dates) that Donald Trump will insist on during the next four years—assuming he loses—the Fox News yappers need something to talk and talk about, and it certainly isn't going to be Republican policies. So this fictional narrative serves the interests both of Fox News—whose main concern is keeping its soon-to-be demoralized audience content and soporific—and also helps to deflect the inevitable horror stories that will be uncovered by a Democratic-controlled Congress investigating the Trump crime family's vast trail of detritus throughout our government.

By talking about Hunter Biden, the Trump family, especially the Trump children, also hopes to deflect attention from their own greatest weakness, namely the amoral, kleptocratic nepotism that they embody like no family ever before in American history...

[...]

None of them can win using ideas anymore, because they don't have any. All they can do is seek attention: gesticulate, wave their arms in the air, shout at the crowd, invent things, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve, even though they can no longer explain why they deserve it.

Put simply, assuming Joe Biden wins this election, we should all gear up for four long years of Fox News-inspired fantasy programming.

Of course, there's always the mute button.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/tucker-carlson-rages-after-social-media-platforms-finally-check-his-racist-conspiracies

on  Tuesday, Tucker Carlson broke away from his usual format of being racistagainst mostly Black people andLatino folks, to get racist against the country of China. In a segment that Fox News emblazoned with the chyron “Coronavirus Whistleblower talks to Tucker,” Tucker brought on Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan to promote a debunked conspiracy theory that the Chinese government created the SARS-CoV-2 in a lab. Her theory is based on what she and three other colleagues say are telltale signs that the virus did not evolve naturally.

:{

}:

Yan’s theory and the report she was promoting on Carlson’s show have not been peer reviewed, and since it lacks any evidence to back it up, “evidence” she claimed during the interview but never seemed to get around to presenting, has been considered debunked for months by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community.Both Facebook and Instagram (owned by Facebook) flagged Tucker Carlson virus posts as “false information.” Twitter has followed suit, suspending Yan’s account. Tucker is freaking-out mad that the social media sites, usually complicit in the right wing’s spread of misinformation and lies, is cracking down even a little on the almost always egregious lies people like Carlson promotes.

One of the ways that Tucker attempted to sell Yan to the public was that because she is Chinese herself, she cannot be racist against Chinese people and therefore isn’t wrong about accusing the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese scientists of creating the virus because she is racist. You see how that tail gets eaten by itself? The idea that Yan and this research team found special evidence in the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is interesting since the genome has been publicly available to any scientist with access to a computer and the internet for months.

Carlson’s “interview,” forgot to mention that Dr. Yan’s not-peer-reviewed “report” was published “by two nonprofit organizations, the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation,” both connected to former Trump adviser and generally terrible person Steve Bannon. *Forbes* reports that “the four authors of the paper, Li-Meng Yan, Shu Kang, and Jie Guan, and Shanchang Hu, all have the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation as their affiliation.” The University of Hong Kong has distanced themselves from Yan, and have contradicted her personal narrative, saying “Dr. Yan never conducted any research on human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus at HKU during December 2019 and January 2020, her central assertion of the said interview."

now, any good conspiracy theorist will tell you that you cannot trust China or the University of Hong Kong, and they would have the power and the motive to smear a scientist who was accusing them of unleashing a global pandemic. But strangely, for all of the purported “evidence,” the researchers forgot to submit their explosive findings to a legitimate scientific journal. I mean, if they had that evidence, they would win Nobels and Yan would be exonerated pretty quickly.

But this is a trumped-up conspiracy theory to distract the public from the Trump administration’s homicidal neglect of our country’s national and public health security. The hope is that in promoting China as the evil concoctors of this virus as some kind of biological weapon, Americans will make the leap to believe that there was little Trump could have done to be prepared for it. Don’t try to explain it to me.

Online, people chronicled how the Bannon right-wing machine promoted this calorie-free theory instantly, pushing it into the general consciousness, or more specifically, into the right wing’s general consciousness. Everything from the New York Post pushing the conspiracy theory based on the Carlson evidence-free interview, to Yan’s heavily edited Wikipedia page, reengineered to seem more serious and rigorous than it was previously.

Tucker has since decided to go full-on in on Wuhan-created virus conspiracy theory, adding a new low to the Tucker Carlson experience. Tucker is now promoting his show by saying that Facebook, and any and every scientist that disagrees with the conspiracy theory is a part of the conspiracy theory. So while he and his surrogates will not and cannot provide actual evidence for their many outrageous claims, if you point that out … you are a part of the conspiracy.

It’s not a new angle. In fact, this has been the right wing’s entire propaganda gimmick for the last four decades. Say you are strong on National Security and supportive of the troops, while cutting back on social services and military health services that directly impact them and us. Promote that conservatives are fiscally responsible, while blowing out the deficit every time they are in a position of power. It has been effective as the majority of Americans believe that social media companies are censoring people, and most of the people screaming about being censored are right-wing websites with enormous amounts of traffic, or conspiracy-theorist hucksters. Sadly, our country’s inability to think critically is an enormous problem.

The work that needs to be done is hard work. The answers are not implemented easily. You don’t get to just post blame on something and then fold your arms and say it shouldn’t be this way. It is this way and solving the issues take work.

If you want you can watch the fact-free interview with Yan below.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/report-facebook-employees-have-evidence-showing-pattern-preferential-treatment-right-wing

A new BuzzFeed report reveals that Facebook employees have evidence that shows the platform gives preferential treatment to right-wing Facebook pages, which is at stark odds with conservatives’ frequent and unsubstantiated claims that social media platforms are censoring right-wing accounts.

An August 6 article from Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac reports that there are growing internal concerns about how Facebook handles misinformation, particularly misinformation related to voting and the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

In internal message boards, employees questioned “the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages” including the far-right outlet Breitbart, which Facebook considers a “trusted new source.” Reportedly, employees have evidence that shows “a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages,” including interference in Facebook’s fact-checking process from company leaders such as Facebook Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan. Kaplan, a former deputy White House chief of staff for the George W. Bush administration, reportedly pushed for Facebook to partner with right-wing groups and wasinvolved in nixing proposed solutions to stop political polarization on the platform.

This reporting comes as right-wing politicians and figures continue to baselessly accuse Facebook and other social media platforms of censorship and anti-conservative bias. During the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee hearing last month, conservative lawmakers repeatedly alleged that Facebook is biased against right-leaning content. Additionally, Fox News attacked Facebook and accused the platform of censorship after Facebook enforced its policy against COVID-19 misinformation.

Media Matters has repeatedly found that claims of anti-conservative bias on social media platforms are false. In multiple studies over the course of several years, Media Matters has shown that right-leaning and left-leaning content thrives on Facebook, with right-leaning Facebook pages earning more interactions -- reactions, comments, shares -- on posts about voting and posts about protests against police brutality than do posts from left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages. In recent weeks, this trend has continued to hold.

BuzzFeed’s latest report about Facebook employees claiming there is a pattern of preferential treatment toward right-leaning Facebook pages and figures further underscores how Facebook has caved to pressure from conservatives, despite evidence repeatedly debunking conservatives’ baseless accusations. From BuzzFeed’s August 6 article:

With heightened internal tensions and morale at a low point, concerns about how the company handles fact-checked content have exploded in an internal Workplace group dedicated to misinformation policy.

Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus.The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart’s page, though other accounts continued to share it.

Zuckerberg danced around the question, but did note that Breitbart could be removed from the company's news tab if it were to receive two strikes for publishing misinformation within 90 days of each other. (Facebook News partners, which include dozens of publications such as BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, receive compensation and placement in a special news tab on the social network.)

“This was certainly one strike against them for misinformation, but they don't have others in the last 90 days,” Zuckerberg said. “So by the policies that we have, which by the way I think are generally pretty reasonable on this, it doesn't make sense to remove them.”

But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.

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ref

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/us/politics/trump-allies-news-media.html

no lnx

Trump Allies Target Journalists Over Coverage Deemed Hostile to White House

The operation has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at prominent news organizations.

The operation has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at prominent news organizations.

By Kenneth P. Vogel and Jeremy W. Peters

Published Aug. 25, 2019

Updated Aug. 26, 2019

WASHINGTON — A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.

The group has already released information about journalists at CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times — three outlets that have aggressively investigated Mr. Trump — in response to reporting or commentary that the White House’s allies consider unfair to Mr. Trump and his team or harmful to his re-election prospects.

Operatives have closely examined more than a decade’s worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said. Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up. The research is said to extend to members of journalists’ families who are active in politics, as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.

It is not possible to independently assess the claims about the quantity or potential significance of the material the pro-Trump network has assembled. Some involved in the operation have histories of bluster and exaggeration. And those willing to describe its techniques and goals may be trying to intimidate journalists or their employers.

But the material publicized so far, while in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.

It is clear from the cases to date that among the central players in the operation is Arthur Schwartz, a combative 47-year-old conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. Mr. Schwartz has worked with some of the right’s most aggressive operatives, including the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon.

“If the @nytimes thinks this settles the matter we can expose a few of their other bigots,” Mr. Schwartz tweeted on Thursday in response to an apologetic tweet from a Times journalist whose anti-Semitic social media posts had just been revealed by the operation. “Lots more where this came from.”

The operation is the latest step in a long-running effort by President Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.

The information unearthed by the operation has been commented on and spread by officials inside the Trump administration and re-election campaign, as well as conservative activists and right-wing news outlets such as Breitbart News. In the case of the Times editor, the news was first published by Breitbart, immediately amplified on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. and, among others, Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, and quickly became the subject of a Breitbart interview with Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary and communications director.

The White House press office said that neither the president nor anyone in the White House was involved in or aware of the operation, and that neither the White House nor the Republican National Committee was involved in funding it.

The Trump campaign said it was unaware of, and not involved in, the effort, but suggested that it served a worthy purpose. “We know nothing about this, but it’s clear that the media has a lot of work to do to clean up its own house,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director.

The campaign is consistent with Mr. Trump’s long-running effort to delegitimize critical reporting and brand the news media as an “enemy of the people.” The president has relentlessly sought to diminish the credibility of news organizations and cast them as politically motivated opponents.

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Journalism, he said in a tweet last week, is “nothing more than an evil propaganda machine for the Democrat Party.”

The operation has compiled social media posts from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and stored images of the posts that can be publicized even if the user deletes them, said the people familiar with the effort. One claimed that the operation had unearthed potentially “fireable” information on “several hundred” people.

“I am sure there will be more scalps,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Mr. Trump who is a friend of Mr. Schwartz.

Mr. Nunberg and others who are familiar with the campaign described it as meant to expose what they see as the hypocrisy of mainstream news outlets that have reported on the president’s inflammatory language regarding race.

Image

Arthur Schwartz, a conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser to the president’s eldest son.]

“Two can play at this game,” he said. “The media has long targeted Republicans with deep dives into their social media, looking to caricature all conservatives and Trump voters as racists.”

But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power.

“If it’s clearly retaliatory, it’s clearly an attack, it’s clearly not journalism,” said Leonard Downie Jr., who was the executive editor of The Post from 1991 to 2008. Tension between a president and the news media that covers him is nothing new, Mr. Downie added. But an organized, wide-scale political effort to intentionally humiliate journalists and others who work for media outlets is.

“It’s one thing for Spiro Agnew to call everyone in the press ‘nattering nabobs of negativism,’” he said, referring to the former vice president’s famous critique of how journalists covered President Richard M. Nixon. “And another thing to investigate individuals in order to embarrass them publicly and jeopardize their employment.”

A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, said in a statement that such tactics were taking the president’s campaign against a free press to a new level.

“They are seeking to harass and embarrass anyone affiliated with the leading news organizations that are asking tough questions and bringing uncomfortable truths to light,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”

In a statement, a CNN spokesman said that when government officials, “and those working on their behalf, threaten and retaliate against reporters as a means of suppression, it’s a clear abandonment of democracy for something very dangerous.”

The operation is targeting the news media by using one of the most effective weapons of political combat — deep and laborious research into the public records of opponents to find contradictions, controversial opinions or toxic affiliations. The liberal group Media Matters for America helped pioneer close scrutiny of public statements by conservative media personalities.

Those familiar with the campaign described it as meant to expose what they see as the hypocrisy of mainstream news outlets that have covered the president’s inflammatory language regarding race.Credit...George Etheredge/The New York Times]

The conservative operative James O’Keefe has twisted that concept in ways inconsistent with traditional journalistic ethics, using false identities, elaborate cover stories and undercover videos to entrap journalists and publicize embarrassing statements, often in misleading ways, to undercut the credibility of what he considers news media biased in favor of liberals.

In the case of the pro-Trump network, research into journalists is being deployed for the political benefit of the White House. It is targeting not only high-profile journalists who challenge the administration, but also anyone who works for any news organization that members of the network see as hostile to Mr. Trump, no matter how tangential that job may be to the coverage of his presidency. And it is being used explicitly as retribution for coverage.

Some reporters have been warned that they or their news organizations could be targets, creating the impression that the campaign is intended in part to deter them from aggressive coverage as well as to inflict punishment after an article has been published.

Trained as a lawyer, Mr. Schwartz has endeared himself to members of the president’s family by becoming one of their most aggressive defenders, known for badgering and threatening reporters and others he believes have wronged the Trumps.

He has publicly gone after Republicans he views as disloyal, including the former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, about whom he admitted spreading an unsubstantiated rumor.He has called himself a “troll on Twitter,” which is where he has boasted of being aware of, or having access to, damaging information on dozens of journalists at CNN and The Times that could be deployed if those outlets ran afoul of Mr. Trump or his allies.

The operation’s tactics were on display last week, seemingly in response to two pieces in The Times that angered Mr. Trump’s allies. The paper’s editorial board published an editorial on Wednesday accusing Mr. Trump of fomenting anti-Semitism, and the newsroom published a profile on Thursday morning of Ms. Grisham, the new White House press secretary, which included unflattering details about her employment history.

One person involved in the effort said the pro-Trump forces, aware ahead of time about the coverage of Ms. Grisham, were prepared to respond. Early Thursday morning, soon after the profile appeared online, Breitbart News published an article that documented anti-Semitic andracist tweets written a decade ago by Tom Wright-Piersanti, who was in college at the time and has since become an editor on the Times’ politics desk. The Times said it was reviewing the matter and considered the posts “a clear violation of our standards.”

Mr. Schwartz tweeted a link to the Breitbart piece before 7 a.m., which Donald Trump Jr. retweeted to his 3.8 million followers— the first of about two dozen times that the president’s son shared the article or its contents.Other prominent Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, joined in highlighting the report.

Image

Mr. Schwartz is a friend and informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times]

Breitbart’s article quoted several people or groups with close ties to Mr. Schwartz, including Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Germany, and the Zionist Organization of America. It was written by the site’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, whose relationship with Mr. Schwartz started when Mr. Bannon ran the website.

Mr. Boyle’s article included a reference to the Times profile of Ms. Grisham, which it characterized as “attacking White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham.” Mr. Wright-Piersanti was uninvolved in the editing of the article about Ms. Grisham.

The tweets revealed in the Breitbart article quickly spread to other conservative outlets favored by the president and his allies, including the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.

Mr. Wright-Piersanti apologized on Twitter on Thursday morning and deleted offensive tweets. Mr. Schwartz then issued his warning that he had further damaging information about Times employees.

Mr. Wright-Piersanti, 32, said the tweets, posted when he was a college student with a Twitter following consisting mostly of personal acquaintances, were “my lame attempts at edgy humor to try to get a rise out of my friends.”

But he said “they’re not funny, they’re clearly offensive,” adding, “I feel deep shame for them, and I am truly, honestly sorry that I wrote these.”

He said he had forgotten about the tweets as he started a career in journalism.

“For my generation, the generation that came of age in the internet, all the youthful mistakes that you made get preserved in digital amber, and no matter how much you change and mature and grow up, it’s always out there, waiting to be discovered,” Mr. Wright-Piersanti said.

Like Mr. Wright-Piersanti, other targets of the pro-Trump network have been young people who grew up with social media and wrote the posts in question when they were in their teens or early 20s, in most cases before they became professional journalists.

Image

The photojournalist Mohammed Elshamy in 2014 in South Sudan. Tweets he wrote in his teens became the basis for articles in conservative news outlets.Credit...Andrei Pungovschi]

A week after a White House reporter for CNN sparred with Mr. Trump during a news conference, Mr. Schwartz highlighted a tweet by the reporter from 2011, when the reporter was in college, that used an anti-gay slur. Other similar tweets quickly surfaced, and the reporter apologized, though Mr. Schwartz has continued to antagonize the reporter on Twitter.

In recent months, Mr. Schwartz highlighted a nearly decade-old tweet in which a reporter for The Post had repeated in an ambiguous manner a slur used by a politician.

In March, Mr. Schwartz tweeted a link to an article from Breitbart, written by Mr. Boyle, about a reporter from Business Insider whose Instagram account included anti-Trump references and a photograph of the reporter demonstrating against the president.

In July, around the time CNN published an article exposing old posts by a Trump appointee spreading suggestions that Barack Obama was a Muslim whose loyalty to the United States was in question, Mr. Schwartz resurfaced anti-Semitic tweets from 2011 by a CNN photo editor. Mr. Schwartz suggested that a CNN reporter who specializes in unearthing problematic archival content should “look into the social media activities of your employees.”

The tweets became the basis for several articles in conservative news outlets and hundreds of tweets from conservatives targeting the photo editor, Mohammed Elshamy, which did not stop even after he resigned under pressure from CNN and apologized.

“It felt like a coordinated attack,” said Mr. Elshamy, who said he had received death threats. “It was overwhelming.”

Mr. Elshamy, who is now 25, said he posted the tweets when he was 15 and 16 years old, growing up in Egypt, when he was still learning English and did not fully grasp the meaning of the words.

“I was repeating slogans heard on the streets during a highly emotional time in my nation’s history,” he said. “I believe that my subsequent work and views over the years redeems for the mistakes I made as a kid.”

While he said he understands “the severity and harm of my comments,” he questioned the motivation of the campaign that cost him his job. “It is a very dirty tactic that they are using to cause as much harm as they can to anyone who is affiliated with these media outlets,” he said. “It actually feels like a competition and every termination or vilification is a point for them.”

Mr. Bannon, at the time the head of Breitbart, oversaw the site’s efforts in 2015 to attack Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, after she called out Mr. Trump for tweets disparaging women as “fat pigs,” “dogs” and “slobs.” In an interview, he said the work that Mr. Schwartz was undertaking should be seen as a sign that Mr. Trump’s supporters were committed to executing a frontal assault on news media they considered adversarial.

“A culture war is a war,” he said. “There are casualties in war. And that’s what you’re seeing.”

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:{

trump finally shows signs of shame as he flees a press briefing without answering questions after disinfectant fiasco

maN bites dog 420 an:

Breitbart News issues humiliating correction on a bogus ‘fact-check’ that denied Trump proposed injecting disinfectants

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}:

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aha: "freestyling" at "press conf" but clearly spinning out simple metaphors

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/here-are-the-desperate-ways-trump-and-his-allies-are-trying-to-defend-his-dangerous-claim-about-injecting-disinfectants/

no lnx

Here are the desperate ways Trump and his allies are trying to defend his dangerous claim about injecting disinfectants

Written by Cody Fenwick April 24, 2020

Facing a barrage of fact-checks, criticism, and mockery, President Donald Trump and his defenders are trying to make excuses for his absurd and dangerous suggestion on Thursday that injecting people with disinfectants might help fight COVID-19.

To be 100 percent clear: There’s no reason to think this would work, and it is an even potentially fatal idea. Experts across the board insist that household cleaners should not be used internally on humans.

Because this is an obvious fact, Trump and his supporters are desperate to find an excuse for his dangerous suggestion. And unfortunately for them, two of the excuses they’ve already offered are contradictory. To review, here’s what Trump actually said:

And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out, in a minute. One minute. Is there a way we can do something like that? By injection, inside, or almost a cleaning, ’cause you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. You’re going to have to use medical doctors, right? But it sounds interestingto me.

These remarks came after a discussion of a recent study on sunlight and disinfectants’ abilities to kill the virus on surfaces, outside of the body. Before discussing disinfectants, Trump also preposterously speculated that light could somehow be used externally or internally on the human body to treat COVID-19, which Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, dismissed. Watch the remarks below:

After hearing presentation President Trump suggests irradiating people’s bodies with UV light or injecting them with bleach or alcohol to deal with COVID19. pic.twitter.com/cohkLyyl9G

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 23, 2020

If you watch the remarks, there’s really no ambiguity about what Trump is saying. He’s trying to extrapolate from studies about effective methods of cleaning the virus in the environment to treating humans who are infected. It’s a frankly childish understanding of medicine, but he presented it as a fascinating possibility — and on national TV, no less, where some vulnerable and susceptible viewers may actually take his claims seriously.

So how could one possibly defend these remarks?Breitbart,a far-right website that closely aligns itself with the president, took a widely mocked stab at offering an excuse in the form of “fact check”:

CLAIM: President Donald Trump suggested injecting people with disinfectant to cure coronavirus.

VERDICT: False. Trump was speaking generally about new information about sunlight, heat, and disinfectant killing the virus.

This is not so. As the clip shows, Trump was talking about using this information as a possible basis for testing potential treatments of COVID-19.

In the most desperate section of this “fact check,” writer Joel Pollak claimed that when Trump said the word “inject” he didn’t really mean “inject,” and it was unfair of critics to think he did:

Trump used the word “inject,” but what he meant was using a process — which he left “medical doctors” to define — in which patients’ lungs might be cleared of the virus, given new knowledge about its response to light and other factors.

The use of the word “other factors” here is particularly rich, because Trump talked about “injecting” directly after he brought up disinfectants specifically. That’s what was so egregious and concerning.

In a slightly more plausible defense of Trump, Breitbart pointed out that the president appeared to walk his comments back later in the briefing:

When ABC News’ Jonathan Karl asked Dr. Bryant about whether the president had proposed injecting a person with “bleach and isopropyl alcohol” later, Trump clarified that “It wouldn’t be through injection,” and that he was talking about “cleaning, sterilization of an area,” and about applying the disinfectant to “a stationary object.”

But he’s the actual exchange this refers to, per the White House transcript:

[KARL]    But I — just, can I ask about — the President mentioned the idea of cleaners, like bleach and isopropyl alcohol you mentioned.  There’s no scenario that that could be injected into a person, is there?  I mean —

ACTING UNDER SECRETARY [BILL] BRYAN:  No, I’m here to talk about the findings that we had in the study.  We won’t do that within that lab and our lab.  So —

THE PRESIDENT:  It wouldn’t be through injection.  We’re talking about through almost a cleaning, sterilization of an area.  Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work.  But it certainly has a big effect if it’s on a stationary object.

So here’s what actually seems to have happened. Trump floated the idea of injecting people with disinfectants. Then, incredulous, a reporter asked Bryan, who actually knows what he’s talking about, whether this could even be a possibility. Bryan knocks down the possibility that Trump floated directly, saying directly “no” and “We won’t do that within that lab and our lab.”

Then Trump, apparently realizing that others think this is an absurd idea, tries to backpedal the outrageously dangerous and simplistic idea that he had floated.

Now that Trump clearly knows that everyone is mocking and deriding him for this error, he’s trying to make his own excuse. But instead of sticking with Breitbart’s twisted interpretation that “inject” doesn’t really mean “inject,” Trump inow wants us to believe he was being sarcastic.

Asked about the injection remarks on Friday in the Oval Office, Trump said: “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen.”

Again, if you watch the remarks above, it’s clear they weren’t sarcastic. Later in Thursday’s briefing, when a reporter criticized Trump for floating baseless rumors, the president defended himself by saying he was just sharing ideas. And even if he had been sarcastic, it’s would still be dangerous to float such an idea during a briefing where people are trying to get information about the nation’s crisis.

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:{Nunes:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:: Whistleblower Complaint Is Another :{Steele:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: :{Dossier:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nunes%20chalupa%20steele%20dossier+site:www.breitbart.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2019/09/26/devin-nunes-on-whistleblower-complaint-what-we-have-is-another-steele-dossier/"):{https://www.breitbart.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/2020-election/2019/09/26/devin-nunes-on-whistleblower-complaint-what-we-have-is-another-steele-dossier/:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

Sep 26, 2019

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) called the whistleblower complaint involving President Trump and Ukraine "another Steele dossier" and accused House Democrats of running an information warfare operation against the president.

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180 on va gov after loss  bgr

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has neg trump stories but always labelled by dem thus not to be belieived/ to make ppl mad?

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facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a false answer during a congressional hearing before the House Financial Services Committee when asked about a division of right-wing website The Daily Caller being involved in Facebook’s fact-checking efforts.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) asked Zuckerberg why a division of The Daily Caller is included in the Facebook fact-checking project given the publication has many ties to white supremacists. Zuckerberg demurred on the question of Facebook’s role, and instead claimed that a third party was responsible for appointing the fact-checkers.

That claim is false. Facebook requires its partners to be accredited by the organization, but it is Facebook who decides which organizations they use in the fact-checking project. And yet, Zuckerberg repeated this falsehood during a follow-up question.

Breitbart in the Facebook News tab: As if that wasn't bad enough, Facebook announced its new "news tab" this week. While the company refused to release a full list of news organizations who are participating, it did announce that Breitbart was part of it.

Breitbart is certainly a disreputable website known for spreading misinformation. For example, in 2017, Breitbart’s editor-in-chief admitted that the website’s all-in defense of Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore was not a product of any news judgment about whether Moore had been accurately accused of child molestation, but instead was a political calculation meant to protect President Donald Trump against reports of his own sexual misconduct. When Breitbart petitioned for a permanent Senate press credential, it could not prove that it was editorially independent.

What stands out most in Breitbart’s inclusion in Facebook News is the supposed prohibition on hate speech. Breitbart has a long history with hate speech, including letting neo-Nazis ghostwrite articles. That is not an exaggeration, and it's only the tip of the iceberg.

When pressed about Breitbart's inclusion, Zuckerberg claimed that the news tab needs a "diversity" of views. It's just another standard BS answer that panders to the right - something that all of Facebook's executives are extremely well-practiced at by now.

Also: It turns out that Breitbart is also in Apple News.

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manafort ukraine hit on Julia PM

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/05/ex-trump-aide-paul-manafort-approved-black-ops-to-help-ukraine-president

no lnx docs

The Guardian -

Former Trump aide approved 'black ops' to help Ukraine president

Exclusive: Paul Manafort authorised secret media operation that sought to discredit key opponent of then Ukrainian president

by Luke Harding

Thu 5 Apr 2018 11.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 5 Apr 2018 20.00 EDT

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort authorised a secret media operation on behalf of Ukraine’s former president featuring “black ops”, “placed” articles in the Wall Street Journal and US websites and anonymous briefings against Hillary Clinton.

The project was designed to boost the reputation of Ukraine’s then leader, Viktor Yanukovych. It was part of a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort carried out by Manafort on behalf of Yanukovych’s embattled government, emails and documents reveal.

The strategies included:

• Proposing torewrite Wikipediaentries to smear a key opponent of the then Ukrainian president.

• Setting up a fake thinktank in Vienna to disseminate viewpoints supporting Yanukovych.

• A social media blitz “aimed at targeted audiences in Europe and the US”.

• Briefing journalists from the rightwing website Breitbart to attack Clinton when she was US secretary of state.

Manafort’s Ukraine strategy anticipated later efforts by the Kremlin and its troll factory to use Twitter and Facebook to discredit Clinton and to help Trump win the 2016 US election. The material seen by the Guardian dates from 2011 to 2013.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, has indicted Manafort on multiple counts. Manafort is accused of “laundering profits” from his lobbying work in Ukraine, carried out over a period of a decade for Yanukovych and his political party.

Mueller also accuses Manafort of hiring retired European politicians to lobby on behalf of Yanukovych, and paying them more than €2m (£1.74m, $2.45m) via offshore accounts.

The documents reveal another surreptitious operation to influence international opinion. In 2010 Yanukovych defeated his rival Yulia Tymoshenko in presidential elections. The following summer Ukrainian prosecutors arrested Tymoshenko and put her on trial. This provoked severe criticism from the Obama administration and the EU, which accused Yanukovych of locking up Tymoshenko for political reasons.

In 2011 Manafort approved a clandestine strategy to discredit Tymoshenko abroad. Alan Friedman, a former Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reporter, based in Italy, masterminded this project. Friedman has previously been accused of concealing his work as a paid lobbyist.

Also involved were Rick Gates, Manafort’s then deputy, and Konstantin Kilimnik, another senior Manafort associate who the FBI believes has links to Russian military intelligence.

In July 2011 Friedman sent Manafort a confidential six-page document titled Ukraine - A Digital Roadmap. It laid out a plan to “deconstruct” Tymoshenko via videos, articles and social media. Yanukovych deferred to Manafort, who gave the project the go-ahead, sources in Ukraine’s former government say.

Friedman’s proposed operation was ambitious. It included producing anonymous videos attacking Tymoshenko and comparing the opposition leader to a drunk Boris Yeltsin. “The social media space offers great opportunities for guilt by association,” Friedman wrote in the document.

He continued: “We know that video exists of Tymoshenko uttering some of her outrageous claims in court … The video can be floated into the social space to reinforce the impression that she is at best reckless and unstatesmanlike and at worst malicious, defamatory and antisemitic.”

[An anonymous video attacking Yulia Tymoshenko.

Twitters users, including “those ‘known’ to us”, could retweet hostile content. The “roadmap” included a website, blogposts and “blast emails”, sent out to a “targeted audience in Europe and the US”. One section was called “Black Ops”. It said: “This could include Wikipedia page modification to highlight [Tymoshenko] corruption and trial and modify the tone of the language being used.”

Friedman worked with Eckart Sager, a one-time CNN producer. Emails show they liaised closely with “Paul”, who in turn briefed Yanukovych’s chief of staff, Serhiy Lyovochkin. Lyovochkin declined to comment. He appears in correspondence as “SL”.

“He was under the radar,” one source said of Friedman. “Alan kept a low profile. Without Paul’s authorisation Alan would never have got a contract with the [Yanukovych] government.”

Friedman’s company FBC Media was retained on a “rolling contract”. It was paid around €150,000 every three months, sources in Kiev suggest. The money was deposited in an offshore account in Seychelles, they allege. Often the payments were late, prompting Friedman to complain, they add.

Quick guide

Paul Manafort Ukraine connections: who's who?

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Contacted by the Guardian, Friedman said these earnings were “declared”. He confirmed his company worked for Ukraine from late summer 2011 on what he called “a public relations and country profiling project”. He said: “It was not a secret or covert plan. We had PR people proposing interviews and features to newspapers very openly.”

He said its goal was to promote the Ukraine government’s then policy of moving closer to a partnership agreement with the EU. “Our aim was to keep a steady communication going in favour of dialogue between Brussels and Kiev. That was our message.

“We never supported a pro-Moscow stance and had already ended our relationship when the Ukrainian president abandoned closer ties with Europe.”

Asked whether he had registered with the US Department of Justice, Friedman said he had never worked as a lobbyist for Ukraine. He added: “I never registered as a foreign agent because I never was one.

“I was a communications guy, doing PR media strategy work in Europe for a client, like dozens of London PR companies that work for a variety of governments.”

The documents show Friedman reported directly to Kiev. In spring 2012 he told the foreign minister, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, he had “generated dozens of positive op-eds/interviews/articles for print and TV” and “disseminated positive news stories” to nearly 2,000 publications.

Key to this strategy was a fake thinktank, the Center for the Study of Former Soviet Socialist Republics (CXSSR), set up with Manafort’s backing. Friedman used it to publish dozens of positive stories about Yanukovych, many of them authored by a “Matthew Lina”.

Lina’s comment pieces criticising Tymoshenko and Obama’s state department ran on the conservative US website RedState. Friedman told Manafort his editorial team ghostwrote an article by Yanukovych published by the Wall Street Journal.

He claimed credit for a Tymoshenko profile written by the Journal’s Matthew Kaminski. Kaminski said Friedman was never a source, “or even someone that as far as I can remember I had any contact whatsoever with”.

In April 2012 Friedman sent another “highly confidential” two-page document to Manafort. It set out plans to launch a “special website” entitled The Tymoshenko Files. The site would purport to belong to Inna Bohoslovska, a Ukrainian deputy and Tymoshenko critic.

In fact, Friedman would “discreetly prepare, implement and maintain” the site, the document said. It would include “ghost-penned” blogs and “a quasi-novella serialisation”. Asked about the website, Friedman said he had never written “any content”.

Emails seen by the Guardian show a regular pattern of interaction between Manafort, Friedman, Gates, Kilimnik and Ukrainian officials. Gates, who went on to work with Manafort on the 2016 Trump campaign, wrote several messages. In February Gates , and agreed to cooperate with Mueller.

At the time Kilimnik was the Russian manager of Manafort’s Kiev office. Kilminik is understood to be “Person A” in Mueller’s latest indictment, filed last week. It says theFBI believes Kilimnik has ties to Moscow’s GRU spy agency, and adds that Gates was aware of this. Kilimnik denies a connection. Friedman confirmed he had met Manafort and Gates but said he had done so “because the client asked me to”.

Manafort’s media operation included attacks on Clinton. In October 2012 Gates emailed Manafort and Friedman, flagging a piece written by the journalist Ben Shapiro. The Breitbart article criticised Clinton for her public support of Tymoshenko, who had recently made an electoral pact with the far-right Svoboda party.

The article cited a Jewish “leader” who accused Clinton anonymously of creating a “neo-Nazi Frankenstein”. Gates wrote: “Gentlemen – Here is the first part of a series of articles that will be coming as we continue to build this effort. Alan, you get full credit for the Frankenstein comment.”

The alleged use of offshore accounts is likely to interest the FBI. Manafort is accused of concealing more than $75m earned from his work in Ukraine.

Yanukovych’s attempts to woo western leaders ended in October 2013 when he accepted a bailout from Moscow. He fled to Russia after anti-government protests. In 2015 Friedman wrote an authorised biography of Silvio Berlusconi. Manafort continued to work for Yanukovych’s party up until he joined Trump’s campaign. Manafort denies wrongdoing and has said he will fight Mueller’s charges.

==

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ben-shapiro-trump-used-irregular-channels-because-he-was-rightfully-paranoid/

ben Shapiro, a right-wing political commentator and the editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, attempted to defend President Donald Trump in light of testimony from Bill Taylor, the United States’ top diplomat in Ukraine. Taylor testified that the Trump administration had circumvented normal diplomatic channels and that Trump ordered that foreign aid to the country be dependent on Ukraine’s president launching an investigation into one of Trump’s political enemies.

:{During }:{ of his podcast, Shapiro defended Trump’s behavior surrounding Ukraine. }::{In part of that defense, Shapiro argued that government is a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in which leaders rule according to their perception of what the government is like. Because Trump had good reason to believe the government was corrupt since he was being targeted by Democrats, Shapiro argued, he chose to use “improper channels” to do his political bidding.}:

“He also feels as if he has been targeted, and correctly so. He feels that he is being targeted by people inside his own administration, to the cheers of the media. And that’s true, he is being targeted by people in his own administration to the cheers of the media,” Shapiro said.

To back up his claims that Trump was right to feel targeted, Shapiro cited recent news reports that the author of an anonymous New York Times op-ed last year, identified only as a senior official in the Trump administration, will be publishing a book called “A Warning.” He argued that the book was the type of thing that would rightly motivate Trump to set up improper communications channels.

“That’s not good for the presidency. It’s not good for the country. And of course, it’s going to underscore how suspicious Trump is of people inside his administration, and it’s going to encourage Trump to set up exactly the sort of irregular channels that Bill Taylor was talking about,” Shapiro said. “Why would you set up an irregular channel? The only reason to set up an irregular channel is because you don’t trust the regular channel. One of the reasons you might not trust the regular channel is it feels like the regular channel is being used as a method of hurting you.”

Shapiro added, “It’s hard to argue with Trump about why Trump should feel differently.”

The anonymously authored book set to come out later this year is, according to Shapiro, “underscoring the president’s distrust in government, which leads him to set up irregular channels, which leads them to make mistakes, which leads him into traps, which leads the Democrats to seem to believe that they have material to impeach.”

Later in the same episode of his podcast, Shapiro argued that Trump’s comparison of the impeachment process to “lynching” was not actually problematic.

==

i have not been able to figure her TG out; many ads on AN

no lnx

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that she thinks Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, is being “groomed” by Russia to run as a third-party candidate in 2020.

Clinton made the allegations during an interview with David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager. During the interview, Clinton alleged that Russia used 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein as an “asset” and suggested that Gabbard would play a similar role in the upcoming election without mentioning her name.

“They’re also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

Clinton went on to label Stein a “Russian asset.”

“And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton said. “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”...

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-duplicitous-trolls-are-using-tulsi-gabbards-candidacy-to-foment-disruption-and-chaos/

nolnx

ous trolls are using Tulsi Gabbard’s candidacy to foment disruption and chaos

Written byNancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 23, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard is not going to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. At this point, her polling average at Real Clear Politics is 1.4%. Nevertheless, conservative media celebrated the fact that Gabbard won the online poll sponsored by Drudge Report after the first round of debates. Similarly, Gabbard won polls from both Breitbart and Drudge after her performance in the second debate. Those results were not replicated by any reputable polling firm.

Not long after the first debate, we learned what had prompted Gabbard’s success in those online polls.

Users from pro-Trump communities on 4chan and Reddit implored fellow members to vote for lower-polling candidates in online polls, specifically Tulsi Gabbard and Bill de Blasio, in the hours after Wednesday’s Democratic debate — a sign that digital manipulation efforts related to U.S. politics and elections remain very much alive....

raw story

ref 4 digby

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/09/new-york-times-battered-on-msnbc-for-pushing-smear-of-hunter-biden-in-order-to-maintain-access-to-trump/

An “AM Joy” panel jumped all over the New York Times for pushing a widely debunked smear of Hunter Biden promoted by Donald Trump, saying the newspaper is more interested in maintaining their access to the Oval Office than debunking the lie.

Speaking with host Joy Reid — who noted that her producers asked for comment from the Times but were rebuffed — MSNBC regular Maria Teresa Kumar scorched the Times, as well as reporter Ken Vogel, for the uncritical parroting of the president’s smear.

Pointing to Vogel’s story and noting his source was a Breitbart writer, Kumar explained, “The biggest challenge, Ken Vogel does not declare the source , that Peter Schweizer,  is underwritten by the Mercer family — the Mercer family is a neo-facist family that underwrites Steve Bannon and the Breitbart Report so it is not credible.”

“What they had done so stealthily, so well, is that they know that if they can have any type of story in an established newspaper, as is the New York Times, that it any breeds a sense of legitimacy,” she continued. “Fox News takes it and Breitbart takes it, all the ultra-rightwings take it and say, ‘Look, the New York Times is saying it, so it must be true.’ That’s a lack of due diligence.”

“It’s disappointing in the New York Times, quite frankly,” she further explained. “When they try to equate something with Biden and Trump, they’re trying to make sure they continue having access to the president and that’s not the way to do it.”

With host Reid noting Vogel’s desire to not appear on her show, AM Joy regular Eric Boehlert called the Times reporting, including previous stories about Democrats and Hillary Clinton, “Timidity access journalism.”

Watch

==

==

anti-vaxxers sorta, but no mention of recent outbreak in US NW, amazing pro UN, dump on france; yemen mentioned but not 1 mil cholera

https://www.breitbart.com/news/un-warns-of-complacency-as-measles-cases-soar-worldwide-2/

story supports lauren so ref intercepts

==

ref mma

A professor who was caught agreeing to hide the oil funding behind a climate denial research paper named Breitbart News as a media outlet that could "likely help" publicize the research, according to emails unearthed as part of an undercover investigation by Greenpeace. Indeed, Breitbart News has frequently cited Princeton Emeritus Professor William Happer to promote the supposed "benefits" of climate-warming carbon pollution and argue against a "war on CO2" --  including just days before the Greenpeace investigation was released. And now that Greenpeace has exposed Happer's ethically dubious actions, Breitbart News is defending Happer's behavior as "morally and scientifically unimpeachable."

On December 8, Greenpeace released the results of its investigation, in which Greenpeace UK reporters claiming to represent oil and coal companies asked two university professors to write industry-friendly research papers, and the professors agreed to do so without disclosing the fossil fuel funding behind them. According to Greenpeace, the investigation details "how fossil fuel companies can secretly pay academics at leading American universities to write research that sows doubt about climate science and promotes the companies' commercial interests." 

As part of its report about the investigation, titled "Exposed: Academics-for-hire agree not to disclose fossil fuel funding," Greenpeace released a series of emails between its undercover staffers and the two academics, William Happer and Penn State Emeritus Professor Frank Clemente. In an email exchange in early November, a Greenpeace employee who was posing as an oil company consultant based in Beirut asked Happer if he could write a briefing paper "examin[ing] the benefits of fossil fuels to developing economies," and if there were any "US outlets or contacts you may have" that could help "get this research out far and wide." The Greenpeace employee also mentioned a London Timescolumn praising carbon emissions by Matt Ridley, who Happer said was in "close touch" with a pro-carbon group called the CO2 Coalition that Happer helped organize. The Greenpeace employee then asked Happer if Ridley -- a Timescolumnist who also frequently writes op-eds published by The Wall Street Journal-- "would help to disseminate our research." Happer replied: "I am sure Matt Ridley will be interested in whatever you produce. The Breitbart news organization would also likely help, as would various blogs, syndicated columnists, etc."

Given Breitbart News' past coverage of Happer, it should come as no surprise that he mentioned Breitbart when asked to name media outlets that would promote his industry-funded, climate-denying research. For instance:

• A June 3, 2015 Breitbart article touted a letter from Happer and two other physicists attacking the American Physical Society (APS) for a statement recognizing the reality of man-made climate change.
• A January 22, 2015 Breitbart article purporting to list off "Ten reasons why the war on CO2 has done far more harm than good" approvingly quoted Happer referring to "the jihad against atmospheric carbon dioxide."
• An October 24, 2014 Breitbart article quoted "climate expert" Happer as saying: "No chemical compound in the atmosphere has a worse reputation than CO2, thanks to the single-minded demonisation of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control and energy production. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science."
• A September 2, 2011 Breitbart article quoted Happer as follows: "Disagreeing with [the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is like going to Saudi Arabia and criticizing Muhammad."

On December 4, several weeks after Happer mentioned Breitbart News in his email to Greenpeace (and just days before Greenpeace released the results of its investigation), Breitbart News published yet another article touting Happer, this one titled "Carbon Dioxide Is Not Our Enemy." In it, Breitbart's John Hayward wrote a highly sympathetic profile of Happer's climate science denial, asserting that a white paper Happer co-authored was "meant to be a conversation-starter" and took "a non-confrontational approach with copious footnotes and supporting sources, inviting readers to perform their own research and gain a fuller understanding of CO2 and its benefits." Hayward also stated that Happer "lamented the vicious treatment given to scientists who showed even modest skepticism toward the link between CO2 and climate change."

After Greenpeace released its investigation, Breitbart News' James Delingpole rushed to Happer's defense with a December 8 article,in which he wrote: "What's clear is that [at] every stage Happer's behaviour was morally and scientifically unimpeachable." Delingpole alleged that Happer was not at fault because he made clear he "would only say in his paper what he believed anyway" and indicated that he did not "wish to benefit personally from the fee, but preferred that the money should go to a tax-exempt educational charity, which pays only his travel expenses."

It's true that Happer has a long track record of advocating for the purported "benefits" of carbon pollution, and it's also true that he requested in his emails to the undercover Greenpeace employee that "whatever fee would have come to me would go directly to the CO2 Coalition" -- the group Happer helped organized earlier this year. But Delingpole tellingly did not provide Happer's answer to two other questions Delingpole noted that Greenpeace had raised:  "Would the CO2 Coalition be happy to take a direct donation on condition the donor remained anonymous?" and  "Might Happer be able to get his paper peer-reviewed by sympathetic authors?"

This is where Happer's conduct is far from "unimpeachable," as Breitbart News claimed.

The Greenpeace staffer posing as a representative of the Middle Eastern oil company told Happer over email that "we are happy to make a direct donation to the CO2 Coalition, providing it is anonymous," and asked Happer whether "the CO2 Coalition voluntarily discloses its funders." Happer replied that he believed the CO2 Coalition isn't "required to make public any donors, although it is required to disclose them to the Internal Revenue Service." He also forwarded the question to William O'Keefe, another member of the Board of Directors of the CO2 Coalition and former Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the American Petroleum Institute. O'Keefe replied by suggesting that the oil company funnel the funds through the Donors Trust, which has been dubbed the "dark-money ATM" of the conservative movement:

We are under no obligation to identify donors, except to the IRS but I think that is just organizations. When people ask the IRS or a firms 990 [sic], the donor list is redacted. If the person participates in the Donors Trust, he/she can make the donation through that and have complete confidentiality.

Happer then forwarded O'Keefe's response to the undercover Greenpeace employee. As Greenpeace noted, in his emails "Happer also disclosed that [coal giant] Peabody Energy paid $8,000 in return for his testimony in a crucial Minnesota state hearing on the impacts of carbon dioxide. This fee was also paid to the CO2 Coalition."

The exchange between Happer and the undercover Greenpeace staffer exemplifies how the fossil fuel industry's funding of shoddy science can be hidden from public view, and how this strategy can apply not just to the research papers themselves but also to op-eds and other media coverage about them. Indeed, the other university professor that Greenpeace approached, Penn State's Frank Clemente, listed over email a series of op-eds he had written that had been published in newspapers across the United States, and then observed: "Note that in none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar."

The other serious issue raised in Happer's emails relates to peer review, the process by which scholarly work is checked by a group of experts in the same field prior to publication. As Greenpeace documented, in his emails Happer "laid out details of anunofficial peer review process run by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a UK climate sceptic think tank, and said he could ask to put an oil-funded report through a similar review process, after admitting that it would struggle to be published in an academic journal." Specifically, Happer wrote that if he submitted the research paper to a peer-reviewed journal, it might "no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly your client would also like." Instead, Happer proposed a review process that would not be anonymous and would be conducted by the climate-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation, writing that although "purists might object that the process did not qualify as a peer review ... I think it would be fine to call it a peer review."

The Global Warming Policy Foundation recently conducted a similar review of another pro-carbon pollution paper, with Ridley -- who used to be a regular columnist for The Wall Street Journal -- deceptively alleging in the London*Times* that the paper had been "thoroughly peer reviewed."

==

==

NB progress means armed teachers

BB bs

report on the the February 14, 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting shows no progress in implementing safety measures since the April 20, 1999, Columbine attack.

The Sun-Sentinel published their own report, which examines the use of unarmed security monitors. In lieu of guns, the security personnel had radios, yet two monitors spotted and recognized the gunman before shots were fired yet failed to call a Code Red to lock down campus.

The school had an armed resource officer on campus–Broward Deputy Scot Peterson–but he “remained sheltered [outside the school building] for nearly 48 minutes, watching as other officers enter the building.”

:{

}:

On March 15, 2018, Breitbart News published surveillance video allegedly showing Peterson outside Build 12 while the shooting was carried out inside. Broward Sheriff Scott Israel indicated that Peterson arrived at Building 12 roughly 90 seconds after the attack began.

He remained outside as the gunman went on a floor by floor shooting spree, that included stopping to reload five times.

Roughly six minutes after the attack was over, Peterson was still huddled up, sheltering in place outside. He told approaching Coral Springs officers that the gunman was on the second or third floor when, in fact, the gunman had already fled the building. Surveillance video shows the gunman–now unarmed–running across campus and going to Walmart, where he “ordered a drink at Subway.”

He left Walmart and went to McDonald’s, where he remained but a short time.

The commission instigating the Parkland shooting report noted the absence of safety as well, and voted 13-1 to recommend arming teachers at the school. Armed teachers are in the classrooms to defend themselves and their students whether the school’s resource officer enters the building or not.

On December 19, 2018, Breitbart News reported President Trump’s determination to include armed teachers in his school safety push. Trump made the point that it is “critical to have armed personnel available at a moment’s notice,” and he noted that teachers can be part such personnel.

Armed teachers are in classrooms to defend themselves and their students whether the security monitors call a Code Red or not.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

2nd AmendmentPoliticsColumbineMarjory Stoneman Douglas High Schoolschool safetyschool shooting

==

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/01/04/exclusive-global-sea-level-data-agency-hits-back-after-attacks-breitbart-and-climate-science-deniers

A British government-backed research project that coordinates data from tide gauges around the world has hit back at climate science deniers who wrongly accused their scientists of faking findings.

The Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level, based in Liverpool, UK, at the National Oceanography Center, dismissed the claims made by two Australia-based scientists who both reject the well-established links between greenhouse gas emissions from human activity and global warming.

The claims gained wider attention afterBreitbart’s James Delingpole, a climate science denier, screamed it was certain evidence PSMSL had been “caught red-handed tampering with raw data in order to exaggerate sea level rise.”

PSMSL said despite the claims, tide gauges and satellites showed that sea levels around the globe were rising and the rate of rise had increased in recent decades. Recent adjustments to the tide gauge data under scrutiny, in Yemen, had actually resulted in a decrease in the rate of sea level change, a spokesperson said.

The paper by Albert Parker and Cliff Ollier appeared in the new “open access” journal Earth Systems and Environment and claimed that data from a tide gauge in Aden, Yemen, did not show that sea levels there had risen.

As well as gaining attention from far right outlet Breitbart, the “research” was also covered uncritically by the UK’s MailOnline, which repeated the claim that PSMSL had made “arbitrary” adjustments to their data.

But senior scientists who are experts in sea level, and who spoke to Snopes and DeSmog, rubbished the claims, saying the study was flawed because the conclusions were unsupported by any methodology.

Unintelligible Research

Leading sea level scientist Dr. John Hunter told DeSmog the research was “close to being unintelligible.”

A spokersperson for PSMSL, at the National Oceanography Center, told DeSmog that MailOnline had approached them for comment, but published the story before scientists had a chance to respond. No other outlets contacted them to check.

The spokesperson wrote: “Any adjustment applied is never ‘arbitrary’ but is based on documentation of benchmark heights held by the PSMSL stretching back many years. An ongoing job of the PSMSL is to determine whether the adjustments made are correct, especially when new documentation becomes available or if there is a reanalysis of the existing documentation.”

PSMSL said the Aden, Yemen, gauge was assessed in 2008 and again in 2013 and this information was published on the PSMSL website.

“The 2013 reassessment resulted in a decrease (and not an increase) in the estimated 19th-20th century rate of sea level change at Aden,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that PSMSL was submitting a response to the journal.

“Global sea level is both rising and accelerating, and the data set compiled by PSMSL provides important input to this. This is detailed in the IPCC AR5 report chapters 3 and 13 … Specifically, PSMSL data inform us that sea level has risen by about 1-2 mm/year during the 20th century, and together with data from satellites, the rate over the last couple of decades has been over 3 mm/yr.”

Dr. John Hunter, a renowned expert on global sea level rise from the University of Tasmania, has analysed the Parker paper. He told DeSmog it was “hard to be sure what [Parker] has done” with the data because the paper, like others by the same author, were “close to being unintelligible.”

But he said the PSMSL broadly made two kinds of adjustments to data, which were “not arbitrary” but necessary.

One type of adjustment was to take the raw data and convert this to an average sea level height over a particular time period. A second was essentially a calibration exercise that matched the height of the zero mark on the tide gauge to a fixed point on the land.

Hunter said: “Broadly, PSMSL base the adjustments on whatever trustworthy information they have — if they don't have satisfactory information, then they don't convert that section of record from Metric to [Revised Local Reference data*]. They document what they do and why they do it.

“On the other hand, Parker's papers are often close to being unintelligible, so it is hard to be sure what he has done.

“Parker and Ollier (2017) appear to completely ignore the background information and instead fiddle around with the sea-level records only, matching break-points as best they can, using techniques which tend to yield adjusted records with virtually no trend.”

Hunter added that tide gauges and satellites all showed that sea levels were rising, and there was good understanding that this was being caused by thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets.

Who is Albert Parker?

Dr. Albert Parker is a mechanical engineer and former Fiat motor company researcher who, as reported by DeSmog, has also published papers under the name Alberto Boretti. He appears to have begun using the name Parker in about 2013 — around the time he took a role at RMIT University, which he has since left.

Boretti has refused to say why he uses two different names. Boretti and his sometime research partner Cliff Ollier, of University of Western Australia, are both listed as members of Principia Scientific International.

PSI is a fringe climate science denial group that publishes materials that deny that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.

Parker is prolific with his research and tends to target little-known and poorly regarded journals.

In early 2017, Parker and Ollier claimed that Australia had not warmed since the end of the 1800s, even though all temperature data shows a clear warming. The pair again argued that data, this time temperature readings, was being nefariously altered.

Journals Under Investigation

Parker and Ollier have co-authored several papers in a separate journal, Environmental Science: An Indian Journal, where the pair have also argued against human-caused climate change.

The publication Environmental Science: An Indian Journal is run by an organization called Trade Science Inc, which is owned by Indian “open access” publisher, OMICS.

OMICS is currently under investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for alleged deceptive practices. The FTC is questioning OMICS claims that its journals are properly peer-reviewed, and the agency alleges deceptive marketing practices. OMICS denies the allegations.

A brochure advertising the network of :{OMICS:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: trading names includes Trade Science Inc, and a contact address for Trade Science Inc is the same as OMICS International’s headquarters in Hyderabad.

Parker has had several university affiliations in recent years, including RMIT, the now defunct University of Ballarat, and James Cook University.  In his latest research he listed no academic affiliation.

In 2013, Parker wrote a paper with a fellow Australian, Thomas Watson, again arguing that sea levels were not rising.

Watson also thinks global warming is not caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions, but instead says the Earth’s climate is controlled by “magnetism.”

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/02/06/climate-science-deniers-new-york-american-museum-natural-history-rebekah-mercer

With friends like climate science deniers and alt-right megaphones like Breitbart, you have to wonder whether New York’s iconic American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) needs any enemies right now.

As the New York Times and others are reporting, the museum is facing calls from hundreds of scientists, its own curators, campaigners, and the public to drop rich benefactor and major Trump funder and ally Rebekah Mercer from its board of trustees.

As DeSmog reported in 2017, the foundation of the billionaire Mercer family has given millions to the museum, with latest figures putting their generosity at $3.8 million since 2013.

Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, heads the Mercer Family Foundation that has also been giving millions to climate science denial groups, including the notorious Heartland Institute.

But now the museum finds itself in the unenviable position of being defended, perhaps not surprisingly, by the Mercer-funded hyper-partisan outlet Breitbart and climate science denial characters from other Mercer-funded groups.

Deniers on the Defense

In a typically verbose screed on Breitbart, climate science denier James Delingpole called the scientists who had signed a letter protesting Mercer’s presence “basically frauds” and “imbeciles.”

Now climate science deniers have begun to circulate their own “open letter” calling for the AMNH to keep Mercer on the board and “not to cave in to this pressure.”

The letter reads: “The Earth has supported abundant life many times in the geological past when there were much higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is quite likely that future generations will benefit from the enrichment of Earth’s atmosphere with more carbon dioxide.

“Make no mistake, the agitators are not defending science from quackery — quite the contrary!”

That statement itself is contradicted by every major scientific institution in the world and thousands of scientific studies over many decades.

Many of that letter’s signers are affiliated with groups funded by Mercer’s family foundation in recent years. There’s retired Professor Will Happer of the CO2 Coalition; Richard Lindzen, a fellow at the Cato Institute; and Craig Idso, the chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

In a footnote, the letter states: “The views represented in this letter are those of the individual signatories and not the institutions they are affiliated with. Institutions are listed simply for identification purposes.”

The first signatory is Professor J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania.

Marketing professor Armstrong has spoken at several Heartland Institute conferences and was handed a “lifetime achievement” award at the institute’s March 2017 conference in Washington D.C.

The Mercer’s family foundation, which Rebekah leads, has given some $5.78 million to Heartland since 2008. Both Rebekah and father Robert attended Heartland’s D.C conference and have recently extended their funding to other anti-science groups.

As DeSmog reported, at the D.C conference Armstrong compared the apparently heroic work of climate science deniers to New York’s brave 9/11 firefighters.

Many of the names on the pro-Mercer petition have also signed numerous other letters denying the risks of human-caused climate change.

Pro-Science Petition Spammed

What’s more, it appears that some have targeted the pro-science public petition calling for Mercer's removal — which is separate from the open letter signed by scientists — by adding fake names.

In a statement, Beka Economopoulos of the Natural History Museum, a mobile science museum which is helping co-ordinate the letters, and petitions, said:

“There have been about a dozen fake names added to the public sign-on list, ranging from the inventor of the steam engine James Watt, to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

“It’s not clear if the names were added as a simple prank or in a deliberate attempt to damage our credibility, but either way we quickly removed them and are keeping a close eye to ensure only legitimate names are added. It’s sad that people will go so far to protect Rebekah Mercer as to invoke the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, but here we are.”

The museum’s famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is known for his impassioned attacks on climate science deniers.

In 2017 when DeSmog asked Tyson about the Mercers' financial support, he stressed how his position showed the independence of science from funding, but added: “All knowledge has value, especially knowledge of how people distort knowledge.”

In response to questions about the current protests, Tyson told DeSmog: “I have nothing to add or subtract from my previous correspondence with you on this matter.”

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https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/trumps-vote-suppression-team-doing-gops-dirty-work

Anyone who favors expanding voting rights should be relieved by Wednesday’s demise of President Trump’s so-called Election Integrity Commission.But the panel’s right-wing agenda to rig the voting process to benefit the GOP will continue.

There’s plenty to cheer about when white nationalists like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice-chair, and voter suppressors like the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky were discredited by a panel run in a secretive, conspiratorial and clownish manner. But these Republicans are not giving up on their plan to create new barriers to eligible voters.

“Amid many challenges for the institutions of American democracy, this was a rousing win,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. “No doubt, there is fallout to come… The commission has vanished, but its pernicious objectives persist. The White House has asked the Department of Homeland Security to take up the commission’s work—a dangerous and appalling idea. Earlier this morning, the president took to Twitter to renew calls for voting restrictions.”

Indeed, Kobach signaled his next move to Politico, which noted, “The Kansas official said he expects officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and political appointees overseeing that agency to take over the commission’s work and begin efforts to match state voter rolls to federal databases of noncitizens. He insisted he was not disappointed with the president’s decision.”

“It’s the right move,” Kobach said. “It’s a shifting in tactics from having the investigation be done by a federal commission to having it be done by a federal agency. The agency has a greater ability to move quickly to get the investigation done.”

The GOP Strategy Unmasked

Kobach’s is referring to a strategy employed by the most fervent partisan Republicans to position red-run states to keep new registrants from voting and do mass purges of infrequent but otherwise legal voters from their rolls. In short, it draws on intentionally sloppy data-mining to creates thousands of false positives that are then used to stymie voters. That porous data has been used in recent cycles in Georgia to delay approving new registrations and to accelerate mass purges of voter rolls. But it's not just Georgia.

In 2014, Florida’s top election official proposed using DHS’s problematic citizenship data to purge voter rolls. In response, county election supervisors rebelled and blocked it—because they still felt the sting of the 2000 election, when Secretary of State Katherine Harris used sloppy data-mining (seeking former felons who could not vote under that state's laws) to purge tens of thousands of eligible voters before that year's presidential election.

If Kobach has his way, the contours of that sordid history will repeat itself, including using a DHS database that was never designed to be an authoritative list of every U.S. citizen. But in the years since Harris’ Florida purge, the right-wing strategy has become clear.

Republicans like Kobach strategically target weak points in the voting process. They pinpoint areas in the process that are ambiguous, or where there’s no authoritative national data to counter their claims of purported illegal activity.

For example, there is no federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, which these right-wingers define as someone impersonating someone else at the polls to vote more than once, and has become the go-to justificatiom for red-run states to erect new barriers to voting century. Since there’s no single federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, it becomes a useful propaganda tool for Republicans because it's left to acacdemics and the media to debunk it, which these partisans routinely ignore.

The latest high-profile example of this narrative is Trump's thoroughly debunked claim that millions of Democrats illegally voted more than once to deprive him of 2016’s popular vote majority.But that lie, recited again by Trump’s press office when announcing the commission’s demise, resonates among supporters who want to believe all Democrats are crooks despite vast documentation by academics and the press that voter fraud barely exists. In the absence of an authoritative federal accounting, it becomes an easy pretext for red states to pass laws to, as they purport, police the process’ integrity. In reality, they thwart Democratic voters....

kobaCh announced this on Bb

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https://www.alternet.org/environment/how-right-wing-media-totally-distorted-positive-news-climate-change

denier

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/guess-who-breitbart-and-sarah-palin-are-blaming-california-wildfires

collection of right-wing websites teamed up with half-term nitwit Sarah Palin to spread a fake news story that appeared to pin the Northern California wildfires that have tragically killed at least 40 people onto an immigrant man who was arrested at a park in Sonoma, California. Jesus Fabian Gonzales—who “often sleeps in the park and is well-known to law enforcement”—was arrested Sunday after starting a small fire that he says he lit to stay warm, and one that “was so small a responding sheriff’s deputy was able to mostly put it out before firefighters arrived.” Gonzales was taken into custody without incident for one count of arson, but by Tuesday, Breitbart, InfoWars, and other sites were blaring sensationalist headlines, including one that stated that the “homeless arsonist behind Calif. wildfire that killed 40 people is an illegal alien”:

Breitbart News and InfoWars offered no evidence to link the man’s arrest to the fires and their accounts of the man’s arrest were disputed the same day by Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano.

“There’s a story out there he’s the arsonist for these fires. That is not the case. There is no indication he is related to these fires at all,” Giordano said in a news conference also broadcast on the department’s Facebook page and area TV stations. “I just did want to kill that speculation right now so we didn’t have things running too far out of control.”

Speculation from, say, Palin, who tweeted that “bet you not a single mainstream news organization is going to cover this story. Not PC or something.” No, it’s just fake, dumbass. In fact, *USA Today*notes that Sonoma County Sheriff’s Sgt. Spencer Crum said that “the only questions Breitbart News and InfoWars asked were about Gonzales's ethnicity and whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement had placed a detainer on him, which would hold him for an additional 48 hours at the jail.” It’s almost like they have an agenda here!

And one of the fake news websites that ran with the story also appeared to think California was being hit by one giant fire, rather than the at least one dozen major fires that firefighters are courageously battling, and some hours away from where Gonzales was arrested. But when your goal is to blame immigrants for just about anything, who cares about the facts?

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Major story about ties between Mercers, Breitbart, and neo-Nazis:{

Some of this was evident already, it's true. But the confirmation and salacious details are absolutely wild. BuzzFeed's Joe Bernstein broke a major story this week about how Breitbart under Steve Bannon used Milo Yiannopoulos to give editorial control to white nationalists and neo-Nazis. The lengthy story is definitely worth reading in full. We pulled out a few things worth noting, including how the entire affair is orchestrated by the GOP donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer. In retrospect, 60 Minutes' failure to confrontSteve Bannon about Yiannopoulos or the Mercers is even more of a failure than it was at the time.

}:

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-study-deniers-2489397710.html

no link

Climate Deniers Twist Study in Attempt to Question Science

A study released last week suggesting that the world may have more time to keep warming under 1.5 degrees C than previously thought is being twisted by deniers to question scientific proceedings and accuracy.

Politico reported Monday morning that powerful deniers are focusing on misinterpretations of the study to support efforts to roll back climate policy and question climate science at large (as our own Denier Roundup predicted last week).

The study represents "exactly the type of debate discussion scientists need to be having," Heartland Institute President Tim Huelskamp told Politico. "This article proved that there can be a lot of debate about the fundamental issues."

The study's authors pushed back against denier misuse of their findings. In an op-ed in the Guardian last week, they wrote that "after reasonably accurate initial reporting, suddenly our paper was about a downgrading of the threat of climate change, when it was actually nothing of the kind.

"Debating the current level of human-induced warming and how it relates to the 1.5° C goal feels a bit like discussing how best to steer a spacecraft into orbit around Saturn whileDelingpole [James, Breitbart] and Stringer [Graham, a Labour MP] are urging their readers to question whether the Earth goes round the Sun," they added.

For a deeper dive:

Politico, Ars Technica. Commentary: The Guardian, Myles Allen and Richard Millar op-ed

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4. Breitbart and Fox News serve up talking points for Jeff Sessions' DACA-rescinding press conference.

If one needs more evidence the Trump administration takes its tone and language directly from Fox News and Breitbart, look no further than Jeff Sessions' press conference this week. As liberal watchdog Media Matters notes, Sessions' primary talking points were ripped off directly from the two outlets. Breitbart/Fox and Sessions both claimed DACA was “amnesty” (it’s not), that the “child migrant surge” was due to DACA (it’s not), that DACA recipients take American jobs (they don’t), and that DACA was “unconstitutional” (it isn’t).

Steve Bannon may have exited the White House, but his propaganda reach hasn’t. Recently, there have been reports Trump’s new Chief of Staff John Kelly was trying to wean Trump off InfoWars, but it’s doubtful the two pillars of Breitbart and Fox News will go anywhere anytime soon. After all, where else would they trial balloon their talking points?

error no BB?

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/donald-trump-fake-news-government

Pruitt appears to be the most Trump-like member of Donald Trump’s cabinet, and now the federal agency he is tasked with leading, the Environmental Protection Agency, has officially adopted the president’s most pernicious habit.

When Trump recently visited hurricane-ravaged Houston he praised the Coast Guard while knocking the journalists tasked with covering the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.

“Think of it, almost 11,000 people by going into winds that the media would not go into . . . unless it’s a really good story,” Trump said, before gesturing toward the media.

That same day, the Associated Press published a story about the flooding of toxic waste sites in Houston, noting that Scott Pruitt’s EPA was still not on the ground. The agency responded in Trump-like fashion,attacking the pressto distract from legitimate questions.

Echoing Trump’s longstanding habit of singling out specific reporters for attacks, the EPA called out one reporter on the story by name in a news release titled “EPA Response to the AP’s Misleading Story.” Remarkably, the statement starts with a personal attack on Washington-based AP reporter Michael Biesecker:

Despite reporting from the comfort of Washington, Biesecker had the audacity to imply that agencies aren’t being responsive to the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey. Not only is this inaccurate, but it creates panic and politicizes the hard work of first responders who are actually in the affected area.

Biesecker’s AP colleague Jason Dearen, however, visited seven toxic sites known as “Superfund sites,” the most contaminated toxic waste sites in the country, in and around Houston — by boat, vehicle and on foot.

After the waters receded in the town of Crosby, Texas, situated between two Superfund sites, “a sinkhole the size of a swimming pool had opened up and swallowed two cars,” Biesecker wrote. “The acrid smell of creosote filled the air.” The Saturday report also noted that the “EPA had not yet been able to physically visit the Houston-area sites.”

In its unprecedented attack, the EPA accused the AP of leaving out information about the EPA’s other efforts to monitor the toxic land sites.

“Once again, in an attempt to mislead Americans, the Associated Press is cherry-picking facts, as EPA is monitoring Superfund sites around Houston and we have a team of experts on the ground working with our state and local counterparts responding to Hurricane Harvey,” EPA associate administrator Liz Bowman wrote in a statement. “Anything to the contrary is yellow journalism.”

The release went on to criticize past reporting by Biesecker, arguing that he has a “history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story.” To illustrate this, the EPA linked to a sensational Breitbart story that claimed the AP faced a “CNN-like scandal” after a July story Biesecker wrote inaccurately characterized an interaction between Pruitt and Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris. Biesecker’s story, based on EPA schedules, initially said the two met for half an hour at a Houston hotel. The AP’s**story**turned out to be wrong because they were reporting on inaccurate meeting schedules provided by the EPA. The AP corrected its story when the formal meeting was canceled.

Besides the personal criticisms it leveled against the report’s author, the EPA’s statement did not point to any specific factual inaccuracies in the AP’s story. The report’s co-author, who reported from on the ground in Texas, was not singled out by the EPA statement. In fact, the EPA appeared to confirm the AP’s report overall, noting that more than a dozen sites have been flooded and that EPA has not investigated them in person — only monitoring the waste sites by plane until the floodwaters receded.

When pressed by reporters about the aggressive statement, agency officials continued their attack on the media.t

“We understand you are very focused on our press release; we hope you will apply the same focus to the facts, which include that a national reporter from a wire service publishing [sic] inaccurate and misleading stories about the agency and it’s [sic] staff on the ground,” Bowman wrote in an email to Politico over the weekend. “We think that is more important than who drafted a press release.”

Earlier this year Trump called the press the “enemy of the American people.” Beyond the damage of his rhetoric, however, Trump’s war on so-called fake news through the official channels of the federal government can only have a chilling effect.

For its part, the AP standing by its story and its reporters.

“AP’s exclusive story was the result of on the ground reporting at Superfund sites in and around Houston, as well as AP’s strong knowledge of these sites and EPA practices,” AP’s executive editor Sally Buzbee said in a statement. “We object to the EPA’s attempts to discredit that reporting by suggesting it was completed solely from ‘the comforts of Washington’ and stand by the work of both journalists who jointly reported and wrote the story.”

Sophia Tesfaye is Salon's deputy politics editor

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Rightwing news site Breitbart has a new business plan. The self-described home of the “alt-right” started selling fidget spinners this week. The spinners’ centers are decorated with the florid face of its newly returned leader, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, above the hashtag #WAR.

But the media company is going to have to sell a lot of the $7.95 spinners if it wants to make up for the campaign that is destroying its advertising base.

Donald Trump and Bannon parted ways shortly after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Trump’s refusal to lay the blame for the violence at the feet of white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The evening of his departure, Bannon appeared at the offices of Breitbart News and led an editorial meeting, returning directly to the role he had given up to advise Trump and pledging to take down his enemies inside the White House and in the wider Republican party.

While Bannon helped Trump use the power of the internet to fire up his base, those tools have now been turned against him. His return, and the alt-right’s involvement in Charlottesville, have ignited an online campaign to force companies to pull their ads from Breitbart. It seems to be working.

Mark Irvine, senior data scientist at search marketing company WordStream, calculates that Breitbart’s ad revenue has declined by 51% since November as advertisers have fled.

:{View image on Twitter:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important"):}:

:{Twitter Ads info and privacy:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important;display:inline !important"):}:

The company declined to comment but editor-in-chief Alex Marlow told the New York Times: “It’s a fight. That’s all I can really say.”

Leading the fight is an anonymous group called Sleeping Giants. Using the Twitter handle @slpng_giants and a Facebook page, for the past eight months Sleeping Giants has targeted companies whose ads have appeared on Breitbart.

Harnessing the power of its 106,000 followers, they have persuaded almost 2,600 advertisers to pull their ads, including Audi, Avis, BMW, Easyjet, Nestlé and the Canadian government.

Speaking anonymously, Sleeping Giants’ founder said: “You are going to have a hard time finding a lot of big companies on there now.

“The last week has been really bananas. We haven’t got a lot of sleep in the last week.”

Activists started their campaign in reaction to their perception that Breitbart was running “xenophobic, sexist and racist articles. They had a ‘black crime’ section for a while. For us it wasn’t just that they were saying these things, it is that they are couched as news. They feed into racial stereotypes and sexism. They prime the pump and use their comments section as a chance to build their following.”

Among Breitbart’s most infamous headlines:

• World Health Organization report: trannies 49 Xs higher HIV rate- Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy

• Political correctness protects Muslim rape culture

• Science proves it: fat shaming works

• The solution to online ‘harassment’ is simple: women should log off

Most of the companies advertising on the site don’t so directly but via brokers that display their advertisements all over the web. While Sleeping Giants said they are keen to protect free speech, they argue that free speech doesn’t entitle Breitbart to make money off advertisers, especially if those advertisers are unknowingly giving money to a site whose views clash with their own policies on non-discrimination and other issues.

“We want to take the profit out of bigotry,” said the spokesman.

Kellogg’s was the first big name to react, pulling its ads last November. Breitbart hit back with a campaign to boycott Kellogg’s. “That was the dumbest move they could have made,” said the Sleeping Giants spokesman. “When you’re an advertiser, the last thing you want is some crazy blog threatening to send people after you if you decide not to do business with them.”

Remaining advertisers, including Amazon and Vodafone, are under pressure to pull their ads too. An online petition calling for Amazon to withdraw has so far attracted over 320,000 signatures. A Vodafone spokesman declined to comment specifically on Breitbart but said it actively monitored sites used for advertising and was the first company to announce a policy banning advertising on hate speech and fake news media outlets.

“Under that policy, any outlet whose predominant purpose is the communication of divisive and offensive content will be excluded from our advertising whitelists,” he said. “Conversely, if the majority of the content provided would not be categorised as hate speech or fake news, an outlet may be considered for addition to our whitelists.

“We acknowledge our responsibility to ensure our advertising budget does not fund outlets that have a negative impact on society. We also acknowledge our responsibility to protect freedom of expression and freedom of media.”

An ad boycott may not bring Breitbart to its knees, said David Folkenflik, the media correspondent at National Public Radio. One of Bannon’s first meetings after exiting the White House was with rightwing hedge-fund tycoon Robert Mercer, who has given money to Breitbart, Trump’s campaign and the Brexit campaign.

“My sense is that Bannon tends to lean into conflict, seeing it as a sign that they are doing something right and valuable,” said Folkenflik. Breitbart has wealthy backers “who see a non-financial reason for Breitbart. There is a political and agenda driven motivation for what Breitbart does.”

Since Bannon’s return, the site has already accused Trump of flip-flopping on Afghanistan, claiming he has been captured by the Washington establishment. However, it has swiped at Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and backed Trump for threatening a government shutdown in order to get funding for his border wall.

Bannon himself doesn’t seem worried about money.

“I’ve got my hands back on my weapons,” Bannon told the Weekly Standard in his first interview after his White House exit. “I built a fucking machine at Breitbart. And now I’m about to go back, knowing what I know, and we’re about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.”

Dominic Rushe is the US business correspondent for the Guardian.

==

2x from main:

http://www.alternet.org/investigations/breitbarts-disinformation-dominated-right-wing-media-2016-creating-dark-paranoid-fact

Right-wing media evolved into a hall of mirrors in 2016, when Breitbart displaced Fox News as the key agenda-setting and attack-leading epicenter of a disinformation-filled, paranoid ecosystem promoting Donald Trump and his pro-white America agenda.

Breitbart not only led the right’s obsessive, hostile focus on immigrants, it was also the first to attack professional reporting such as the New York Times and Washington Post.[see matt boyle mission to destroy = disruption meme?] Breitbart's disruptive template fueled the political and information universe we now inhabit, where the right dismisses facts and embraces fantasies.

There is no corollary dynamic on the left or among pro-Clinton audiences in 2016. The left's news sources, media consumption and patterns of social media-sharing are more open-minded and fact-based and less insular and aggressive. Still, Breitbart’s obsessive focus on fabricating and hyping scandals involving Hillary Clinton (and Jeb Bush early in the primary season) pushed mainstream media to disproportionately cover its agenda.

These observations are among the takeaways of a major study from Columbia Journalism Review that analyzed 1.25 million stories published online between April 2015 and Election Day 2016.While the study affirmed what many analysts have long perceived—that right-wing media and those who consume it inhabit a paranoid and dark parallel universe—it also documented shifts in the right’s media ecosystem; namely, Breitbart supplanting Fox News as the leading purveyor of extreme disinformation.

“A right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart [has] developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world,” CJR wrote. “This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.”

The CJR report said Americans’ media consuming habits are “asymmetric,” meaning those on the left—progressives and Democrats—rely on more diverse outlets and content, compared to the right.

“Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites,” CJR wrote. “But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.”

The pro-Trump media specialized in what CJR called “disinformation,” where facts are presented in isolation or stripped of context, and then exaggerated or hyped to produce false sense of alarm or crisis. This is more sophisticated than merely lying, they said.

“Rather than ‘fake news’ in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading,” CJR said. “Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent ‘Bowling Green massacre.’”

CJR's methodology looked at how the 1.25 million stories were shared or referenced online; e.g., if a person shared a story from Breitbart, what other sites was he likely to share or hyperlink to? CJR used an open source program called Media Cloud, which was developed for studying media at Harvard University and MIT.

The most frequently shared sources among Trump supporters, in descending order, were Breitbart,The Hill, Fox News, Gateway Pundit, Politico, Washington Examiner, Daily Caller, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times,donaldjtrump.com, Conservative Treehouse, InfoWars, Daily Mail, Truthfeed, New York Post, Investors, the Right Scoop, statespoll.com, and Conservative Tribune.

The most frequently shared sources among Clinton supporters, in descending order, were Washington Post, Huffington Post, New York Times, The Hill, CNN, Politico, Politicus USA, Daily Kos, Raw Story, hillaryclinton.com, MSNBC, Salon, Think Progress, Daily Newsbin, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo, Daily Beast, Media Matters, NBC News and Vox.

Notably, there was virtually no middle ground. The most centrist news source, as measured by comparable volume of shares by Trump and Clinton supporters was the Wall Street Journal,CJR found.

Hyper-Partisan Disinformation

“There are very few center-right sites: sites that draw many Trump followers, but also a substantial number of Clinton followers,” they said. “Between the moderately conservative Wall Street Journal, which draws Clinton and Trump supporters in equal shares, and the starkly partisan sites that draw Trump supporters by ratios of 4:1 or more, there are only a handful of sites. Once a threshold of partisan-only attention is reached, the number of sites in the clearly partisan right increases, and indeed exceeds the number of sites in the clearly partisan left.”

The emergence of a self-segregating, far-right media universe is a relatively recent development. This fractured and self-referencing ecosystem barely existed before Barack Obama became president in 2008. As CJR noted, when Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, the only far-right publication was the New York Post. By the time Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, there was “only the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, and arguably Sean Hannity.” In 1996, Fox News was launched, and Alex Jones of InfoWars went on the radio. Breitbart was not founded until 2007.

Breitbart first displaced Fox News in the GOP’s crowded primary season early in 2016, CJR reported, when there was a field of 17 candidates and no clear frontrunner.

“The pattern of hyper-partisan attack was set during the primary campaign, targeting not only opposing candidates but also media that did not support Trump’s candidacy,” it said. “The February map [of the most read and shared websites], for example, shows Fox News as a smaller node quite distant from the Breitbart-centered right. It reflects the fact that Fox News received less attention than it did earlier or later in the campaign, and less attention, in particular, from users who also paid attention to the core Breitbart-centered sites and whose attention would have drawn Fox closer to Breitbart.”

CJR explained that Breitbart started to attack Fox News early in 2016. “The top-20 stories in the right-wing media ecology during January included, for example, ‘Trump Campaign Manager Reveals Fox News Debate Chief Has Daughter Working for Rubio.’ More generally, the five most widely shared stories in which Breitbart refers to Fox are storiesaimed to delegitimize Fox as the central arbiter of conservative news, tying it to immigration, terrorism and Muslims, and corruption.” The list is:

• The Anti-Trump Network: Fox News Money Flows into Open Borders Group
• NY Times Bombshell Scoop: Fox News Colluded with Rubio to Give Amnesty to Illegal Aliens
• Google and Fox TV Invite Anti-Trump, Hitler-Citing, Muslim Advocate to Join Next GOP TV-Debate
• Fox, Google Pick 1994 Illegal Immigrant To Ask Question in Iowa GOP Debate
• Fox News at Facebook Meeting Is Misdirection: Murdoch and Zuckerberg Are Deeply Connected Over Immigration

Those attacks ceased by late spring, when the finalists for the GOP nomination were Trump and Ted Cruz. By then, CJR reported that the most-shared news sources on the right were, in descending order, Breitbart, Fox News, Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit, Washington Examiner, WikiLeaks and InfoWars. On the left, the most shared sources as the primaries ended were: CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Hill and Politico.

ESCALATOR]: But even as red and blue America turned to differing media, CJR noted that the right’s aggressive and hyperbolic political attacks shaped coverage by more mainstream and professionalized outlets. “The right-wing media was also able to bring the focus on immigration, Clinton emails, and scandals more generally to the broader media environment,” CJR said.

“A sentence-level analysis of stories throughout the media environment suggests that Donald Trump’s substantive agenda—heavily focused on immigration and direct attacks on Hillary Clinton—came to dominate public discussions,” it continued. “The right-wing media was also able to bring the focus on immigration, Clinton emails, and scandals more generally to the broader media environment… [and these] came to dominate public discussions.”

Right-wing media wasn’t just setting the topical news agenda, it was shaping the angles or slants taken, CJR noted. “While mainstream media coverage was often critical, it nonetheless revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set: immigration. Right-wing media, in turn, framed immigration in terms of terror, crime, and Islam, as a review of Breitbart and other right-wing media stories about immigration most widely shared on social media exhibits."

As the campaign crested, right-wing media was churning out a fount of propaganda, CJR said, saying its disinformation epitomized “the paranoid” in our politics.

“What we find in our data is a network of mutually reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world,” CJR said. “‘Fake news,’ which implies made of whole cloth by politically disinterested parties out to make a buck of Facebook advertising dollars, rather than propaganda and disinformation, is not an adequate term. By repetition, variation, and circulation through many associated sites, the network of sites make their claims familiar to readers, and this fluency with the core narrative gives credence to the incredible.”

CJR gave stunning examples. It cited examples by Ending the Fed, which was one of the most frequently shared right-wing sites on Facebook.

“While Ending the Fed clearly had great success marketing stories on Facebook, our analysis shows nothing distinctive about the site—it is simply part-and-parcel of the Breitbart-centered sphere,” it wrote. “The false claims perpetuated in Ending the Fed’s most-shared posts are well established tropes in right wing media: the leaked Podesta emails, alleged Saudi funding of Clinton’s campaign, and a lack of credibility in media. The most Facebook-shared story by Ending the Fed in October was ‘IT’S OVER: Hillary’s ISIS Email Just Leaked & It’s Worse Than Anyone Could Have Imagined.’ See also, InfoWars’ ‘Saudi Arabia has funded 20% of Hillary’s Presidential Campaign, Saudi Crown Prince Claims,’ and Breitbart’s ‘Clinton Cash: Khizr Khan’s Deep Legal, Financial Connections to Saudi Arabia, Hillary’s Clinton Foundation Tie Terror, Immigration, Email Scandals Together.’

“This mix of claims and facts, linked through paranoid logic characterizes much of the most shared content linked to Breitbart,” CJR continued. “It is a mistake to dismiss these stories as ‘fake news;’ their power stems from a potent mix of verifiable facts (the leaked Podesta emails), familiar repeated falsehoods, paranoid logic, and consistent political orientation within a mutually reinforcing network of like-minded sites.”

Needless to say, CJR believes the right’s fact-averse, hyper-partisan hate-mongering is extremely dangerous for American culture and politics. That’s because wide disinformation erodes the prospect of governing based on compromises. If there’s any silver lining to CJR’s analysis, it is that red and blue America still “pay attention to traditional media, following professional journalistic practices, and cross-reference what they read on partisan sites.”

But there is no going back to a simpler, pre-internet past. Today’s press must recognize “it is operating in a propaganda and disinformation rich environment,” CJR said. “Rising to that challenge could usher in a new golden age for the Fourth Estate.”

CJR ended its report on that upbeat note. For the rest of us, its research and reporting tell us it is no accident that Breitbart’s Steve Bannon is in the White House as Trump’s senior strategist. He helped put Trump there by fanning an unheralded wave of dark propaganda and opening a Pandora’s Box that is not about to be closed.

Steven Rosenfeld

==

i forgot how key james o'keefe was in launching this bozo into escalator: prominence, explained by richard hofst paranoid style:

no link

THE BLOG 07/23/2010 11:36 pm ET | Updated May 25, 2011

Why Does Anyone Take Andrew Breitbart Seriously?

By Peter Dreier ,  Christopher R. Martin

Andrew Breitbart has a job to do and he does it well. Breitbart’s job is to lie and distort the truth in order to advance a right-wing agenda, embarrass liberals, and undermine the Obama administration.

Breitbart is not a journalist, researcher, or pundit. He is a propagandist. He operates several websites (BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BigHollywood), where he and other right-wing bloggers spew their political pornography. The articles that appear on these websites are contemporary versions of what historian Richard Hofstadter called, in a famous 1964 essay, the “paranoid style” of American politics practiced by extreme conservatives.

Breitbart is part of the “paranoid style” conservative echo chamber that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, and thousands of lesser-known activists who use a combination of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative publications, and the new media (emails, blogs, youtube, facebook) to mobilize support for their right-wing crusade. Breitbart was a featured speaker at the Tea Party conference in Nashville in February and is a frequent guest on Fox News and right-wing TV and radio talk shows. His websites are propaganda vehicles for building a political movement. Unlike Fox News, he doesn’t even pretend to be “fair and balanced.” What much of America learned this week is that Andrew Breitbart is unfair and unbalanced.

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What’s distressing is not that Breitbart does his job, but that the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, including the Obama Administration, take him seriously. The recent dust-up over the firing of federal Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, fueled by a doctored video on Breitbart’s website, is only the latest example of this.}:

Since he began his website operation, Breitbart has sought to inject himself and his blogger network into the political debate. Sometimes he succeeds in getting wider attention, outside the right-wing silo, for the manufactured scandals he tries to provoke.

Breitbart’s public visibility has peaked twice, according to an analysis of stories on the Lexis/Nexis database.

His first brush with fame occurred in September 2009, after he sponsored two young right-wing video activists — Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe — who visited 10 ACORN offices with a hidden video camera, claiming they were a prostitute and her friend, and tried to entrap the group’s staff into giving them advice about buying a home to use for their prostitution ring. They recorded their stunt and selectively edited the tapes for release, later splicing in video footage of O’Keefe dressed up in an outlandish pimp costume (hat, sunglasses, fur coat, and walking stick) with racist overtones.

In fact, O’Keefe actually wore a dress shirt and slacks and identified himself as a student or friend of the young woman who was trying to protect her. Although O’Keefe’s costume change was exposed months ago, the image has been imprinted in the media’s mind. On Thursday, for example, the Associated Press story about Breitbart referred to O’Keefe and Giles as “actors posing as a prostitute and her pimp.”

Breitbart not only defended the duo’s actions but said that O’Keefe “is already well on his way to being one of the great journalists” and that he deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Breitbart has refused to release the original, unedited videos to any of the organizations investigating the ACORN controversy.

By the second week of September 2009, the ACORN videos became a national story. The videos were posted on Breitbart’s website, then quickly became the top story on the Glenn Beck Show, the rest of Fox News, conservative talk radio (including Rush Limbaugh and his local counterparts), and CNN’s Lou Dobbs Show. The controversy proved irresistible for the mainstream news media, which reported the story and broadcast clips of the videos many times. These video attacks compounded ACORN’s problems, having been the victim of another manufactured scandal before and during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Karl Rove, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican establishment falsely accused ACORN of “voter fraud.”

The videos led many of ACORN’s supporters to abandon the community organizing group. Soon after the video scandal surfaced in the mainstream media, the U.S. House of Representatives (including many Democrats who had worked with ACORN in the past) voted to de-fund the organization. In reality, less than 10 percent of ACORN’s budget came from federal grants. But the symbolism of Congress’ action was more important than the money itself. Congress’ action provoked ACORN’s cautious foundation funders to drop the group like a hot potato.

Within a few months, ACORN had been exonerated of wrongdoing by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, the Attorney General of California, and a federal judge, who ruled that the law barring the group’s receipt of federal funds was unconstitutional. By then, however, it was too late. In April, ACORN laid off its entire staff and closed its offices in over 100 cities. (Meanwhile, last January O’Keefe was arrested for breaking into Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office in another “gotcha” attempt,; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years of probation, a fine of $1,500 and 100 hours of community service).

(Full disclosure: We were a target of Breitbart’s smear tactics after we published a study last year revealing the distorted media coverage of the manufactured ACORN controversy. An updated and expanded version of that study will be published in a few weeks in the fall issue of Perspectives on Politics, a journal sponsored by the American Political Science Association).

Now Breitbart is back in the news as a result of another manufactured controversy, this one regarding Shirley Sherrod. He’s gotten even more media attention for this episode than he did for his ACORN shenanigans. But the current firestorm has many of the same elements as the phony ACORN scandal that he cooked up last year.

First, Breitbart posted a highly doctored video on his website that was intended to put its target (both African Americans — hardly a coincidence) in the worst possible light. Then the right-wing echo chamber — including Fox News and the conservative blogosphere — picked up Breitbart’s ball and ran with it. Next, the mainstream media — the daily newspapers and the TV networks — took the false accusations at face value and repeated them without bothering to verify and fact-check, acting more like stenographers than reporters. Finally, liberal groups like the NAACP and liberal politicians (in this case, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the White House), wary of any controversy, jumped the gun and distanced themselves from the target of Breitbart’s attacks — by firing Sherrod before she even had an opportunity to explain or they bothered to investigate the accusations.

Unlike the manufactured ACORN controversy, Breitbart’s deception in the Sherrod “scandal” was uncovered quickly. A few media outlets, including CNN, dug a bit deeper, interviewed Sherrod, talked to the white farmers that Sherrod helped, reviewed the entire videotape of her speech to the NAACP in Georgia, and disclosed what should have been apparent from the beginning — that what Sherrod actually said had no relationship to what Breitbart claimed she said. This led the White House, Vilsack, the NAACP and others to offer apologies and led Vilsack to offer Sherrod another job with the Department of Agriculture.

There are thousands of right-wing websites and bloggers, but so far Breitbart is the most successful, having mastered — indeed, having helped create — the new rules of political combat made possible by the internet and cable TV.

Breitbart has not only drawn attention to his manufactured scandals but also to himself. Time magazine, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, and other publications have published profiles of Breitbart. These profiles could hardly be called fawning or even admiring. He comes across as an obnoxious, self-centered bully. But the profiles are nevertheless respectful, in the sense that they recognize his entrepreneurial skill and his take-no-prisoners attitude.

Both the right-wing echo chamber and the mainstream media don’t quite know how to categorize Breitbart and what he does. The Philadelphia Daily News called him a “rising conservative media figure.” The Washington Post called him a “conservative activist” and an “internet entrepreneur.” NPR described him as a “conservative online news entrepreneur.” The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called him a “blogger,” while Newsday and the New Republic called him a “conservative blogger.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal called him an “online muckraker and journalist.” Sean Hannity, the San Francisco Chronicle, and ABC’s “Good Morning America” labeled him a “publisher.”

Regardless of what he’s called, the Sherrod story is a good example of Breitbart’s skill at what academics call “agenda-setting” and “framing”.A week ago, hardly anyone had ever heard of Shirley Sherrod. Now, she’s practically a household name. And many people who might not recognize her name at least know something of the story. In the past few days, almost every major news outlet has published or broadcast something about this story. That’s the art of agenda-setting.

Americans not only know who Sherrod is, they already have an opinion about her, because they’ve been told that she’s a black federal employee who used her position to discriminate against whites. That’s the art of framing. Within a matter of hours, that frame burned through the media like prairie fire.

This process is easily verified by an examination of Lexis-Nexis. Among daily newspapers, the conservative Washington Times has been the most likely to report Breitbart’s propaganda over the past few years, followed by the Wall Street Journal. Among magazines, the conservative National Review, followed by the right-wing American Spectator, have given Breitbart a megaphone. Among TV networks, Fox News has been Breitbart’s best customer, followed by CNN.

Only after his smears are reported in the right-wing echo chamber do the mainstream media outlets pick it up, where it reaches a much wider audience. The mainstream media are mesmerized by the Tea Party and controversies that it and its political allies have stoked. In bending over backwards to cover the right wing — and downplay comparable activities by liberal and progressive activists — the reporters and editors have lost sight of the journalists’ responsibilities not only to fact-check and verify, but also to provide context.

By now it is clear what Breitbart is selling. But the real question is why the mainstream media and Democratic politicians bought it. Breitbart is a con artist, but con artists succeed if consumers don’t know they are being conned — or don’t care.

Given Breitbart’s track record, why does anyone — reporters and editors, foundations, advocacy groups, and elected officials — take him seriously? Or why not at least treat him like an arm of the Tea Party, as a political activist, and a propagandist, not as a source of credible information?

Of course, Breitbart has offered no apology and is still trying to defend and justify his actions. Perhaps this most recent brouhaha will destroy Breitbart’s credibility with the mainstream media and even with his right-wing colleagues at Fox News and elsewhere, who were embarrassed by the Sherrod mishap.

But it isn’t only the mainstream media that needs to do some soul-searching. It is also the Obama Administration and, more broadly, liberal Democrats and liberal advocacy groups and foundations, who were too quick to distance themselves from ACORN and now Sherrod.

Clearly the Obama administration over-reacted, fearful, as a high-level official put it, of having the Sherrod story show up on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show. Why they are so intimidated by Beck and his ilk is a mystery. Their followers, and those who identify with the Tea Party, represent no more than 15 percent of all voters. Moreover, very few of Beck’s (or Limbaugh’s) devotees would even consider voting for a Democrat. After all, they think Obama is a Marxist, a Muslim, and a foreigner. This is not a constituency that Obama and the Democrats are going to win over by appearing to be bipartisan or middle-of-the-road.

And if Obama and his inner circle are worried that Breitbart’s and Beck’s poison will spread from their base among right-wing zealots and start influencing “independent” and “swing” voters — and thus help sway close elections toward Republican candidates — then the best way to prevent that from happening is to fight back, and challenge their lies and distortions, not run away and hide, or capitulate, as they did by firing Van Jones, abandoning ACORN, and firing Shirley Sherrod.

Breitbart’s credibility may or may not survive the Sherrod controversy. But what’s important is whether responsible journalists — as well as the Obama administration, the Democrats, and liberals and progressives — learn some lessons from this episode.

Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College. Christopher Martin teaches communications at the University of Northern Iowa.

Follow Peter Dreier on Twitter: www.twitter.com/peterdreier

Peter Dreier 

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College

Christopher R. Martin

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/why-does-anyone-take-andr_b_657964.html

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http://www.alternet.org/media/breitbart-news-dramatic-tailspin-may-be-irreversible

newsweek

Earlier this year, reporter Lee Stranahan was in the White House press room when another journalist asked him which outlet he worked for.

“Breitbart News,” Stranahan answered, recalling the exchange in a recent phone conversation.

The other journalist laughed, thinking this had to be a joke. Breitbart, after all, was largely known, whether justly or not, as a hothouse where the alt-right tended to its most outlandish, paranoid creations: Clinton conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant fearmongering, garden-variety misogyny. One of its story tags was “black crime.” The tag is no longer used, yet it remains attached to a half-dozen stories on the website, the last published just over a year ago.

Tradition rules journalism as much as it rules golf, and tradition dictated that the White House press room was for upstanding men and women who’d gone to Columbia Journalism School, putting in their time at the Palookaville Weekly Citizen before earning a coveted spot in the newsroom of The Washington Post or The New York Times, or some other publication that deserved to be in the White House because its mission was sober reportage, not click-bait about “lesbian bridezillas” or “trannies.” Breitbart had no business being there because it would eagerly publish—has eagerly published, in fact—articles about “lesbian bridezillas” and “trannies.”

And not just a couple of such articles either: Breitbart’s editorial outlook is not imbued with cultural or political conservatism. Breitbart’s guiding principle is that of the tabloid: If it bleeds, it leads. Especially if the bleeding is caused by an illegal immigrant or some “globalist” Democrat crafting the New World Order on her porch in the Hamptons. This was (and largely remains) a lurid vision of America, terrifying yet enchanting, like one of those 1980s crime blockbusters with weird racial politics and lots of explosions, not to mention at least a couple of scantily clad blondes in search of a musclebound savior, preferably one wearing a sweat-stained American flag bandana.

But there Breitbart was, the outsider suddenly in the inner sanctum of American power, the unpopular kid unexpectedly crowned prom king, sought out by all those who’d once mocked him. Its chief executive, unkempt ultra-nationalist Steve Bannon, is now Trump’s chief strategist. He brought Breitbart staffers with him to the White House, including self-styled terrorism expert Sebastian Gorka and establishment tormentor Julia Hahn, in what *The Hill* called “the Breitbartization of the White House.”

And even as President Trump was supposedly draining the political swamp, his White House granted Bannon a retroactive ethics waiver that allowed him to keep talking Breitbart staffers, in seeming violation of federal rules.

Whatever you think of Breitbart’s unabashed distaste for Democrats and centrist Republicans, or its famously incendiary headlines—“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” “Bill Kristol, Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew”—it is inarguable that the site helped elect Trump, in large part by mercilessly shredding every Republican opposed to his candidacy while touting his immigration plan (i.e., the border wall) and making the darkest possible insinuations about Hillary Clinton and her supposedly corrupt coterie. So there Breitbart News was on November 8, shoulder to shoulder with Trump in the electoral trenches, firing away at the Democratic firewall. It crumbled that night, and the plains of the Midwest lay open for the taking. So did the Oval Office.

And that’s the problem Breitbart faces today, a problem similar to the one plaguing the Trump administration: Being an outsider works only when you’re on the outside. Breitbart’s (potential) troubles have been compounded because it sold Trump to its readers as our guy. Bannon had once wanted that guy to be Alabama’s Senator Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general. Instead, he got an ideology-averse pseudo-mogul, difficult to control but easy to convince. It’s hard to know how much of Breitbart’s support of Trump was a ploy for clicks, but it certainly presented a convincing portrait of an economic nationalist whose business savvy was matched only by his xenophobia.

The sale was made, but as has been frequently the case with Trump, the buyers have started to suspect they may have been played for fools. Breitbart (and, really, the entire right-wing media establishment) is now faced with a bungling chief executive who has embraced NATO and Goldman Sachs, largely ditched his plan for a border wall with Mexico and, during a speech in Saudi Arabia, didn’t utter the words that have been the touchstone of Republican foreign policy: radical Islamic terrorism.

What’s to be done about this? Breitbart doesn’t have a particularly rich tonal register, its voice reverting most frequently to outrage, derision or disgust. It is incapable of hitting the complex notes of regret, or even of measured concern. If you wanted nuance, you’d probably be a Weekly Standard subscriber.

“They are an outlet that has a very, very large stake in the success of President Trump,” explains Ben Shapiro, who left Breitbart during the presidential campaign, after Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski roughly grabbed Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields. After the incident, Breitbart sided with the Trump campaign over its reporter’s easily verifiable claims. Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire and host of a popular right-leaning podcast, says that under Bannon, Breitbart had become “Trump’s personal Pravda.”

For Breitbart, the potential spoils of playing the role of a state propaganda organ are great. The dangers are greater still. In February, Alexa, which ranks the popularity of websites, scored Breitbart as the 29th most visited website in the nation. This was an astonishing achievement for a news organization founded a decade ago in a Los Angeles basement, unknown to most Americans until the Trump candidacy ceased to seem like a political sideshow. Breitbart celebrated the achievement with typical bluster, touting its digital supremacy over both ESPN and PornHub. By the beginning of 2017, Breitbart had more unique visitors than Politico, more total traffic (that is, both visitors and page views combined) than The Washington Post. Breitbart had beaten not just the pornographers but also the journalistic elites who’d scorned it for years.

But much like Trump himself, Breitbart News may have expended too much energy on gloating. Breitbart has fallen to 63rdin Alexa’s rankings (its ranking was actually much lower, in the 270s, but after Vanity Fairpublished that figure, Breitbart complained to Alexa and had its ranking somehow recalibrated). SimilarWeb, a company that uses Google Analytics to analyze web browsing patterns, found that Breitbart had 128 million total visits in November, but that the number has since dropped to 78 million total visits in April. That is still an amazing feat, one that places Breitbart well above most other news organizations. Yet some in the media wonder whether the high watermark of the site’s relevance was the election in November.

Right-wing sites like the nascent Heat Street and Tucker Calrson's more established Daily Caller have shown themselves to be more nimble in their coverage, less tied to the White House and more willing to conduct genuine journalism. Traffic numbers aside, those are the sites I visit when I want to understand what the right is thinking.

Web popularity is fleeting, especially so when tethered to the fortunes of one exceedingly volatile, temperamental head of state. Alex Marlow, 31, the site’s Berkeley-educated editor-in-chief, has said he won’t allow for Stalinist shows of loyalty in his newsroom (the newsroom is mostly digital; writers tend to work from home). “When we feel like the president is not honoring the pledges he made to the public, he’s going to get critical coverage,” he told NBC’s *Today* in March.

Breitbart’s attempts to detach from Trump have been minor. For the most part, the site has either pulled its punches or directed them elsewhere. Much like the president, Breitbart is adept at transferring blame, usually to hapless White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, to whom almost unimaginable powers of ruin have been ascribed; the modestly more competent chief of staff, Reince Priebus; or the team of “globalists” (an epithet that, to some, has anti-Semitic connotations) who’ve pulled Trump toward centrist positions that could yet rescue his presidency but alienate his base.

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7:02 PM - 11 Jun 2017

Luis Gutierrez Whines: Breitbart News Coverage of Illegal Immigrants, Muslim Refugees Too Harsh -...

Luis Gutierrez Whines: Breitbart News Coverage of Illegal Immigrants, Muslim Refugees Too Harsh

breitbart.com

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“Any attempts to separate themselves from Trump will result in an immediate collapse of their traffic,” warns Shapiro, “and will not result in any additional mainstream credibility.”

That credibility won’t be easy to come by, especially from a Washington press corps predisposed to sneer at Breitbart as an unsophisticated arriviste, one that has consistently put click-getting ahead of truth-telling. In March, the Standing Committee of Correspondents denied Breitbart a congressional press pass. Hadas Gold, a media reporter for Politico, explained at the time that committee members had questions about Breitbart’s monetary ties to right-wing activists Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, which the site has generally downplayed. The committee seemed to also frown on the fact that Breitbart’s newsroom was a Capitol Hill townhouse, known as “the Breitbart Embassy.”

News organizations are funded by all sorts of individuals, some of them perhaps unworthy of the high-minded journalistic enterprises they sponsor. And though I’ve never been to the Breitbart Embassy, I doubt it’s all that different from your average Manhattan newsroom, with its abused coffee machine and even more abused bathrooms. Regardless, the correspondents’ committee felt these to be signs of Breitbart’s pervasive amateurism. “The whole thing suggests to me that they’re just not ready for a credential,” a committee member told Politico.

At the same time, Breitbart’s much-touted plans to expand into Europe, proof of its newfound relevance, seem to have been more talk than anything else. In February, Politico reported that “difficulties in recruiting journalists, questions about which language to use and a desire to make a high impact on launch have all slowed down efforts to establish French and German editions.” In the course of my reporting, I also heard that domestic bureaus weren’t nearly as well staffed as Breitbart wanted readers to believe.

Right around the same time, Breitbart cut ties with its most prominent writer, expert provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos —or “MILO,” as he is called on the site, like a European soccer deity—after it was revealed that he’d made comments supportive of pedophilia.

After the London Bridge attack at the beginning of this month, Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh made Islamophobic comments on Twitter (“There would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn’t live there”). She was promptly fired, in what may have been a sign of how sensitive Breitbart News has become to accusations that it promulgates right-wing extremism. The firing instead exposed it to criticism from those very extremists, some of whom are now calling the site "Cuckbart," using the far right's favorite term (i.e., "cuck," from cuckold) for weak-kneed members of its clan.

The site’s gravest problem may be the wholesale flight of advertisers, who have been pressured by anti-Trump forces to disassociate themselves from any outlet friendly to his administration. "Breitbart ads plummet nearly 90 percent in three months as Trump’s troubles mount," read the headline of a Digiday story by Lucia Moses that detailed the site's deepening financial woes.

The campaign against Breitbart is being led by a group that identifies itself on Twitter as Sleeping Giants. At the time of this writing, its online spreadsheet of advertisers that no longer buy ads on Breitbart includes 2,178 entries, from German flagship airline Lufthansa to Zeus, a beard grooming company. A visit to the Sleeping Giants feed finds a tweet at the founder of tech company Taboola, which apparently advertises with Breitbart: “Do you love money more than tolerance?”

The Perils of Access Journalism

Perhaps no man has a more complex relationship with Breitbart than Lee Stranahan, one of the most polarizing and unusual figures of the alt-right, which brims with unusual and polarizing figures. He has quit the site twice and been fired once, because of clashes with editors. But having been originally hired by Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, Stranahan sees himself as a Breitbart purist, a “reader’s’ advocate” who will rescue the organization from its own trolliest impulses, returning it to its original mission, which was to...well, that’s actually not entirely clear.

“I take that legacy really seriously,” Stranahan tells me while talking about working for Breitbart, whose founder died in 2012, effectively leaving the site in the hands of Bannon, a slovenly, self-styled intellectual with a visceral feel for the kinds of stories that would animate the far right, the stories mainstream conservative publications like the National Review would never publish.

“It’s why I kept going back to Breitbart,” Stranahan says. (None of the several current Breitbart editors contacted for this story responded to a request for comment. Nor did Breitbart Chief Executive Larry Solov or the company’s spokesperson, Chad Wilkinson.)

These days, Stranahan hosts a radio show for the Sputnik news agency, the Kremlin-funded outlet that has been friendly to Trump. He also runs an online journalism school and The Populist, a news outlet. His sensibility remains edgy and outré, tending to be angry and suspicious. Those can be helpful qualities for a reporter, allowing Stranahan to spot big stories the mainstream media may have missed, most notably the Pigford farm loan scandal, which allowed some African-American farmers to collect $50,000 federal compensation payments after falsely claiming discrimination by the federal Farm Service Agency. But those same qualities could be ruinous if you’re trying to cozy up to the White House in hopes of getting first-rate access.

Stranahan is also adept at Periscope, the video-based social media platform owned by Twitter. After his latest departure from Breitbart in March, he posted a 23-minute video in which he called himself Breitbart’s “crying mom” and “stern dad,” saying the site was in need of “tough love.” Congressional Republicans were in the midst of their first, and unsuccessful, attempt to bring the American Health Care Act (AHCA) to a vote, in a push led by House Speaker Paul Ryan but supported by Trump. The bill, which would weaken President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act without abrogating it, was toxically unpopular with the American public, so Breitbart had deemed it Ryancare, thus implicitly absolving Trump of any responsibility.

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2:21 PM - 10 Jun 2017

Ramadan Rage 2017: The Complete List of Jihadist Attacks Around the World - Breitbart

Ramadan Rage 2017: The Complete List of Jihadist Attacks Around the World

breitbart.com

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Stranahan, himself a Trump supporter,would have none of it. “Donald Trump has been actively supporting this bill,” he said in the Periscope video, arguing that the responsibility for the AHCA ended with the president. Breitbart pretending otherwise would only mean disaster for Breitbart.

“You’re making yourself look bad to the outside world. You’re pandering to the worst elements of your readership, who will just go along in complete denial, in complete total denial, that Donald Trump might have actually made a mistake,” Stranahan said, his voice far closer to pain than bitterness.

“It’s a bad move,” he warned. “It’s bad move journalistically. It’s a bad move politically.”

Stranahan tells me what the site lacks most is responsible leadership. “You got people running things, in editorial positions, who are 30 years old,” he says. The reference is clearly to Marlow, the editor-in-chief.

Stranahan’s greater nemesis is Matt Boyle, the 29-year-old White House editor, with whom he reportedly clashed. A Bannon protégé who lacks his mentor’s dark intellectual pretensions, Boyle is reportedly disliked by some on the right, including former colleagues at The Daily Caller who are said to have widely mocked him behind his back. Boyle was recently the subject of a mostly unflattering profile in the *Washingtonian* in which a former editor, Jonathan Strong, happily went on the record to say that Boyle “has two modes: murder and blow job.”

Personal rivalries aside, Stranahan’s greater point is that access journalism is not real journalism, that playing publicist to the president ultimately does the president little good while squandering long-sought journalistic credibility. Nor can it be said that Breitbart News has capitalized on that access in the way it must have intended. In February, it landed a White House interview with Spicer, which was broadcast on Facebook Live. The reactions were brutal, withThe Washington Post, for example, calling it “the most awkward thing ever.”

It was a Trumpian predicament, a classic Rodney Dangerfield moment of respect maddeningly withheld at the moment when it was so plainly deserved.

Alt-Right Theater of the Grotesque

“They’ve had a lot of growing pains,” says Will Sommer, a writer for The Hillwho publishes a newsletter on conservative outlets, Right Richter. “It’s easier, if you’re a site like Breitbart, to be in the opposition," especially if your roster was stocked with iconoclasts like Stranahan and Bannon.

So what now?

Now, you have editor-at-large Joel Pollak explaining that when Trump pushed aside the prime minister of Montenegro during the recent NATO summit, he was merely asserting American supremacy. And you have reporter Daniel Flynn defending Montana politician Greg Gianforte, who’d assaulted a journalist, for “the good politics of body slams” Gianforte practiced in Bozeman.

It’s hard to say whether this is what Breitbart readers want or what Breitbart is most capable of giving its readers.

It may simply be that Breitbart was never equipped to become the sober, Wall Street Journal -like publication Marlow seemed to promise after helping to elect Trump. The site was started by Breitbart as “a streamlined news portal for information junkies seeking access to every single story produced by the major newswires,” as writer Greg Beato described it in a 2009 post for Gawker. Beato pointed to the not-so-secret formula for Breitbart’s success: aggregate wire stories in a way that would earn links from the Drudge Report, the traffic behemoth where Andrew Breitbart had once toiled with the site’s founder, Matt Drudge. Beyond any motivating ideology, the site has been sustained by Drudge-friendly links that consistently drive web traffic. That is as true today as it was eight years ago: SimilarWeb’s analysis shows that 53 percent of all outside referrals to Breitbart come from Drudge. That may seem like a high number, but it actually represents a precipitous drop of 28 percent since March.

After Breitbart’s unexpected death, Bannon sharpened the site, turning it into a high-volume theater of the grotesque, the “platform for the alt-right” that most Americans came to know during the presidential campaign. The hiring of figures like Yiannopoulos signaled a more combative stance on cultural issues; Gorka gave the site its strong anti-Muslim edge, while Hahn, a young University of Chicago graduate, came to so closely mirror her boss’s vituperative attacks on the Republican Party’s centrists that she came to be known as “Bannon’s Bannon.”

“Bannon built a far-right-wing media sledgehammer, an enforcer of orthodoxy that its fans praised for its swagger and that its critics labeled xenophobic or worse.” That was the colorful description offered by *The* *Washington Post* as Bannon moved from the Breitbart Embassy to the big white mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. The audience was—and remains—younger and more sophisticated than that of Fox News yet animated by the same resentments: the Clintons, Mexico, Muslims, Goldman Sachs, Lena Dunham.

Breitbart can’t pivot away from right-wing click-bait to sober, deeply reported news any more than Trump can pivot away from paranoid tweets, self-pitying broadsides against the media and weekends at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, at least, has daughter Ivanka to keep him in check, or so they say. With Bannon gone, it’s hard to see anyone at the Breitbart Embassy overseeing the kind of radical editorial overhaul that would make Breitbart more like the Journaland less like World Net Daily.

At the same time, the president it helped elect has an approval rating below 40 percent, making the daily job of selling his policies even more difficult. Breitbart remains an ally, though. If it has anxieties about Trump, it isn’t quite ready to share them just yet. That’s because while Drudge provides the traffic, Bannon provides the access, the interviews and “exclusives” that are the meat of Breitbart’s reporting. Anger the president, and the gates to the White House might close. That has made it difficult for Breitbart to honestly ascribe Trump’s shortcomings and failures to Trump himself.

“They’re failing to grapple with news of the day,” says The Hill ’s Sommer. “Eventually, your audience starts to get disillusioned.”

This is true not only of Breitbart but of an entire right-wing media ecosystem still largely unwilling to call out Trump on the plainly unrealistic promises he made. Sustained illusion thus becomes the best antidote to creeping disillusion. So in the Breitbart world, the jobs have all come back from China, while “the illegals” have all gone back to Mexico. The administrative state will be deconstructed, just as Bannon promised, until there are so few bureaucrats left in Washington they can share a single Uber out of town. NATO, NAFTA, NEA: They are all dead, or dying, cowering in the last dank dungeons of the “deep state.”

Stranahan isn’t optimistic about the long-term success of this approach for Breitbart. “I would not be surprised if their readership goes down again,” he says of the site he once loved but no longer recognizes."

==

==

mma

guess you either die an edgelord, or you live long enough to see yourself become the cuckservative. That’s the takeaway from the last six months at Breitbart.com, the right-wing website previously led by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. Breitbart became a conservative media juggernaut by riding the rising tide of the racist, misogynistic “alt-right” and Donald Trump’s bigoted presidential campaign. But amid a massive advertiser boycott and faltering website traffic, the site has been forced to backpedal -- at least somewhat -- from the reputation that was responsible for its popularity in the first place.

And that’s placed the website in an untenable position between its dwindling fringe-right audience and the advertisers it needs to survive.

Signs that Breitbart’s editors had become nervous with their public status as “alt-right” champions began appearing as far back as November, when one of the site’s most virulent commentators left, saying the site had become “more controlled.” But the pace of cosmetic change quickened after progressive activists began destroying the site’s business model by urging advertisers to abandon it.

The Washington Postoutlines four such changes: the removal of Breitbart staffers Milo Yiannopoulos and Katie McHugh, who departed amid media firestorms over their commentary; the elimination of the website’s regular spotlight on purported instances of “black crime”; and the delay of a planned expansion to France and Germany.

Putting aside the European expansion, which is less about addressing vulnerabilities than simply struggling to move forward, these efforts fall into two categories -- staffing and content. In each case, Breitbart’s interests in attracting traffic and retaining advertisers are at cross purposes, leaving the website vulnerable to its competitors.

Breitbart was happy to attract traffic from bigots with articles such as “Five Devastating Facts About Black-On-Black Crime” and “Black-On-Black Crime: Blame It On The System And Ignore The Evidence.” But this sort of content is racist on its face, and as Breitbart’s profile rose, being associated with naked bigotry became untenable for the site’s advertisers. Breitbart likely pulled the plug on this sort of content to assuage the advertisers, but at the cost of opening the site up to the critique that it had knelt at the altar of “political correctness.”

Likewise, when media attention settled on Yiannopoulos and McHugh, their histories of bigoted commentary made them radioactive to advertisers. But each had a strong individual fan base and close ties to the “alt-right” network because of that very virulence, which had previously made them valuable assets to Breitbart by building the website’s audience.

As the site has sought to downplay its relationship with the “alt-right” and the fringe, commentators from those movements saw weakness and began attacking Breitbart for turning its back on its fans and supposedly becoming mainstream. In recent months, this far-right alternative media echo chamber has gained an increasingly large audience by presenting its adherents as completely dedicated to President Donald Trump and as savage foes of “political correctness” and “SJWs” -- in other words, by trying to out-Breitbart Breitbart.

This dynamic came to a head on Monday when Breitbart fired McHugh after she responded to the London Bridge terror attack by tweeting that "there would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn't live there” and attacked a critic’s perceived ethnicity. The far-right immediately rallied around McHugh and lashed out at her former employer, with leading fringe figures declaring that the website had given in to “political correctness,” castigating the site for supposedly seeking “to try to pivot to the mainstream,” and declaring that “Breitbart is over.”

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Follow

[Mike Cernovich :{

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}:@Cernovich](https://twitter.com/Cernovich)

Breitbart fired a journalist to appease fake news media. Here's how to respond! :{https://www.:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important"):}:wesearchr.com/bounties/suppo:{rt-katie-mchugh-fired-from-breitbart-for-telling-the-tr :(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important"):}:…

10:21 AM - 5 Jun 2017

Support Katie McHugh: Fired From Breitbart For Telling The Truth

Katie needs your help, America.

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None of this is to say that Breitbart has suddenly become a beacon of moderation. Yiannopoulos spent years promoting bigotry with the site’s full approval before he apparently crossed the line. McHugh didn’t suddenly start tweeting racist things over the weekend -- she first drew attention for this behavior in September 2015. Asked about her racist tweets in March 2016, current Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow replied, “We’re considering giving Katie a weekly column.”

And while “black crime” reporting seems to have died away, Breitbart still regularly publishes the same type of anti-Muslim commentary that got McHugh fired, and continues to employ white nationalist reporterswith long records of racism who have yet to experience a media flashpoint.

If the site’s leaders were cleaning house, they would clean house. Instead, they’re taking steps to minimize advertiser blowback when public attention is focused on their staffers’ awful behavior.The day after McHugh was fired, Digiday reported that Breitbart had lost nearly 90 percent of its advertisers over the previous three months, along with seeing a steep decline in traffic.

Those simultaneous crises have put the website in a precarious position. If its editors can’t demonstrate a drastic change in behavior, there’s no chance their advertisers will return. But if they do try to become more mainstream, the site will come under fire from other members of the alternative media echo chamber who want to carve off some of Breitbart’s audience.

This dynamic has been a part of the right-wing media for years. There is constant pressure for commentators to push the envelope and become ever more extreme, accusing liberals of dire behavior to indulge the worst pathologies of their audience. During the Obama administration, right-wing media figures faced a series of decision points where they could either choose to enable the conservative movement's increasingly destructive behavior, or speak out and put their standing with that movement in jeopardy. Trump’s campaign, with all its bigotry and authoritarianism, held a mirror up to that system. Some of its members were horrified and decried what they had built, while others stood by the future president and attacked those “NeverTrumpers,” in part to steal their audiences.

Indeed, Breitbart itself used these tactics against Fox News during the 2016 election, building up its own massive audience in part by lashing out at the network for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. Fox responded to that pressure, and its commentators have largely avoided attacks from the right during the Trump administration by emerging as the president’s most devoted propagandists.

Now Breitbart is under the same pressure, and there’s nowhere for it to go without risking its financial security

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/06/07/breitbart-doomed/216818

==

Breitbart.com -- the fake news site known for propelling Donald Trump and Steve Bannon into power -- posts and promotes a large swath of climate-denying content on its widely-read site.

To date, 2,100 companies have stopped advertising on Breitbart, but one major online retailer has not -- Amazon.¹

Tell Amazon to stop funding hate and climate change denial propaganda!

Last week, when Trump backed out of the Paris climate agreement, Amazon made the statement: "Amazon continues to support the Paris climate agreement and action on climate change. We believe that robust clean energy and climate policies can support American competitiveness, innovation, and job growth." ^2

So why is Amazon still buying ads on Breitbart, which spreads the lie that climate change isn't real?

1. Fiegerman, S. (23 May 2017). "Amazon latest brand hit by protests over Breitbart ads." ABC 12 KSAT.com. 
2. Leswing K. (1 June 2017). "Apr." Business Insider. 
3. Cadwalladr, C. (26 February 2017). "Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media." The Guardian.

==

mostly ~ Planned parenthood, also rhee v devos

http://www.breitbart.com/author/dr-susan-berry/

sems oddly legit?

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/06/universities-say-federal-govt-not-necessary-for-paris-climate-agreement/

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839

...The extremist “alt-right” website has continued to cite ACPeds as a legitimate source of medical information, using the statement as “evidence” to oppose basic protections for LGBTQ youth. Since ACPeds released the baseless “child abuse” claim in March, Breitbart has parroted the lie as fact in 19 different articles. Here are the headlines:  

1. [Gay Group Promotes ‘Gender Ideology’ For Children](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#1.%20Gay%20Group%20Promotes%20‘Gender%20Ideology’%20For%20Children)
2. [Pope Francis: Gender Theory Part Of ‘Global War’ To Destroy Marriage](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#2.%20Pope%20Francis:%20Gender%20Theory%20Part%20Of%20‘Global%20War’%20To%20Destroy%20Marriage)
3. [Physicians Decry Pseudo-Science Of Transgenderism, ‘Absurd’ To Say Anyone Is Born Into ‘Wrong Body’](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#3.%20Physicians%20Decry%20Pseudo-Science%20of%20Transgenderism,%20‘Absurd’%20to%20Say%20Anyone%20is%20Born%20Into%20‘Wrong%20Body’)
4. LGBT Groups Blast Pope Francis Over Gender Comments
5. [Pastor: Iowa Is Claiming Authority Over Church’s Teaching Of Christian Sexuality](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#5.%20Pastor:%20Iowa%20Is%20Claiming%20Authority%20Over%20Church’s%20Teaching%20Of%20Christian%20Sexuality )
6. Criticism Of Transgender Agenda Will Get Virginia Students Expelled
7. [Washington State Schools Push ‘Gender Fluid,’ Transgender Ideas On K-12 Kids](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#7.%20Washington%20State%20Schools%20Push%20‘Gender%20Fluid,’%20Transgender%20Ideas%20on%20K-12%20Kids )
8. [Open Letter To Leaders: Gender Ideology ‘Putting Our Children At Risk’](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#8.%20Open%20Letter%20To%20Leaders:%20Gender%20Ideology%20‘Putting%20Our%20Children%20At%20Risk’ )
9. [Pro-Gay Group Warns ‘Significant Risks’ In Transgender Medical Treatments For Children](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#9.%20Pro-Gay%20Group%20Warns%20‘Significant%20Risks’%20In%20Transgender%20Medical%20Treatments%20For%20Children)
10. Vermont Schoolkids Resist Official Pressure For Transgender Favoritism
11. [Princeton Prof: Transgenderism Not Scientific, ‘Superstitious Belief’](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#11.%20Princeton%20Prof:%20Transgenderism%20Not%20Scientific,%20‘Superstitious%20Belief’ )
12. [Pro-Family Leaders Condemn Administration’s Imposition Of ‘Abusive’ Transgender Policy](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#11.%20Princeton%20Prof:%20Transgenderism%20Not%20Scientific,%20‘Superstitious%20Belief’ )
13. [Andrea Lafferty: Donald Trump And Others ‘Don’t Understand The Full Impact’ Of ‘Gender Identity’ Ideology](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#13.%20Andrea%20Lafferty:%20Donald%20Trump%20and%20Others%20‘Don’t%20Understand%20the%20Full%20Impact’%20of%20‘Gender%20Identity’%20Ideology)
14. [Pope Says No To Trans-Kids, Teach Young ‘To Accept Their Own Body As It Was Created’](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#14.%20Pope%20Says%20No%20to%20Trans-Kids,%20Teach%20Young%20‘to%20Accept%20Their%20Own%20Body%20as%20it%20Was%20Created’ )
15. [Planned Parenthood Ignores Doctors’ Warnings Of Transgender Dangers To Children](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#15.%20Planned%20Parenthood%20Ignores%20Doctors’%20Warnings%20of%20Transgender%20Dangers%20to%20Children)
16. How The Washington Post Gets The North Carolina Anti-Trans Law Wrong
17. North Carolina Passes Anti-Trans Bill, Corporate Bullies Circling
18. [College Of Pediatricians Calls Transgender Ideology ‘Child Abuse’](https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/16/19-times-breitbart-cited-discredited-hate-group-spread-harmful-lies-about-pediatric-medical-care/214839#18.%20College%20of%20Pediatricians%20Calls%20Transgender%20Ideology%20‘Child%20Abuse’ )
19. Pediatricians Call Gender Discordance Conditioning Child Abuse

Two Breitbart authors -- who are bylined as “Dr. Susan Berry” and “Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.” -- wrote 13 of those 19 articles (seven and six, respectively). It’s unclear whether their titles are particularly relevant to the subject matter. According to his Breitbart biography, Williams “is a Permanent Research Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame University,” and his personal website biography says that he earned a doctorate in theology in Rome. Berry has no biographical information on Breitbart, including no information to indicate what sort of doctor she is. An archived version of her columnist page from 2014 indicates that she has a doctorate in psychology, while a 2013 article in Darien News reports that a clinical psychologist Susan Berry works “primarily with gifted children and adults.”

1. Gay Group Promotes ‘Gender Ideology’ For Children

...

==

swamp thing:

Jon Perdue, a self-described guerrilla warfare expert and fellow at a little-known security think tank, wrote a book called “The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism.” He is also a onetime contributor to Breitbart.

Perdue was hired as a special assistant at the Treasury Department. The agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.Perdue was featured on CNBC’s reality series “Make Me a Millionaire Inventor” for his invention, the Packbow, which Perdue came up with while studying “collapsed societies, and what people who lived in those societies came up with to either defend themselves or to survive.” It’s a bow and arrow that doubles as a compass, tent pole, walking stick, spearfishing rig, and water purification tablet receptacle.

===

http://www.spin.com/2017/03/infowars-breitbart-fbi-russia-inquiry/

Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey confirmed in a congressional hearing that the Bureau is investigating alleged Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Now, McClatchy DC is reporting that the investigation includes an inquiry into Breitbart News and Alex Jones’s InfoWars, two outlets that worked hard to get Trump elected.

McClatchy’s report, which is sourced to two anonymous people “familiar with the inquiry,” alleges that investigators are interested in a network of apparently Kremlin-controlled social media botsthat published millions of links to articles from InfoWars and Breitbart, as well as known Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik News. The key question is whether anyone at the far-right American publications did anything to assist the Russian social media campaign.

The existence of a Russian botnet created to help elect Trump isn’t hard to believe at all–it fits neatly with the Kremlin’s strategy of using a government-funded “troll farm” to influence American internet discourse. And it’s also not surprising that such a network would select InfoWars and Breitbart as publications to amplify, as both unambiguously favored Trump in the election, as did the Russians.What’s harder to believe is that the campaign would have required active assistance or collaboration from the sites themselves. You don’t need a publisher’s consent to tweet out their stories, and conducting a Twitter search for any randomly selected internet article will frequently turn up tweets that look like they came from bots–usually operated for some less nefarious purpose than destabilizing a government. It seems more likely that the Russians correctly recognized InfoWars and Breitbart as essentially pro-Trump propaganda outlets, and co-opted their content for use as actual propaganda.

Jones denied the story to McClatchy reporters who reached him by calling into his show, telling them any allegations about InfoWars collusion with the Russian government are “a (expletive) lie.” But who knows? Either way, there’s a delightful irony in seeing Jones and InfoWars–longtime paranoiacs about covert state operations and shadowy global conspiracies–used as pawns in an actual international government information war, whether wittingly or not.

==

==

The New York Observer

CONNECTION: OWNED BY JARED KUSHNER, TRUMP’S SON-IN-LAW

The Observeris a news site owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Under Kushner’s leadership the Observer has been an unabashed pro-Trump megaphone. The paper was one of only three national papers to endorse him during the primary election. The outlet’s close relationship with Trump forced their national political reporter, Ross Barkan, to resign because he felt “a line had been crossed” with both the endorsement and their editor-in-chief’s secret involvement with the campaign.

Since Trump’s victory, the Observerhas moved toward becoming a propaganda outlet for the incoming administration. On December 2, the Observer published an op-ed from University of Texas-Austin adjunct professor Austin Bay calling for the FBI to conduct a “detailed investigation” into the “political thuggery” of anti-Trump protests after the election.

The Observeralso recently argued for the release of Julian Assange. Assange’s organization, WikiLeaks, released -- with the probable assistance of the Russian government -- wave after wave of mundane emails stolen from Democratic politicians and operatives, which were endlessly spun by right-wing media into increasingly bizarre, and dangerous misinformation.

Right Side Broadcasting Network

CONNECTION: HELPED TRUMP WITH PRE- AND POST-DEBATE SPIN; CEO SAID “TRUMP BUILT RSBN”

Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) is a relatively new “news” network that announced on December 6 that it would “become a 24-hour network very soon” and it would be “in the White House” and “at the press briefings” during the Trump presidency. According to Foreign Policy magazine, there are several steps a news outlet must go through to get White House press credentials, but the president can evade those by simply inviting the outlet to attend and allowing them to ask friendly questions, as President George W. Bush allowed a conservative reporter to do during his administration.

RSBN developed such a close relationship with Trump during the primary and general elections that The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers has described them as “the unofficial version of Trump TV” since last summer. Borchers reported that the Trump campaign had “teamed up with Right Side to produce pre- and post-debate analysis shows that streamed on Trump’s Facebook Page.” Right Side Broadcasting CEO Joe Seales hosted an “ask me anything” session on Reddit in which he told pro-Trump redditors that “Trump built RSBN” and they should “continue to discredit” mainstream media and instead tune into “media outlets like us and the other conservative sources like Breitbart.”

The National Enquirer

CONNECTION: OWNED BY DAVID PECKER, TRUMP’S LONG-TIME FRIEND

The National Enquirer is owned by David Pecker, Trump’s close friend, and was, along with his son-in-law’s paper and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, the only other national outlet to endorse Trump. New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman reported that while Trump’s “scandal-filled personal life would be yuge! for the supermarket tabloid,” he has been “exclusively celebrated in the Enquirer’s pages.” Trump himself has even written op-eds exclusively for the Enquirer, where he explained “I am the only one who can make America great again!”

The National Enquirer also undertook a strange and savage campaign against Trump’s electoral opponents. With thin sourcing, often only from noted liar/Trump supporter Roger Stone, the Enquirer alleged that Jeb Bush celebrated his father’s presidential win with a cocaine binge, that Hillary and Chelsea Clinton “covered up Bill’s cocaine rehab,” and that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had affairs with multiple women. Their most outrageous pro-Trump lie was that Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Enquirer made this claim based on one blurry photograph, but that did not stop Trump from touring cable news shows to hype the absurd smear.

Breitbart News

CONNECTION: OPERATED BY TRUMP’S CHIEF STRATEGIST, STEVE BANNON, WHO DESCRIBED THE SITE AS THE “PLATFORM FOR THE ALT-RIGHT,” WHICH INCLUDES WHITE SUPREMACY

Breitbart.com was founded by Andrew Breitbart along with Trump’s current chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who in 2014 described Breitbart as the “platform for the alt-right,” a term commonly used to describe people who embrace white nationalism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. Breitbart News is infamous for headlines like “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” “Young Muslims In The West Are A Ticking Time Bomb,” and “After The Pulse Club Massacre, It’s Time For Gays To Come Home To The Republican Party.” Breitbart even undertook campaigns of online harassment directed at Facebook’s trending news team for their perceived “bias;” these campaigns were directed by Milo Yiannopoulos, who was permanently banned from Twitter for leading a harassment campaign against Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.

During the 2016 election, reporters and even former Breitbart employees repeatedly criticized the site for attempting a “rebranding of white supremacy … through Trump.” Former Breitbart writer Ben Shapiro accused the site of embracing “a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism,” and his former colleague Kurt Bardella similarly labeled Bannon a “dangerous” and “combative” “pathological liar.” Bardella resigned from Breitbart on March 11 when Trump’s then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, grabbed Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields at a Trump event. Rather than defending their Fields, a Breitbart employee hurriedly worked to “make sure that [the incident] doesn’t turn into a big story.”

Infowars And The Alex Jones Show

CONNECTION: TOP TRUMP ADVISER ROGER STONE IS A FREQUENT JONES/INFOWARS COLLABORATOR AND TRUMP APPEARED ON JONES’ PROGRAM AND PRAISED HIM

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is the host of The Alex Jones Show and heads Infowars, which distributes right-wing content through its website and social platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Jones and his website have pushed false stories and fringe conspiracy theories, including that the government perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and the tragedies at Columbine, Oklahoma City, Sandy Hook, and the Boston Marathon, among others.

Jones and Infowars were a leading source of false stories and conspiracy theories about Clinton in 2016. They pushed false claims about Clinton’s health, the “pizzagate” conspiracy, and supposed pro-Clinton voting fraud, among many others. Several of these stories were subsequently highlighted by Trump on the campaign trail.

Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone serves as the president-elect’s messenger to Jones’ audience. Stone has been one of Jones’ most frequent guests, helped organize a pro-Trump event with Jones, and is also an Infowars guest host. Trump mainstreamed Jones’ program by appearing on it in December 2015 and telling him: "Your reputation's amazing. I will not let you down." Trump has repeatedly echoed Jones’ rhetoric and heand his campaign tweeted links to Infowars.com.

Trump suggested his relationship with Jones will continue: Jones said the president-elect called him after the election to thank his audience and promise he would return to the program. And Stone said Jones will be a “valuable asset” for “President Trump’s legislative program.”

http://mediamatters.org/research/2017/01/02/media-outlets-poised-become-trump-s-personal-propaganda-machine/214773

==

failure to support

http://wwwwww.alternet.org/human-rights/debunking-latest-breitbart-promoted-right-wing-racist-paranoid-buzzword

The false claim that there is a genocide against white people is a key rallying cry used by organized white supremacists to justify racist violence targeting people of color, Muslims and Jews. With the rise of Donald Trump, who promptly appointed white nationalist Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, those forces will soon have a direct line to the White House.

George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of international politics and decolonization at Philadelphia-based Drexel University, recently found himself at the center of a smear campaign for mocking the concept of white genocide. On December 24, Ciccariello-Maher posted a tweet stating, "all I want for Christmas is white genocide." He explained the tweet in a later statement: “For those who haven't bothered to do their research, ‘white genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I'm glad to have mocked it.”

Ciccariello-Maher’s tweet and other social media commentary was soon reported by the white nationalist publication Breitbart, which ran an article by Warner Todd Huston referring to the scholar’s Twitter feed as “hateful” and “obnoxious.” The comments section of the article included at least one death threat against Ciccariello-Maher, as well as hateful messages targeting LGBTQ people and African Americans. The story quickly spread to Reddit and 4chan, and before long George Ciccariello-Maher had become became the target of a coordinated campaign to contact his employer, Drexel University. Ciccariello-Maher said he awoke Christmas morning to death threats targeting him and his family.

But Drexel, instead of defending Ciccariello-Maher, appeared to be swayed by the pressure it received and publicly condemned his social media remarks as “utterly reprehensible” and “deeply disturbing.” The university’s statement did not include any mention of the white supremacist origins of the term Ciccariello-Maher was mocking—an omission that extended to numerous press outlets which covered the story.

Scholars of fascism and the racist right told AlterNet such omission is dangerous in the era of Trump, with implications far beyond Ciccariello-Maher. “This phrase and its broad dissemination these days is helping shape what Trumpism is politically and also, by its very framing, is something that can authorize any kind of violence against people of color,” Joseph Lowndes, an associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon in Eugene, told AlterNet. “We should mock it, expose it and delegitimize it.”

Term with a disgraceful history

“Fears of the decline of the so-called white race have been around for a long time, with different iterations,” Lowndes said. “In the American context, it goes back to fears of slave revolts. You can see it in Thomas Jefferson’s notes, when he describes slavery as holding a ‘wolf by the ears.’ He claimed that once you let the wolf go, it will turn on you and devour you.”

Such racist concepts were used as salvo against movements to abolish slavery. "In the 19th century, before the Civil War, you can look at how people who were anti-abolition were warning everyone about an impending genocide if slaves were liberated,” said Alexander Reid Ross, who teaches in the geography department at Portland State University and is the author of the forthcoming book, Against the Fascist Creep.

In undated remarks published in a book of his writings and speeches, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison expressed his outrage at such baseless fear-mongering:...

==

==

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/21/breitbart-admits-role-trump-enforcer-showing-why-it-should-be-denied-congressional-press-credentials/214883

In a Politico article detailing how President-elect Donald Trump’s “horde of enforcers” -- Breitbart.com listed prominently among them -- are scaring Republican lawmakers away from criticizing him, a Breitbart editor said Republicans are right to fear the right-wing website, which was previously run by Trump senior counselor Stephen Bannon. This admission from Breitbart that the outlet plans to support Trump, rather than objectively cover his incoming administration, further demonstrates that the website is not editorially independent enough to warrant permanent Capitol Hill press credentials.

Breitbart applied for permanent Capitol Hill press credentials in November. Media Matters has objected to the request, urging members of the Standing Committee of the Senate Press Gallery in an open letter to reject the request based on Breitbart’s disqualifying inability to demonstrate editorial independence from the Trump team as required by the committee's rules. Breitbart fails this standard in several ways, as several former members of the committee have acknowledged. In a December 21 Politico report headlined “Trump posse browbeats Hill Republicans,” Breitbart further demonstrates why the site must be disqualified from obtaining a permanent press pass by admitting that it will go after Trump’s Republican critics.

From the Politico article (emphasis added):

In early December,Rep. Bill Flores made what seemed like an obvious observation to a roomful of conservatives at a conference in Washington. Some of Donald Trump’s proposals, the Texas Republican cautioned, “are not going to line up very well with our conservative policies," though he quickly added that there was plenty the incoming president and GOP Congress could accomplish together. Little did Flores realize the hell that would soon rain down from Trump's throng of enforcers.

Breitbart seized on Flores' remarks a few days later, calling them proof that House Republicans planned to “isolate and block President Donald Trump’s populist campaign promises.”

[...]

It’s little wonder that Capitol Hill Republicans have papered over their not-insignificant policy differences with Trump, shying away from any statement about the president-elect that might possibly be construed as critical. They’re terrified of arousing the ire of their tempestuous new leader — or being labeled a turncoat by his army of followers.

It's a novel form of party message discipline that stems from Trump but doesn't necessarily require the president-elect to speak or tweet himself. Plenty of others are willing to do it for him. Since the election, numerous congressional Republicans have refused to publicly weigh in on any Trump proposal at odds with Republican orthodoxy, from his border wall to his massive infrastructure package. The most common reason, stated repeatedly but always privately: They're afraid of being attacked by Breitbart or other big-name Trump supporters. "Nobody wants to go first," said Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), who received nasty phone calls, letters and tweets after he penned an August op-ed in The New York Times, calling on Trump to release his tax returns. "People are naturally reticent to be the first out of the block for fear of Sean Hannity, for fear of Breitbart, for fear of local folks."

An editor at Breitbart, formerly run by senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon, said that fear is well-founded.

“If any politician in either party veers from what the voters clearly voted for in a landslide election … we stand at the ready to call them out on it and hold them accountable,” the person said.

==

http://www.ecowatch.com/steve-bannon-trump-2094347523.html

President-elect Trump's choice of Steve Bannon as his top aide signals that white supremacists will be represented at the highest levels in Trump's White House," a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said about the former Goldman Sachs investment banker.

Even climate-denier Glenn Beck warned that Bannon "is a guy who wants to tear this system down and replace it with a new system. He is a frightening … no, he is a terrifying man. A terrifying man."

While Bannon hasn't specifically talked about his climate plans, he bragged to Mother Jones in July that his site had become "the platform for the alt-right." Well, this platform harbors a clear disgust for environmentalists and environmental policy.

Let's take a look at some of the anti-climate stories and sample quotes published by Breitbart writers.

1. "Trump's War on the Green Blob Will Make (Almost) All of Us Richer, Happier, and Freer" by James Delingpole

• Sample quote: "Once other countries see the effects of Trump's anti-renewables, pro-fossil-fuel revolution, they'll find it harder to justify to their electorates the massive costs of the lunatic green energy policy by which the West has been held to ransom these last few decades."

Trump—who believes climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese and literally said, "The wind kills all your birds" and solar is "not working so good"—has made no bones about his support of fossil fuels and vows to undo "all job-destroying Obama executive actions" such as the Clean Power Plan....

bannon trump

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/5-manufactured-news-scandals-produced-and-promoted-breitbart-news-and-new-trump

5 scams

Since its inception, the aim of Breitbart News has been to taint liberals and the left with the stench of scandal—by any means necessary. Most often, the favored means involves manufacturing scandal, sometimes through innuendo and misconstruance, and most effectively through the posting of misleadingly edited video.

Now Breitbart News CEO Stephen K. Bannon brings those same fact-free, mud-slinging values to yet another reboot of Donald J. Trump’s flagging presidential campaign. On Wednesday, Trump named Bannon as his new campaign chief, replacing Paul Manafort, who resigned today under a cloud of actual scandal concerning his consulting work for the deposed Ukrainian former president Victor Yanukovych, widely viewed as a tool of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Here we offer a brief overview of five scandals manufactured by Breitbart News, both under Bannon’s leadership, and that of Andrew Breitbart.

Louisiana flooding and Obama - Nowhere in the Breitbart News coverage of the federal response to the ongoing flooding disaster in Louisiana will you see a quote from Gov. John Bel Edwards suggesting that now would not be a good time for President Barack Obama to visit his state because of the logistical nightmare it would impose on first responders. Instead, what you’ll find is invective against the president for being on vacation, and a characterization of his absence from the scene as something negligent. Yet, here’s what Edwards has had to say about it, according to the Times-Picayune:

Edwards said a presidential visit could cause additional problems for flood recovery efforts. Obama's motorcade requires many roadways to be shutdown -- and many local streets are still closed because of the flooding. Also, a presidential visit puts a strain on law enforcement. First responders shouldn't be pulled away to deal with Obama, when they are needed for search and rescue missions still, Edwards said.

The Breitbart slam on Obama was published alongside a report that Donald Trump and running-mate Mike Pence headed today to Louisiana. Not that they’d want to exploit the disaster for political purposes, or anything.

Benghazi!— Breitbart CEO Bannon is part of a cabal that demanded the Republican Congress pursue endless investigations of the State Department response to the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. If you’re wondering why Congress has so far spent $6.7 million investigating the Benghazi tragedy, it’s partly over the fear that Breitbart News will marshal its resources to push members of the relevant congressional committees out of office if they don’t come up with a viable scandal to hang around the neck of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who served as secretary of state when the incident happened. (Breitbart News is credited with havingcreated the pressure the forced the resignation of former House Speaker John Boehner.)

In 2013, Mother Jones exposed the agenda of Groundswell, a weekly planning meeting convened by the right-wing group, Judicial Watch. Bannon’s name was on the guest list for a May 8, 2013, meeting, and Breitbart News reporter Matthew Boyle and the late editor Mike Flynn were active on its listserv and participants in the messaging strategies on a range of issues at the time of the Mother Jones report. Others in the group, according to Mother Jones:

One of the influential conservatives guiding the group is Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, a columnist for the Daily Caller and a tea party consultant and lobbyist. Other Groundswell members include John Bolton, the former UN ambassador; Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy; Ken Blackwell and Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council; Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch; Gayle Trotter, a fellow at the Independent Women's Forum; Catherine Engelbrecht and Anita MonCrief of True the Vote; Allen West, the former GOP House member; Sue Myrick, also a former House GOPer; Diana Banister of the influential Shirley and Banister PR firm; and Max Pappas, a top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

In one email message to the group, Boyle assures Groundswell members:

“I’m saying we can get pieces out fast on Breitbart. Whenever you have an idea, email or call me with a pitch and I'll do my best to get the story out there. Keep us on offense, them on defense. Even if the idea isn't perfect, I can help massage it to get there.”

Audio of one of the group’s meetings obtained by Karoli Kuns of Crooks and Liars reveals Boykin of the Family Research Council pushing the false Benghazi narrative of a State Department cover-up, suggesting that the message be conveyed to Boehner and Rep. Darryll Issa (R-Calif.), then chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, that nothing short of the appointment of a special committee on the Benghazi matter would do; conspiracy theorist, Islamophobe and birther Frank Gaffney is heard saying that in a meeting the previous night, he impressed upon the speaker and the committee chair that “there’s a lot of restiveness on the part of folks like us, and some of their donors as a matter of fact…” In May 2014, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) was appointed to lead the newly formed Select Committee on Benghazi.

Breitbart News stepped up to spin every small revelation into a false narrative of a gargantuan scandal.

False “sting” on Planned Parenthood - Breitbart News was the big player in disseminating the demonstrably false narrative that Planned Parenthood sells the parts of aborted fetuses for profit. No matter that it’s not true: The story, however many times it’s been debunked, has been used as a bludgeon in Congress and state legislatures across the nation as a reason to withhold government funding of Planned Parenthood’s health-care services to poor and working-class women.

In a series of videos concocted by Daniel Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress, interviews with Planned Parenthood employees are misleadingly edited to confirm to the false narrative. (The true story is that if a woman having an abortion at a Planned Parenthood opts to donate the fetal remains for medical and scientific research, Planned Parenthood facilitates the transfer of the remains, sometimes charging the recipient to cover the costs for the preparation and transportation of the aborted fetus.)

In March of this year, Florida was the 12th state to defund Planned Parenthood’s health care, and Republicans in Congress attempted to withhold federal funds in a bill that was vetoed by President Obama. Parts of the Florida law were struck down on Thursday by a federal judge, but in other states, similar laws remain in effect.

While in Florida, the defunding legislation has been rolled back by a  Federal court, the false narrative has stuck. In November of 2015, gunman Robert Lewis Dear, Jr., shotand killed three people, and wounded nine, using the phrase “no more baby parts” to explain his actions to police.

The smearing of Shirley Sherrod - Bannon may have been a talented maker of propaganda before he met Andrew Breitbart, who honed his skills at the Drudge Report, but under the latter’s tutelage, he learned the art of the smear. According to Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek, Bannon “marveled at Breitbart’s visceral feel for the news cycle and his ability to shape coverage through the Drudge Report, which is avidly followed by TV producers and news editors.”

Yet one of Breitbart’s most famous smear campaigns actually got him in trouble with the right—once it splashed back all over the movement.

In July 2010, Breitbart’s BigGovernment site posted an explosive video of Shirley Sherrod, a black official of Obama’s Department of Agriculture appearing to say, in a speech to the NAACP, that that she would not provide help to a white farmer who was on the verge of losing his farm. Breitbart’s posting of the video appeared to be in retribution for a July 16 vote taken at the annual meeting of the NAACP in which delegates unanimously condemned racist elements in the Tea Party. The administration promptly fired her, and Ben Jealous, who then led the venerable civil rights organization called Sherrod’s remarks “appalling,” and the right exploded in celebration. It was to be short-lived.

The NAACP searched its video archives and unearthed the full video of the speech, which showed Sherrod making exactly the opposite point of that depicted in the highly edited version of the speech posted on Breitbart. In fact she was saying that, in setting aside any race-based judgment she might have made about the farmer, Roger Spooner, she learned that the real enemy was poverty.

Spooner stepped intothe media limelight to defend Sherrod. “"If it hadn't been for her, we would've never known who to see or what to do", he told CNN. "She led us right to our success."

Still, the life of Shirley Sherrod—whose father was shot to death by a white farmer in a dispute over livestock—was forever changed. President Obama called her to not quite apologize, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Visack offered her another position, which she declined. She brought a law suit against Breitbart News, which was settled in October 2015 (terms undisclosed).

Fox News, which heavily promoted Breitbart’s false Sherrod narrative, was for a time banned from appearing on the channel’s shows for a time.

The destruction of ACORN - In 2009, Breitbart protégé James O’Keefe and sidekick Hannah Giles set out to conduct a “sting” on ACORN, the community organizing group that, in addition to its advocacy work on housing for low-income people, conducted a get-out-the-vote operation among the nation’s poor (who, when they vote, tend to vote for Democrats). So the two posed as pimps, or pimp-and-sex-worker, visiting several ACORN offices to ask for assistance with smuggling underage undocumented immigrants into the U.S. for sex work. One wore a hidden camera.

After their field work was done, they created a series of deceptively-edited videos that appeared to show ACORN employees to be willingly complicit in the scheme. Later it was shown that many simply played along in the moment, not knowing quite what to do. Juan Carlos Vera, an ACORN employee in San Bernardino, lost his job when Fox News aired a video posted on Breitbart News that showed him interacting with O’Keefe and Giles. In fact, Vera said he played along in order to collect as much information from the pair as possible, and thencalled the police.

In order to make ACORN employees—mostly people of color—look as stupid as possible, O’Keefe filmed set-up shots of himself and Giles dressed as cartoon versions of pimp and sex-worker—loud suit and outrageous glasses for him; minimal clothing on her—leaving the impression that they dressed that way while wielding the hidden camera. In fact, they arrived in ACORN offices dressed like staffers on Capitol Hill.

As a result of the O’Keefe videos, congressional hearings were held, and Congress voted to defund ACORN, which had received around $2.5 million a year in federal funds for the community services it provided. In 2010, on the verge of bankruptcy, the group disbanded.

An investigation by the Congressional Research Service found that ACORN had appropriately managed funds it received from the government, and criminal investigations yielded no evidence of criminal activity by the organization.

Juan Carlos Vera won a $100,000 settlement and a weak apology from James O’Keefe.

Snookering National Public Radio - In 2011, NPR Senior Director of Institutional Development Betsy Liley thought she was talking with a potential donor to the non-profit radio network. The man called himself Ibrahim Kasaam, and said he represented an organization called the Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC); the organization wanted to make a $5 million anonymous donation to NPR, he said. The man’s real name isSimon Templar,and the non-profit he worked for is James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. Liley was unaware that she was being audiotaped.

Once that sound file was posted to Breitbart.com, all hell broke loose. According to CNN’s account:

“It sounded like you were saying that NPR would be able to shield us from a government audit. Is that correct?" the man asks.

NPR Senior Director of Institutional Development Betsy Liley responds: "I think that is the case, especially if you were anonymous, and I can inquire about that.”

However, that wasn’t everything that Liley said, though you wouldn’t know it from the ensuing uproar. Again, from CNN:

But in the recording, Liley also advises the man that NPR executives would investigate the giver before accepting any large donation, examining tax records, looking it up on a foundation database and checking out other organizations that have received donations from the giver.

Liley also raises the possibility of NPR turning down substantial gifts and stresses the "firewall" between the revenue-generating part of NPR and its news operation.

Two days before Liley's quotes were posted,NPR CEO Vivian Schiller had resigned when Breitbart posted video from the a meeting with Templar in his MEAC guise, in which she referred to the Tea Party as “racist” and “scary.”

O’Keefe later explained his motivation for the NPR video as retribution for the firing of news analyst Juan Williams for having made comments during a Fox News appearance that were regarded as anti-Muslim.

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's senior Washington editor.

==

[Bannon’s Bulldogs,

at the “Breitbart Embassy”: Alex Swoyer,

Jarrett Stepman,

Julia Hahn. Back row: Bigz Aloysious Bigirwa,

Jordan Schachtel,

Larry Solov,

Alex Marlow,

Bannon,

Matthew Boyle,

Edwin Mora.]

==

==

boyle

freelance till dalily caller

--

Katie McHugh

Homepage Editor at Breitbart News Network

manage the homepage for the Breitbart News Network. My work has been featured on The Drudge Report, Fox News, Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, The College Fix, Daily Mail Online and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

Experience

Homepage Editor

Breitbart News Network

April 2014 – Present (2 years 5 months)

Online nightly manager of news coverage, helping to drive the national conversation. I also contribute original reporting and commentary.

The Daily Caller

Editor

The Daily Caller

June 2013 – April 2014 (11 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area

Collegiate Network fellowworking as an associate editor at Tucker Carlson's 24 hour news site. I copyedited and published breaking news, and contributed original reporting.

National Review

Reporting Intern

National Review

June 2012 – August 2012 (3 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area

I contribute original reporting from Capitol Hill and the D.C. metro area for National Review online, as well as contributing to the homepage, creating video content, and moderating comments.

Daily Caller

Online editor intern

Daily Caller

May 2011 – August 2011 (4 months)

I assist an online editor by writing original news stories, condensing current stories, and aggregating news stories from other sites. I also answer phones and take messages, transcribe recorded interviews for reporters, and run errands for the office.

Institute for Humane Studies

Seminar participant

Institute for Humane Studies

2011 – 2011 (less than a year)

Honors & Awards

Daily Caller’s 2013 Story of The Year Award

Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel

December 2013

An annual award given to a reporter whose story topped the year's trafficcharts.

Lyn Nofziger Fellow

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute

June 2013

ISI's Student in the Spotlight

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute

http://home.isi.org/spotlight/mchugh

Skills...

Volunteer Experience & Causes

Causes Katie cares about:

Children

Education

Environment

Science and Technology

Katie McHugh: “Black Slaves Built The Country As Much As Cows Built McDonalds”

Written by Valentine Stevenson September 18th 2015

It must be very liberating to be a conservative right now. With fifteen GOP candidates still vying for a job that will never be hired for – now that Rick Perry finally looks like the smart one by saying “Laters, losers” – crazy talk wins the hearts and minds of the conservative base and everyone is doing it.

After Andrew Breitbart checked out at age 43 from heart failure and not an Obama-space-based death ray – leaving his widow to tidy up some of his messier affairs – the website that bears his name has traveled further downriver into the fever swamps of nativism, misogyny, barely restrained racism and incompetence.

This is due in no small part by actively seeking out people deemed too horrible to work for Tucker Carlson’s White Privilege Frat House and National Natty Light Reserve. One of the lesser known hires from the DC is Katie McHugh who was brought over to “aggressively and insightfully tell the stories that are shaping our political and cultural experience,” according to Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.

Or, as McHugh put it: “I’m very proud to join the Breitbart News Network to reshape the American political conversation by airing out all the facts.” And, having been promoted to front page editor after slightly more than a year, “reshaping” the conversation is exactly what she is doing by explaining history to America – one tweet at a time.

Recently, while the GOP debaters raged against the dying of the right, McHugh shared some amazing insights about immigrants in America, Muslims, slaves, Native-Americans, and Hispanics on Twitter in her own whimsical way.

Here are several examples: “The only way to strike a balance between vigilance, discrimination, (& terror) is to end Muslim immigration,” “Dear illegal aliens, Our country, lands, heritage & taxpayer $ don’t belong to you. Sincerely, America.” “Indian tribes never bothered to build any kind of civilization. They killed each other and chased bison. Yawn” “British settlers and their descendants built civilization. Indians never bothered to build more than a few teepees.” “Third Wolders whining to me that Americans “stole” America. No, you could never build it yet you expect it to serve you. Go to hell,” “British settlers built the USA. ‘Slaves’ built the country much as ‘cows’ build McDonalds. Amateur…” and many more similar...

==

AWR Hawkins

Contributor at Breitbart.com

Larry Solov

Alex Marlow

Editor-in-Chief at Breitbart News Network

Joel Pollak

Senior Editor-at-Large, Editor of Breitbart California, Associate In-House Counsel at Breitbart.com

Jeff Poor

Editor at Breitbart.tv

Lauren Veneziani

Advertising Sales Executive & Film Critic at Breitbart News Network

Ezra Dulis

Deputy Managing Editor at Breitbart.com

Michael Leahy

Contributor at Breitbart News

Jennifer Lynn Lawrence

Political and National Security Reporter for Breitbart

==

=

POWER PLAY

11.22.15 10:01 PM ET

2016’s Angry Populist Enforcer

Breitbart.com’s Washington political editor is an anti-establishment zealot, whose support even The Donald craves. How did Matthew Boyle gain such power in the presidential race?

Matthew Boyle—the recently named Washington political editor ofBreitbart.com, the right-wing populist news site founded by the late controversialist Andrew Breitbart—will never be mistaken for a slick Beltway insider.

Yet in just a few short years, the 28-year-old Boyle—pudgy, rumpled, and baby-faced, possessed of a manic energy fueled by Marlboro Lights and Mountain Dew—has leveraged his Stakhanovite zeal and pugnacious reporting style, described by operatives and competitors alike as bullying and relentless if occasionally misguided, to become a gravitational force in the Republican cosmos.

“You’ve got a political elite, but also a financial elite and a cultural elite out in Hollywood, and you have to be aggressive with these people to get answers out of them,” he tells me over lunch at Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill, just the sort of expense-account Washington watering hole where Boyle is an alien presence.

Breitbart News’s Machiavellian publicist, former GOP congressional aide Kurt Bardella, has chosen the upscale venue for our meeting.

“It’s not like it’s fun for me,” Boyle continues concerning his combative M.O. “I’d much rather not have to do this. But I feel like to get information from people who don’t give it out, you have to be a little bit rough-and-tumble with them.”

He pauses to give free rein to a hacking cough—a symptom, no doubt, of endless days on the road chasing presidential candidates, sleep-deprived nights filing 30 stories a week (a Brobdingnagian output barely reduced by his new management responsibilities), and his customary pack a day.

Along with ever-present bottles of his favorite sugary, caffeine-infused soft drink, plus a river of hot coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, it adds up to a perfect storm of unhealthy living.

“I’m highly caffeinated at all times,” Boyle declares.

Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon—tagged as “the most dangerous political operative in America” by Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green—has had his eye on the hyperkinetic Boyle since 2011, when the American University journalism school dropout joined the staff of The Daily Caller and began posting rabble-rousing stories on the conservative website.

Notoriously, Boyle’s methodical campaign to ask hundreds of GOP lawmakers, one by one, if they favored the immediate resignation of then-Attorney General Eric Holder over the “Fast and Furious” scandal, and then publish a running tally of Holder’s critics, prompted a public paroxysm of indignation by Holder in November 2011.

“You guys need to—you need to stop this,” he sputtered at Boyle’s Daily Caller colleague Neil Munro, now a fellow editor at Breitbart, when Munro approached Holder after a press conference. “It’s not an organic thing that’s just happening,” the attorney general complained. “You guys are behind it.”

Bannon believed that Boyle fit like a velvet glove over an iron fist into Breitbart’s renegade, anti-establishment ethos that appeals to an estimated 18 million readers who comprise a fired-up activist base in Republican presidential primary politics.

Thus Boyle enjoys direct access to many of the White House wannabes attempting to woo that base; before Rick Perry ended his anemic campaign, Boyle watched the former Texas governor hem a pair of trousers with a needle and thread in his hotel room.

More recently he took a ride in a small helicopter with Dr. Ben Carson, and was planning to spend six days in Haiti watching ophthalmologist Rand Paul perform cataract surgeries until the Kentucky senator’s poll numbers began to erode and Boyle decided he couldn’t spare the time.

Boyle says he has the personal cellphone number of the Republican frontrunner he refers to privately, in a tone of respect if not reverence, as “Mr. Trump.”

Donald Trump, for his part, has returned the favor by granting an endless stream of “exclusives” to Boyle—notably Trump’s vicious personal attack on BuzzFeed political reporter McKay Coppins, a former writer for The Daily Beast when it was merged with Newsweek, for Coppins’s unflattering profile of the reality television star/real estate mogul.

Boyle’s February 2014 hatchet job so faithfully took Trump’s side of the controversy that the press criticism site Mediaite reported the flap under the headline: “Breitbart Now Donald Trump’s PR Firm.”

More recently, Coppins wrote a BuzzFeed story quoting anonymous Breitbart employees to the effect that Trump provides financial support to his favorite news site in return for positive coverage—a charge vehemently denied by Bannon, who says the frontrunner, unlike other GOP candidates, hasn’t even bought advertising space.

“There’s a revolt going on in this country, and the old paradigm—controlled and financed by a collection from the Party of Davos—is cratering,” says Bannon, a wealthy former Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood producer who, by a strange circumstance, owns a lucrative stake in Seinfeld.

“There’s a tsunami of rage from populist conservatives,” he says. Breitbart News—and Boyle—seek to harness it.

***

In early 2012, after Andrew Breitbart’s untimely death of a heart attack at age 43, Bannon assumed control of the news site’s content, attracted investors (reportedly including hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a major donor to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz) and supervised the operation’s rapid expansion at Breitbart News’s headquarters in a mansion near the Capitol Building.

“We had a punch list, seven new verticals, and we knew we had to hire a whole bunch of people,” Bannon says. “Andrew thought the world of Matt, was kind of his mentor when he was at The Daily Caller, and Matt was our No. 1 draft pick. He was a young guy, and had a fighting spirit and aggressiveness which was perfect for us—and which you can’t coach.”

Hiring Boyle away from The Daily Caller the month after the 2012 election cycle ended, “we built a whole team around him to take this whole thing to the next level,” Bannon says. “He’s really a fascinating young man.”

Boyle, who was raised until his early teens in the Boston suburb of Canton, Massachusetts, moved with his family to Idaho, Minnesota, and ultimately Florida as his father, a produce and dairy buyer for supermarket chains, kept changing jobs as a result of corporate takeovers.

Today, Boyle lives with his younger brother, an insurance actuary for Geico, in a two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs of Maryland, far from the Washington social swirl.

Before he took on his new editorial duties, he toiled long into the night, working his sources on the phone, and seldom awoke before noon.

Boyle apparently sees little value in the musty journalistic traditions of objectivity, balance, and dispassionate analysis—an impression held by several Republican staffers toiling in Congress and the current presidential campaign.

“He’s more of an activist than a journalist,” claimed one presidential campaign operative, who, like half a dozen other GOP staffers interviewed by The Daily Beast, spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to arouse Boyle’s ire.

Freelance writer and fire-breathing blogger Charles C. Johnson, whose Gotnews.com website mixes politics and celebrity scandal, says the prevailing view of Boyle as a would-be player, rather than a mere observer, is not far off the mark.

“I think the tension within him is the tension between being an activist and being sort of a straitlaced reporter,” says Johnson, who himself is so far from being a “straitlaced reporter”—indeed, he’s infamous for his unquenchable belligerence—that he was recently banned from Twitter, a punishment yet to be visited upon supporters of the Islamic State.

Yet Johnson is probably in a position to understand Boyle’s passions better than most, having collaborated with him at The Daily Caller on widely criticized stories alleging that New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez had patronized underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic.

:{

}:

Menendez was later indicted by the feds on unrelated corruption charges, although the FBI stated in a court filing that it found some “corroboration” for the still-unproven sex allegations—which Boyle took as vindication.

“I think he has more chosen the straitlaced reporter role,” says Johnson. “I think his dislike of the Washington establishment comes not from an ideological point of view, but more from a temperamental dislike. He feels the establishment of this country has betrayed the country, and no one really covers them with the attention they deserve.”

***

Boyle’s own account of himself is in sync with Johnson’s, but it also contains the sort of conversion narrative that is reminiscent of explanations of how zealous Trotskyites transformed themselves into fervent Neocons.

“I used to be a liberal—I voted for Obama in 2008,” Boyle confides. “I don’t regret that decision. It was based on what he said he was going to do. He said he was going to change the country. He didn’t do that, though.”

Boyle’s ideological epiphany, if that’s what it was, occurred with the explosion of the Tea Party movement in early 2010, when he was co-editor of The Gargoyle, the campus newspaper of Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida.

Curious about widespread news reports that tea partiers displayed a racist streak in their ad hominem trashing of the nation’s first black president, Boyle attended a Tea Party rally in St. Augustine—and freelanced his first story for The Daily Caller.

The experience of interviewing rally participants convinced him that the racism charge was a big lie perpetrated by the media-political establishment. The scales fell from his eyes.

“I’m somebody who believes journalists should be open about their personal beliefs and whatnot,” Boyle says. “I’m a conservative. I believe that the federal government is too big. I think they’re ineffective, they’re incompetent, and both political parties are to blame—not just Democrats or Republicans. It’s an out-of-touch political class in Washington.”

Like the rowdy outlet Boyle now represents, he’s by no means bound by the conventional rules of reportage as taught in the nation’s journalism schools and practiced, or at least peddled, by such establishment bulwarks as The New York Times and The Washington Post. He gets emotionally involved.

For instance, Boyle had a visceral reaction to the Fox News-sponsored Republican candidate debate last August in Cleveland, where the moderators peppered Trump—a Breitbart favorite because of his angry-populist appeal and harsh stance on immigration—with questions about his “temperament” and business failures, and singled him out for his refusal, at the time, to pledge his support to whoever becomes the Republican nominee, and not to run as a third-party candidate.

“They came after him with gotcha questions… He was unfairly treated,” says Boyle, who by his own account went into a tailspin.

“I felt like a part of me died inside when I watched that debate,” he says. “I was mad. The first question that was asked”—Bret Baier’s hand-raising “endorse-your-rival” challenge to the 11 contenders onstage—“was out of line. ‘Will you pledge to support whoever wins the Republican nomination?’ So they all endorsed each other except for Trump. Jeb, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, they all endorsed each other! That’s exactly what’s wrong with politics. They put politics over country! They put politics over public safety! Every single one of them on that stage, except for Trump!”

After that debate, Boyle soothed his wrath and depression by heading over to the nearby Horseshoe Casino and gambling into the wee hours at the craps table.

In his previous visits to the casino while in Cleveland for the debate, Boyle says he was up $500. But in his pre-dawn, post-debate doldrums, “I probably lost $300 of that back.”

Needless to say, he has plenty of detractors.

Betsy Rothstein, who writes a media column for his former employer, The Daily Caller, seldom loses an opportunity to mock him.

Recently, she recounted a “semi-erotic” incident in which Trump took a black sharpie and autographed a shoulder of Boyle’s shirt.

“Suffice it to say,” Rothstein wrote, “Boyle is never washing his shoulder or his shirt again.”

His admirers, meanwhile, include Trump supporter Ann Coulter, who says: “Boyle is a one-man investigative news division, the most productive person in media and amazingly cheerful for someone with such a gargantuan output. I assume his critics are mostly driven by envy.”

Yet Boyle’s apparent distaste for Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, allegedly a tribune of the Beltway establishment, led him to write a series of anti-Ryan stories in the run-up to last month’s election of the new speaker of the House—stories that did little to enhance his reputation for clairvoyance. Sample headlines: “Conservatives Rally Against ‘Mafioso-Style’ Paul Ryan Speakership Demands”; “At Least 75 Percent Opposed: Freedom Caucus Likely To Nix Paul Ryan’s Speakership Bid”; “Paul Ryan Silent As Permanent Political Class Cooks Up Giant Backroom Big Government Budget, Debt Ceiling Deal.”

And later, after Ryan was elected speaker with the support of a supermajority of the Freedom Caucus: “Paul Ryan, House GOP Leaders Set The Stage For Coming Cave To Obama’s Syrian Refugee Resettlement Program.”

On the other hand, Boyle can take a measure of credit for relentlessly reporting—and possibly stoking, according to GOP Hill staffers—the internal right-wing opposition to House Speaker John Boehner, who resigned last month under mounting pressure.

***

Several operatives interviewed by The Daily Beast said they have the impression that Boyle habitually decides what the story is before he gathers the facts, using evidence that supports his thesis and discarding evidence that contradicts it.

Boyle argues otherwise.

“When you’re doing a big investigative story about people in power, you’re not looking at it like a prosecutor who’s trying to put somebody in jail, proving that they broke the law,” he says, “but it’s similar to that. What you’re doing is building a case in the court of public opinion, so what you’re doing is gathering information and evidence that’s going to back up a theory… It’s a constant quest for more information.”

If the evidence backing up the theory isn’t forthcoming, he says, then he simply doesn’t publish.

Such was the case with a rather eccentric theory that he still believes that he had good reason to credit, but could never confirm.

Even now, Boyle refuses to dismiss the idea that New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson lost her job in May 2014 not because of her divisive management style, as the ample public record indicates, but instead as a direct result of her decision to kill a damaging story about the love life and questionable bank loans of Mississippi’s senior senator, Republican Thad Cochran, who was involved in a nasty primary race against Tea Party opponent Chris McDaniel.

Boyle, who spent two months in Mississippi covering the ugly campaign in which several McDaniel supporters videotaped Cochran’s Alzheimer’s-suffering wife in a nursing home, while another McDaniel partisan committed suicide in the aftermath of criminal charges, wrote about Cochran’s foreign taxpayer-funded travel with his administrative assistant (now wife) Kay Webber.

Times Washington reporter Jonathan Weisman was plowing similar ground, but his story never saw print—leading Boyle to embark on a convoluted chase to confirm that Abramson personally spiked the story and was fired as a result.

Apparently Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. was so embarrassed that his top editor was a closet Cochran supporter that she had to go.

“Clearly we did not find enough evidence on this, as is the case with many stories we look into,” says Boyle, who disputes the assertion by Cochran campaign staffers and other reporters who covered the race that his stories for Breitbart reflected a pro-McDaniel bias.

“There were plenty of sources at the time with positions of knowledge who had suspected something,” Boyle says. “There were also plenty of coincidences that may have pointed to something like that… I can’t close the book on this until further evidence comes out.”

Weisman, now an editor in the Times Washington bureau, calls Boyle’s Jill Abramson theory “the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard… The idea that a story about Thad Cochran and his now-wife had anything to do with anything going on in the executive suites at The New York Times is nuts.”

Weisman adds: “It doesn’t necessarily surprise me that Matt Boyle made that assumption.”

Echoing the Breitbart gospel, Boyle says the Washington establishment’s fondness for omnibus trade agreements and comprehensive immigration reform is a manifestation of a phenomenon in which “the political elites are consistently trying to checkmate the American worker.”

He adds: “I’m not writing for the people on Capitol Hill. I’m not writing for the Acela Corridor, or the island of Manhattan, or the District of Columbia, or the Beltway crowd. I’m writing for the people in Middle America, the people all around the country who are interested in learning what’s happening in these power structures.”

Charles Johnson, meanwhile, says of Boyle: “He hates a lot of people… I think in the final analysis he wants to call the shots on things.”

This he seems adept at in the foothills of the presidential campaign, before the first votes are cast; whether Boyle’s influence increases or wanes nearer the political peak will be its own fascinating subplot in the storms and scrambles ahead.

=

no links img:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government**/2016**/02/16/southern-poverty-law-center-manufacturing-hate-for-fun-and-profit/

The Southern Poverty Law Center, always seeming to hover in the shadows whenever honest citizens and organizations try to stand up for this country, is at it again. In addition to the usual suspects – which includes pretty much anyone who disagrees with the American radical Left – SPLC has been increasingly attacking people and groups who express concern about Islamic terrorism –adding them to SPLC’s infamous “Hate Watch” list.

This now includes the Washington, DC think tank, Center for Security Policy. Widely respected in defense circles, the Center has been warning us for years about the subversive tactics being employed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its proxies to destroy our nation from within. Its veteran analysts from the defense and intelligence community seek to warn the country of the existential threat we now face from Muslim terrorists.

Screen Shot 2016-02-11 at 5.53.33 PM

People all over the world have witnessed the terrorists’ handiwork, and America is now undeniably in the cross hairs. Any organization purporting to defend civil rights would not blame, much less attack, Americans for being alarmed, and would be hard pressed to explain its criticism of the Center for Security Policy.

In fact it is difficult to imagine anyone in their right minds not being alarmed. The chart below uses a list compiled by the Heritage Foundation and traces terror plots in the U.S. since 9/11/01. It is easy to see that the trend has been increasing exponentially and in 2015 went off the charts. What will happen in 2016? Already 3 terror plots have been thwarted and the FBI has over 900 pending ISIS cases in all 50 states. With the attacks in France and America, and the violent Middle East migrant invasion of Europe, how could people not be concerned?

Screen Shot 2016-02-11 at 5.56.31 PM

The only true haters are the Islamists and SPLC. Americans do not need to justify their concerns over Islamic terror and its political corollary, the body of Islamic law known as shariah. Indeed, shariah is anathema to every freedom we hold dear and threatens to rob us of it before our very eyes.

If there were no reason to be concerned about Islam, it should be a simple matter for American Muslim leaders to reassure America. But instead, they denounce Americans as Islamophobic and the SPLC turns it into a nationwide vilification campaign. In gambling they call this a “tell.” When your political opponent resorts to name calling, it is because he cannot articulate a credible argument against you. So instead of arguing, he intimidates and attacks.

When an organization as prominent and powerful as the SPLC turns its guns on you, it can cost you your job, your livelihood – even your standing in the community.Not because you have done anything wrong. Not because what they say about you is true, but because a focused vilification campaign forces others to avoid you out of fear. You become what they call “radioactive.”

It is a form of psychological attack familiar to the Left. Vladimir Lenin wrote:

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth… We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.

Herbert Marcuse, a German Communist scholar of the Marxist Frankfurt School, formalized this notion in a 1965 essay titled Repressive Tolerance; Marcuse argued that the First Amendment was insufficient in addressing the Left’s need to be heard. In racist, imperialist, oppressive America, their message would always be ignored. It wasn’t fair, he argued. Marcuse’s answer was to shut down the opposition:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left… Not ‘equal’ but more representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality.

While most of us have never heard of Marcuse or his theory, his idea was enthusiastically embraced by the Left. Marcuse himself was an associate of Julian Bond, an SPLC board member from its founding.  Marcuse and Bond were co-founders of the leftwing newspaper In These Times. They both served on the National Conference for New Politics and were involved in other radical activism.

Marcuse’s “Liberating tolerance” found its most practical application in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, which systematized the tactics of hate, ridicule and vilification to shut down opposing voices. While most leftists have memorized this tactic and we witness it every day in media and politics, I think it is the SPLC’s raison d’être.

Note that they never attempt to justify their position, because they never could. Their sole purpose is to destroy political opposition. That is why debating the Left is impossible. They are not debating. They are calculating ways to destroy you.

And if you think I exaggerate, perhaps I should quote the SPLC itself, whose spokesman Mark Potok has said, “Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them…”

Though trained as a lawyer, SPLC’s founder, Morris Dees, is best known for his fundraising ability. Raising over $24 million for the George McGovern presidential campaign in 1972, his payment was the donor list, the gold mine that provided much of SPLC’s later funding. He also worked on the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976, adding to SPLC’s donor list. In fact, besides issuing slanderous attacks on political opponents, fundraising seems to be SPLC’s primary objective. So since one of the SPLC’s tools is hate, perhaps we should examine how other liberals view them.

SPLC Co-founder Morris Dees’ business partner, Millard Fuller:

Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich. During the eight years we worked together, we never wavered in that resolve.

Renowned anti-death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer [not to be confused with Dees’ partner, Millard Fuller]:

[Dees is] the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement, though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.

Nation Magazine’s Alexander Cockburn:

Ever since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC.

Harpers Magazine:

Today, the SPLC spends most of its time – and money – on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate.

Noting an Arlington, Virginia reader’s question about contributing to the SPLC in the federal government’s Combined Federal Campaign, an editorial in The Fairfax Journal concluded:

… give your hard-earned dollars to a real charity, not a bunch of slick, parasitic hucksters who live high on the hog by raising money on behalf of needy people who never see a dime of it.

Stephen Bright, President of the Southern Center for Human Rights:

The positive contributions Dees has made to justice – most undertaken based upon calculations as to their publicity and fundraising potential – are far overshadowed by what Harper’s described as his “flagrantly misleading” solicitations for money. He has raised millions upon millions of dollars with various schemes, never mentioning that he does not need the money because he has $175 million and two “poverty palace” buildings in Montgomery. He has taken advantage of naive, well-meaning people – some of moderate or low incomes – who believe his pitches and give to his $175-million operation. He has spent most of what they have sent him to raise still more millions, pay high salaries, and promote himself.

Making money does seem to remain SPLC’s primary preoccupation. SPLC raked in $54.4 million in FY 2014, according to its most recent IRS filing, with net assets topping out at an incredible $314.7 million. Some of SPLC’s assets are stashed away in offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands and Bangladesh of all places. Nobody knows how much or why they do that but it is beyond the reach of law enforcement.

Of its $42.4 million 2014 expenditures, 40.6 percent was devoted to salaries. Morris Dees himself still takes a compensation package of almost $365,000 per year. Also noteworthy is the fact that Development Director Wendy Via makes more ($202,426), than SPLC’s general counsel and former CEO Joseph Levin, ($196,446). Not surprising since 22.8 percent ($9,674,637), of total expenses go for fundraising.

Despite its vaunted donor list, SPLC has received millions from literally hundreds of foundations over the years.  The following table lists SPLC’s top ten donors between 2000 and 2014.  The Picower Foundation provided the most. Founder Jeffrey Picower made $5 billion from the Bernie Madoff scam. Friends with Madoff for 30 years, he made more than Madoff himself. The Picower estate settled a suit for $7.2 billion to compensate victims. Don’t look for SPLC to return any of their millions however.

Screen Shot 2016-02-11 at 5.57.53 PM

SPLC’s Montgomery, Alabama headquarters, an imposing testimonial to Stalinist architecture jokingly called the “Poverty Palace” has been described variously as “a high-rise trailer,” “the Fuhrer bunker,” and “a small-scaled Death Star,” Blogger Steve Sailor states:

The Southern Poverty Law Center has worked tirelessly to eradicate the last vestiges of poverty, Southern or otherwise, in the lifestyle of founder Morris Dees…by smearing people like Dick Lamm, three-times Democratic governor of Colorado. Some of the moolah raised from the affluent saps Dees has terrified has gone into building this expensive but godawful-looking headquarters building in Montgomery, Alabama…Yes, I know it looks like a high-rise trailer, but, trust me, it cost a lot of money to build something that ugly.

Social critic James Kunstler called it:

…a “building” designed to look like a small-scaled Death Star, all black reflective glass, canted concrete and steel walls…

In a singular display of pettiness, SPLC’s Levin, CEO at the time, felt the need to respond to Kunstler’s criticism. Kunstler gave it right back:

You say, “…I was CEO when the building was designed and constructed and lived with that process for almost three years.”

Well, you got hosed. You bought the Emperor’s New Clothes… you put up a building that is a horror, and I’m glad that I said so in public. Now I am only sorry that I did not know you were responsible for the building, or that you were in the audience, because I would have singled you out for opprobrium…

The issue is what you did on the site you chose. (And by the way, in case you wonder, I am a registered Democrat and a New York Jew, not a conservative.) You put up a building that looks like the Fuhrer Bunker. It dishonors the site and it even dishonors your mission of social justice. The design of the building makes social justice appear despotic.

And despotic seems to aptly describe SPLC’s entire approach. SPLC made its bones suing the Ku Klux Klan into penury. Nobody can fault them for that. But then, wrapped in the mantle of “social justice”, SPLC grabbed a place of honor among the civil rights legends, all the while turning its notoriety into a cause célèbre for a massive,non-stop fundraising drive. It must ever grow its list of what it defines as “extremist” to shake down terrified donors for more funds. If it ever had noble motives, SPLC has certainly lost its way. Next time you read something, anything from the SPLC, understand what they are really about: fomenting hate and making money. Consider the source.

James Simpson is an economist, former White House budget analyst, businessman and investigative journalist.

==

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/29/2968946_re-stratfor-.html

On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.

Re: Stratfor

Released on 2012-10-12 10:00 GMT

Re: Stratfor

here are some issues that i have been involved with...

http://www.playboy.com/magazine/krassner-vs-breitbart#.TsM1gcaTHTs.twitter

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=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Krassner vs Breitbart

Author Paul Krassner

Few people have more street cred with American liberals than Paul

Krassner. He published the groundbreaking satirical magazine The

Realist (1958=E2=80=932001). People called him the father of the underground

press. (He immediately demanded a paternity test.) He was a co-founder

of the Youth International Party, or Yippies. He received the Feminist

Party Media Workshop Award for journalism and the ACLU Uppie (Upton

Sinclair) Award for freedom of speech. He was inducted into the

Counterculture Hall of Fame at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, and in

December 2010 the writers organization PEN honored him with its

Lifetime Achievement Award. =E2=80=9CI want to say how happy this award mak=

es

me,=E2=80=9D he concluded his acceptance speech, =E2=80=9Cand the only thin=

g that

makes me happier is that it=E2=80=99s not posthumous.=E2=80=9D At the age o=

f 79 he

runs PaulKrassner.com and is working on his first novel.

Andrew Breitbart is 42, and his goal is =E2=80=9Cto take down the

institutional left,=E2=80=9D a job he attacks with gusto and much success. =

He

describes himself as a Reagan conservative with libertarian

sympathies. He has written for The Wall Street Journal and The

Washington Times, was an editor of the Drudge Report and a researcher

for Arianna Huffington and helped create the Huffington Post. He

currently oversees a group of his own controversial online blog sites,

Breitbart.tv, =C2=ADBreitbart .com, BigHollywood .Breitbart.com, Big

=C2=ADGovernment.com, BigPeace .com and =C2=ADBigJournalism .com=E2=80=94=

=E2=80=9Cto hold the

mainstream media=E2=80=99s feet to the fire=E2=80=9D=E2=80=94and he plans t=

o launch

=C2=ADBigEducation.com, which will take on the academic establishment. He

has been a commentator on Fox News and is the author of Righteous

Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! In February 2010 he was

honored with the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award at the

Conservative Political Action Conference in =C2=ADWashington, D.C.

Krassner thought it might be fun if he rang up his longtime cultural

adversary and invited him to sit down and discuss their differences

and similarities. Breitbart wanted to meet at Applebee=E2=80=99s, says

Krassner, but the actual location remains a secret. The result, we

think you=E2=80=99ll agree, is one hell of an interesting dialogue.

KRASSNER: I was surprised to learn you consider my work to be one of

your inspirations. You also claim that the mainstream media had a

double standard and didn=E2=80=99t criticize me the way they do you and the

conservative movement that you represent. That=E2=80=99s not true, though.

I=E2=80=99ve been excoriated in papers from the Los Angeles Times to the

Chicago Tribune to The Washington Post. My favorite headline was give

this man a saliva test. You=E2=80=99ve also praised Abbie Hoffman and the

Yippies and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as heavy influences.

Both those men were close friends of mine and remain my touchstones,

and yet you=E2=80=99re at the other end of the social and political spectru=

m.

What I want to know is, how do they fit into the context of your

personal mission?

BREITBART: Well, at the time you were doing what you were doing,

trailblazing and causing mischief and mirth and effecting the type of

political and social change you were attempting, there=E2=80=99s no doubt y=

ou

were being challenged by others. What I=E2=80=99m talking about is the curr=

ent

order of the media in the 21st century and how history now looks on

the Merry Pranksters, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey and Hunter =C2=ADThompson

with great reverence. It=E2=80=99s as if they=E2=80=99ve been given their o=

wn wing of

the journalism school. I don=E2=80=99t want to simplify history. I understa=

nd

that, at the time, you went through hell, and the same could be said

of Matt Drudge. From 1995 until about 2002 the same forces were trying

to claim that Matt Drudge had no right to be doing what he was doing,

which everybody now accepts as commonplace and accepted =C2=ADpractice=E2=

=80=94AOL

just purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million for replicating,

on a left-of-center bent, what Matt Drudge does. So the trailblazers,

while they=E2=80=99re trailblazing, can have slings and arrows hurled at th=

em,

and I=E2=80=99m not trying to diminish the peril you went through. I=E2=80=

=99m stating

that right now, when I=E2=80=99m reporting truths on Wednesday and causing

mirth on Thursday, the press has a problem with that. I=E2=80=99m saying no,

you=E2=80=99re not going to define me; I=E2=80=99m going to define what I d=

o, and

you=E2=80=99re going to have to deal with it. I gained my inspiration from =

the

knowledge that you guys went through the same process, and I=E2=80=99m using

you as models.

KRASSNER: In your book you write, =E2=80=9CMan, how I long for the days of =

Sam

Kinison, Richard Pryor, Abbie Hoffman, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, George

Carlin and Lenny Bruce, and today the only people upholding their

free-speech legacies are conservatives like Ann Coulter and Rush

Limbaugh.=E2=80=9D At first I thought you must be kidding. What about Louis

C.K., Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Lewis Black, Margaret Cho, Marc

Maron, Rick Overton, Harry Shearer, Kathy =C2=ADGriffin, Wanda Sykes,

Richard Lewis, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, =C2=ADStephen Colbert, Larry David,

Rachel Maddow, Paul Provenza? The place is overflowing with liberals

upholding their free-speech legacies.

BREITBART: I would say that they exist within a protected class for

the most part. As long as they adhere to liberal orthodoxy, they=E2=80=99re

protected and can say anything against anyone at any time. It=E2=80=99s the

conservatives who are challenged by the reigning order of political

correctness. There=E2=80=99s nothing transformative or dangerous about a

liberal in Hollywood or a Sarah Silverman or a Chris Rock being

offensive, because they know they=E2=80=99re granted a =E2=80=9Cget out of =

jail free=E2=80=9D

card, whereas Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter exist outside that

comfortable order. So I=E2=80=99m rooting for those people over the ones li=

ke

Jon Stewart, who are in a protected class.

KRASSNER: By the way, I was once on a TV panel with Ann Coulter, and

during a commercial break I suggested to her that the labels

=E2=80=9Cconservative=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Cliberal=E2=80=9D had become obs=

olete. I asked her what she

thought might be appropriate substitute labels. =E2=80=9CAmericans and

cowards,=E2=80=9D she said.

BREITBART: I love Ann Coulter to the core of my being. Nobody humors

me more. If there=E2=80=99s anyone I want to have a dinner with and who can

have me on the floor laughing=E2=80=94and her laugh is infectious, and to

anybody who knows her, she is just a star. Anyone on the left who

would spend five minutes with her would be laughing, and in puddles of

their own urine laughing, even when she=E2=80=99s making fun of them. Lefti=

sts

have an inability to have a sense of humor about their sanctimony.

KRASSNER: But humor is totally subjective. You=E2=80=99ve said that Bill Ay=

ers

probably wrote Barack Obama=E2=80=99s memoir Dreams From My Father, but to =

me

that=E2=80=99s an obvious joke. Ayers has said, =E2=80=9CI wrote that book,=

and if you

could help me prove it, I=E2=80=99ll split the royalties with you.=E2=80=9D=

On the

other hand, those billionaire Koch brothers, the notorious oil

merchants who oppose reducing air pollution, when they claimed that

smog prevents skin cancer, I thought that was a joke. But they had

actually hired a think tank that somehow managed to come up with that

conclusion.

BREITBART: I believe Bill Ayers is a moral relativist, and I think

he=E2=80=99s protecting his intense and long-standing relationship with Bar=

ack

Obama. The history of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn with the

Obamas=E2=80=94they helped usher Barack Obama into his political origins,

which started in their house, in essence. Of course the media are

going to downplay his relationship with Ayers, an unrepentant radical

domestic terrorist. Of course they=E2=80=99re going to protect Obama. They

protected him from Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who was his spiritual

mentor for 20 years, and from his relationship with Father Michael

Pfleger. The most controversial thing they could glean from my book on

the left was that I believe, based on his writing on Dreams From My

Father, that Jack Cashill makes an incredibly compelling argument that

Ayers performed the mundane task of ghostwriting a politician=E2=80=99s

memoirs. It=E2=80=99s what everyone does. Every politician has a ghostwrite=

r,

and I believe to the core of my being that Ayers was the logical

writer of Dreams From My Father. If you don=E2=80=99t think it=E2=80=99s co=

mpelling,

then don=E2=80=99t think it. It=E2=80=99s just what I happen to think. I do=

n=E2=80=99t think

it=E2=80=99s even a controversial point. One is allowed to draw conclusions

based on well-argued writing.

KRASSNER: In your capacity as Tea Party protector, you must be aware

of the blatant disconnect between its plea for small government and

its desire for social issues to be controlled by the government.

BREITBART: I don=E2=80=99t know what you=E2=80=99re talking about.

KRASSNER: I=E2=80=99ll give you a few examples related to my own experience.

One would be abortion rights. During the 1960s, when abortion was

still illegal, if a woman was a victim of botched back-alley surgery

and went to a hospital, they were required to call the police, who

would not allow a doctor to give her a painkiller before interrogating

her. I ran a free underground abortion-referral service and was

subpoenaed by district attorneys in two cities, but I refused to

testify. Two, marijuana decriminalization. My position is that as long

as any government can arbitrarily decide which drugs are legal and

which are illegal, then anyone behind bars for a =C2=ADnonviolent drug

offense is a political prisoner. I started smoking pot in 1965, and I

still do, only now it=E2=80=99s medical. And three, gay rights, from =E2=80=

=9Cdon=E2=80=99t

ask, don=E2=80=99t tell=E2=80=9D to same-sex marriage, which is not the sli=

ghtest

threat to heterosexual marriage. I mean, take Arnold Schwarzenegger,

Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, John Edwards, David Vitter=E2=80=94please! In

1979 I covered the trial of Dan White for The San Francisco Bay

Guardian. He had killed progressive mayor George Moscone and openly

gay supervisor Harvey Milk.

BREITBART: Dan White was a Democrat, and Harvey Milk was a libertarian.

KRASSNER: I=E2=80=99ll put those labels aside, though. When White was

sentenced to only seven years for a double political assassination, I

got caught in the middle of a postverdict riot at city hall. I was

beaten by two cops shouting homophobic epithets=E2=80=94it made no differen=

ce

to them that I was straight=E2=80=94and as a result I now have to walk with=

a

cane. Anyway, how do you react to the conservative movement=E2=80=99s

inconsistency about less government in their lives?

BREITBART: I don=E2=80=99t know what evidence you=E2=80=99re offering that =

the Tea

Party is focusing on any of those issues. The Tea Party is a bizarre

amalgam of independents, conservatives and libertarians who have

surgically excised the social issues from the table, and the people in

those crowds have diverse opinions on all the things you mentioned. I

happen to be pro-marijuana, certainly marijuana decriminalization, but

I=E2=80=99m not asserting myself and my social views in this current

environment. If you can=E2=80=99t see and if the media don=E2=80=99t want t=

o see that

the Tea Party is about financial restraint and has nothing to do with

social issues=E2=80=94=C2=ADnothing, nothing, nothing=E2=80=94to the conste=

rnation of the

social conservatives. I=E2=80=99ve had rifts and schisms with social

conservatives over my stances on these issues. They can call me a

libertarian if they want. I don=E2=80=99t care what labels they call me. But

the Tea Party is abused by the mainstream media, which misinform the

public of what their rights are. Their rights are specific to the

expansion of government and the inability to rein in budgets. And by

spending money on things that don=E2=80=99t work, we=E2=80=99re putting our=

children

in economic peril, period. It has nothing to do with marijuana, it has

nothing to do with abortion, it has nothing to do with gay marriage.

There are gay people in the Tea Party. There are people of all

different social stripes within the Tea Party who have a singular

focus on restraining government debt and applying constitutional

principles.

KRASSNER: When Who=E2=80=99s Who in America invited me to fill out a form f=

or

inclusion in the book, where it asked for my political affiliation I

wrote =E2=80=9CIndependent Dupe,=E2=80=9D and that=E2=80=99s how it has me =

listed. It=E2=80=99s

interesting to see how in America the free-enterprise system has

become intertwined with democracy, and in the process socialism has

become a dirty word.

BREITBART: It is a dirty word.

KRASSNER: It=E2=80=99s revealing that Norman Thomas ran for president six

times as the Socialist Party candidate, and though he was defeated in

each election, over the past several decades every one of his platform

planks has been adopted by both Republican and Democratic

administrations. The laws they passed just weren=E2=80=99t labeled socialis=

t.

Now, I have no economic ideology, but I realize there is something

wrong with capitalism. I realized it as I read the business section

all those years before the recession was officially declared. I

noticed day after day these news items about hundreds of employees

being let go by different corporations, and yet their shareholders

were pleased because the value of their stocks went up. There=E2=80=99s

something wrong with that. In the insurance industry especially, greed

became a preexisting condition.

BREITBART: Well, I think I lean more toward being an independent

conservative, in that I see problems with the Republican Party, with

its lack of consistency in its point of view and its unwillingness to

fight for conservative principles. I controversially support people

like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Allen West and Rick Perry, people

who are either sort of in the Tea Party sphere or in the more

independent sphere of the conservative movement, who feel less

represented by the Republican Party. I=E2=80=99ve come to appreciate the

emancipation of that independence. If anybody came to me with a

scandal that involved blatant wrongdoing by a Republican, I would be

blissful to report it. But when the mainstream media are so naturally

left of center, people can go to ABC, CBS and NBC with those types of

stories and they will get maximum coverage. So people end up coming to

me only when they have stories that perhaps hurt liberals or

Democrats, because they know that if they go to ABC, CBS or NBC the

door will be closed on them. I wouldn=E2=80=99t recommend that a person who

knows of a scandal involving a Republican come to me, because they can

simply go to The New York Times and it will be exposed. But somebody

should test me, because I would be happy to report on corruption

within the Republican Party. I would like to think that my team, the

people I relate to ideologically, hold themselves to a higher

standard.

KRASSNER: Do you mean that if somebody sent you photos of Rick Perry

that were like the Anthony Weiner photos, you would =C2=ADpublish them?

BREITBART: No doubt. Would I have the same level of enthusiasm? No,

because I expected nothing from Anthony Weiner, and I respect Governor

Perry. But he has further to fall. It would be more disappointing and

more worthy of exposure, because he=E2=80=99s supposed to represent a higher

standard.

KRASSNER: I want to get to the topic of religion. As an atheist and an

absurdist, the most absurd thing I could do is to develop an ongoing

relationship with a deity I don=E2=80=99t believe exists. So as a stand-up

comic, before a performance I would say, =E2=80=9CPlease, God, help me do a

good show,=E2=80=9D and then I would hear the voice of God bellow, =E2=80=

=9CShut up,

you superstitious fool.=E2=80=9D Actually, I stopped being a militant athei=

st

in the 1960s when I realized that Martin Luther King Jr. was a

Christian whose actions I admired, whereas George Lincoln Rockwell,

the head of the American Nazi Party, was an agnostic whose actions I

disdained. So I no longer care what anybody believes instead of what

they do, whether they=E2=80=99re kind or cruel to others. I call myself a

secular humanist, and you call yourself a secular Jew. I=E2=80=99m curious =

as

to how that informs your views on controversies from circumcision to

the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, as a baby I was

circumcised against my will, and now, when San Francisco considers

outlawing circumcision, I=E2=80=99m torn between=E2=80=94=E2=80=94

BREITBART: Torn between?

KRASSNER: Yeah, that=E2=80=99s a poor verb. I=E2=80=99m trapped between=E2=

=80=94=E2=80=94

BREITBART: Ripped apart.

KRASSNER: Yeah, that=E2=80=99ll do it. I=E2=80=99m ripped apart between fre=

edom of

religion and genital mutilation as a form of child abuse. As for the

Middle East, I said to God, =E2=80=9CYou=E2=80=99re supposed to be all-know=

ing, and so

you knew in advance that designating Palestine as the promised land

for Jews would have devastating consequences.=E2=80=9D And I heard the voice

of God boom out, =E2=80=9CI never promised land to the Jewish people; I only

said, =E2=80=98I=E2=80=99ll see what I can do.=E2=80=99=E2=80=89=E2=80=9D B=

ut getting back to what being a

secular Jew means to you=E2=80=94=E2=80=94

BREITBART: Well, first of all, from first-hand experience, I love my

perfectly crafted bell end. [laughs] I think penile sculpture as

religion is above my pay grade. I wouldn=E2=80=99t equate it with

clitorectomies and the depravities you see in Islamic culture and what

they do to women for punitive purposes. Given the fact that I have a

circumcised penis, it=E2=80=99s too damn sensitive, quite frankly.

KRASSNER: I thought it takes away from sensitivity.

BREITBART: Well, if it does, I=E2=80=99m still too sensitive. I may need a

shot or an extra cut. Here=E2=80=99s how I look at it. I used to be an

atheist, and I became an agnostic, and now I exist in a place where I

say I bat third on the Judeo-Christian softball team. I=E2=80=99ve had too

many things happen in my life that, as my father-in-law, Orson Bean,

says, there=E2=80=99s no such thing as coincidences. I=E2=80=99m starting t=

o doubt my

doubts. But I would still say I=E2=80=99m an agnostic who, when watching the

debate between Dinesh D=E2=80=99Souza and Christopher Hitchens, I=E2=80=99m=

usually

laughing and slapping my knee with Hitchens but rooting for D=E2=80=99Souza.

I=E2=80=99m desirous of moving toward the Judeo-Christian side. In the past=

I

took solace in my agnosticism. One reason is that, during my agnostic

years=E2=80=94I call them my nihilistic years=E2=80=94during which I lived =

in a world

of moral relativism and not believing in objective truths, I didn=E2=80=99t

sleep well at night. I was living in a world of moral chaos. The more

I started to listen to people like Dennis Prager and rational people

who were religious=E2=80=94not fly-by-nights like Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy

Swaggart and Benny Hinn. When you get past the hucksters and get to

people like David Mamet, who now speaks of Judeo-Christianity, and

Dennis Prager, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than the nihilism I

embraced. I now find myself fighting alongside many Christians and

Jews who believe Judeo-Christianity is the backbone of American

culture. Until somebody gives me a better replacement than

Judeo-=C2=ADChristianity, I=E2=80=99m not going to be part of the team that=

=E2=80=99s

trying to tear down that pillar and replace it with nihilism and

cultural and moral relativism.

KRASSNER: I know you feel strongly about people succumbing to

political correctness. As a performer I=E2=80=99m a living paradox.

Irreverence is my only sacred cow, yet I try not to let victims become

the target of my humor. There was one specific routine I stopped using

in 1970. It called for a =E2=80=9Crape-in=E2=80=9D of legislators=E2=80=99 =

wives=E2=80=94most

legislators then were men=E2=80=94in order to impregnate them so they would

then convince their husbands to decriminalize abortion. My feminist

friends objected. I resisted at first because it was such a

well-=C2=ADintentioned joke, but I reconsidered. Even in a joke, why should

women be assaulted because men make the laws? Legislators=E2=80=99 wives we=

re

the victims in that joke, but the legislators themselves and their

laws should have been the target. For me to stop doing that bit of

comedy wasn=E2=80=99t censorship, it was conscious evolution. It wasn=E2=80=

=99t

political correctness, it was simple respect. However, in 1982 the

Radical Humor Festival at New York University sponsored an evening of

radical comedy. The next day my performance was analyzed by an

unofficial women=E2=80=99s caucus. Robin Tyler, who said, =E2=80=9CI am not=

a lesbian

comic; I am a comic who is a lesbian,=E2=80=9D served as the spokesperson f=

or

their conclusions. What had caused a stir was my reference to the use

of turkey basters by single mothers-to-be who were attempting to

impregnate themselves by artificial insemination. Tyler explained to

me, =E2=80=9CYou have to understand some women still have a hang-up about

penetration.=E2=80=9D But freedom of absurdity transcends gender difference.

=E2=80=9CYeah,=E2=80=9D I said, =E2=80=9Cbut you have to understand some me=

n still feel

threatened by turkey basters.=E2=80=9D

BREITBART: First of all, there=E2=80=99s a difference between political

correctness and human kindness. I have a specific definition of what

political correctness is, and you sort of touched on it by the

reference to a lesbian comedian having to differentiate her cultural

identity: =E2=80=9CI=E2=80=99m a comic who happens to be a lesbian.=E2=80=

=9D That=E2=80=99s the

problem: Cultural Marxism is political correctness, and political

correctness is the translation of Marxist economic theories from the

battle between the haves and the have-nots into the battle of the

oppressor versus the oppressed. And so, given the oppressor-oppressed

model, the oppressed get to maintain a permanent place of judgment

against the oppressors, and blacks get to judge whites and say,

=E2=80=9CYou=E2=80=99re not allowed to say that,=E2=80=9D but whites aren=

=E2=80=99t allowed to say to

blacks, =E2=80=9CChris Rock, you=E2=80=99re not allowed to make that joke a=

t the

expense of white people, because you=E2=80=99re the oppressor. It=E2=80=99s=

okay for

us to make fun of you.=E2=80=9D This double standard has created a huge

quandary in our country=E2=80=94that somehow there=E2=80=99s a type of affi=

rmative

action whereby one group is allowed to castigate, excoriate, demean

and defile the other as some form of cultural reparations. All it does

in my mind is exacerbate the underlying social rifts, and I reject it

wholly. I love Chris Rock, I love Sarah =C2=ADSilverman, but I also think

Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay should be afforded the same rule

book. I remember watching back in the late 1980s when political

correctness started to take over the comedy world, and the Sam

Kinisons and Andrew Dice Clays were marginalized and excoriated for

their routines, and today Sarah =C2=ADSilverman and Chris Rock get away

with much harsher cultural criticism. I want to exist in a world where

comedy functions as an exhaust system so that all members of our

society can go into that comedy room, into the Improv, and let it all

hang out. When Tracy Morgan is forced to go to a reeducation camp

because he=E2=80=99s offended gay sensibilities, I don=E2=80=99t think it d=

oes anyone

in the gay community any favors that they show they don=E2=80=99t have the

ability to laugh at themselves. I love Caucasian jokes, I love Jew

jokes. All I can say is, I like equal opportunity offenders. It is not

political correctness to be outraged when somebody goes after Trig

Palin because he=E2=80=99s mentally challenged. That=E2=80=99s just pure cr=

udeness and

beyond inappropriate. I guess it=E2=80=99s sort of like the Supreme Court

definition of obscenity=E2=80=94you know offense when you see it, and there=

is

a difference between political correctness and saying something that=E2=80=

=99s

just beyond the realm of propriety.

KRASSNER: Wouldn=E2=80=99t you apply that standard to Rush Limbaugh when he

made fun of Michael J. Fox?

BREITBART: No, I wouldn=E2=80=99t. Rush was making a political point.

KRASSNER: Which was?

BREITBART: From what I recall, and I think it was proved to be true,

he chose not to take the medicines that calm his symptoms of

Parkinson=E2=80=99s so that when he did his ad, he was shaking more than he

ordinarily would in order to rev up the volume of the issue, to pour

oil on the fire over the issue of stem cells=E2=80=94to create the percepti=

on

that if you are for stem cell research, you=E2=80=99re for stopping this

shaking. That was my perception of it. Accusing Hollywood and liberals

of using emotionalism to push an intellectual argument is incredibly

fair game.

KRASSNER: I understand that the epiphany that caused you to make a

political right turn occurred while you were watching the hearings

about Clarence Thomas=E2=80=99s nomination to the Supreme Court. You were

genuinely convinced that the treatment of him was racist. I thought he

was lying when he testified under oath that he had never discussed the

subject of abortion, because in response to a question by Senator Hank

Brown, Anita Hill testified that she had disagreed with Thomas in a

discussion about Roe v. Wade. But then-senator Joe Biden quickly

interrupted her, saying, =E2=80=9CThat is not the subject of these hearings=

.=E2=80=9D

BREITBART: I was upset because it was clear the left and the Democrat

media complex=E2=80=94that=E2=80=99s my description for the natural allianc=

e of the

Democratic Party, liberal interest groups and the mainstream

media=E2=80=94chose to put on a show trial by accusing Clarence Thomas of

sexual harassment and then had absolutely nothing to back it up. The

pretense of this show trial was clearly abortion rights, but they were

willing to embarrass him as much as possible, and the mainstream media

allowed this to go on without challenge. He=E2=80=99s sitting there and

they=E2=80=99re asking him whether or not he=E2=80=99s rented pornography s=

tarring

Long Dong Silver, and the point is? The point is, I guess, to make

this conservative look like he=E2=80=99s a hypocrite because he enjoys sex.

But if the whole point of Roe v. Wade is a right to privacy, these

people invaded his privacy and publicly embarrassed him by flaunting

what they found out about his private life. I found it to be utterly

hypocritical. To watch cads and manslaughter and human sexual

harassment machinery like Ted Kennedy sitting in judgment of him was

beyond the pale. And one year later, to watch the same crowd that had

i believe anita bumper stickers, that had said the threshold for

sexual harassment is so low that if you mention you see a pubic hair

on a Coke can it=E2=80=99s sexual harassment=E2=80=94for those same people,=

the same

Democratic Party, the same Democrat media complex to anoint Bill

Clinton as their standard-bearer, I couldn=E2=80=99t take the hypocrisy. I =

was

writhing in pain. It didn=E2=80=99t mean I immediately went to the supermar=

ket

and signed up to become a Republican. I just started to challenge the

media narrative that was being handed to me, because I saw how

disingenuous that complex was.

KRASSNER: As a Supreme Court Justice, Thomas has declared that the

Constitution gives states a right to establish an official religion,

that prisoners have no constitutional right to be protected from

beatings by guards, that a school official is allowed to strip-search

a 13-year-old girl to look for two extra-strength ibuprofen pills,

that a key part of the Voting Rights Act giving blacks political power

in the South should be struck down, that an American citizen could be

held as an enemy combatant with no charges and no hearing. He

announced a decision that threw out a verdict in favor of a black man

who had been convicted of murder and nearly executed because

prosecutors hid evidence that could have proved his innocence.

BREITBART: I don=E2=80=99t know the answers to these things. If you had giv=

en

me this detailed information, I could have come back with my detailed

response. This is like the Sarah Palin =E2=80=9Cgotcha=E2=80=9D question on=

Paul

Revere. I=E2=80=99m not able to answer this because you are coming to me ar=

med

with data, and I don=E2=80=99t have the ability to see whether there is a

rational argument to defend it or not.

KRASSNER: Well, it=E2=80=99s all a matter of record. Recently a

campaign-finance watchdog, Protect Our Elections, asked the FBI to

investigate Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia, seeking his

disbarment. It alleges that he falsified his financial disclosure

forms, that he engaged in judicial corruption by receiving $100,000

from Citizens United during his nomination and then in 2010 ruled in

favor of Citizens United without disclosing that fact or disqualifying

himself, and that he engaged in judicial insider trading to enrich his

wife by providing her with information about that decision prior to

its issuance, which she then used to launch a new company to take

advantage of that decision.

BREITBART: Do you believe in innocent until proven guilty?

KRASSNER: Do I believe in that? Yes. =C2=AD[chuckles] Okay, you know that

Eliot Spitzer was nailed for spritzing around with a call girl in the

same Washington, D.C. hotel room where he had just written an opinion

piece for The Washington Post about the subprime loan disaster. He

wrote, =E2=80=9CNot only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect

consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to

prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems

to which the federal government was turning a blind eye=E2=80=A6. When hist=

ory

tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its

devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the

Bush administration will not be judged favorably.=E2=80=9D In fact, the rea=

son

Spitzer had flown to Washington was to launch a campaign to attack the

Bush cabal and the arrogant corporations that empower them. There was

speculation that this was the real motivation for Spitzer=E2=80=99s arrest.

And then blogger Joy Reid wrote a few months ago that Clarence Thomas

=E2=80=9Chas never been held to account by the Justice Department, Congress=

or

the media for 20 years of false financial-=C2=ADdisclosure forms related to

his wife=E2=80=99s six-figure salary from a Tea Party organization dedicated

to undoing health care reform, an issue Thomas will almost certainly

be called upon to rule on=E2=80=A6. But what=E2=80=99s interesting about th=

e media=E2=80=99s

latest obsession [Anthony Weiner] is =C2=ADBreitbart=E2=80=99s timing. This=

is a

guy who understands news cycles and how to manipulate them, hence his

veritable role as CNN=E2=80=99s assignment editor, replacing Matt Drudge. D=

id

the timing of the [Anthony Weiner] =E2=80=98scandal pic=E2=80=99 release ha=

ve

something to do with Breitbart=E2=80=99s obsession with protecting Clarence

Thomas?=E2=80=9D

BREITBART: Who is alleging that I timed Congressman Weiner=E2=80=99s public=

ly

tweeting his junk? He is the one who instigated it by his behavior on

Friday night, May 27. It=E2=80=99s such an illogical question that it speaks

to a fevered conspiratorial mind-set that I think dominates the left.

Nobody, including Weiner, contests that he tweeted that thing on

Friday night. How could I have preordained or have had preknowledge

that that would occur? It goes beyond being illogical; it=E2=80=99s wishful

thinking.

KRASSNER: But you have to admit it was great timing.

BREITBART: Did it time with Congressman Weiner attacking Clarence

Thomas? Yes, it did. That would be called a coincidence, and there=E2=80=99s

no logical or metaphysical way to make the argument that I was able to

convince him to mis-tweet a picture of his erect penis to a woman in

Seattle with whom he=E2=80=99d had online communications.

KRASSNER: Since you pressured Anthony Weiner into publicly apologizing

to you for pretending you=E2=80=99d hacked his Twitter site, I would think

that, conversely, you owe an apology to Shirley Sherrod. You

publicized, out of context, a two-and-a-half-minute clip of her talk

before the NAACP in which she told about the time 24 years ago when

she didn=E2=80=99t help a farmer as much as she could have because he was

white, which resulted in a scared administration hurriedly forcing her

to resign as the Georgia director of rural development. But you insist

that she wasn=E2=80=99t your target, that the NAACP was, for applauding what

she=E2=80=99d said. Well, I=E2=80=99ve watched the entire 43-minute speech,=

and they

did not applaud.

BREITBART: They nodded and they murmured.

KRASSNER: They nodded and they murmured?

BREITBART: Yes. Look, if you heard somebody give that speech to a

white audience, talking about how they=E2=80=99d stuck it to a black farmer,

and the audience was going along with it and audibly applauding=E2=80=94and=

by

applauding I mean affirming the narrative. When she was talking about

how =E2=80=9CI took him to one of his own=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9CI didn=E2=

=80=99t give him the full

force of what I could do,=E2=80=9D they were like, =E2=80=9CUh-huh,=E2=80=

=9D just like it was

church. They were nodding in agreement. The whole point of this was,

the week before, Ben Jealous of the NAACP was going on ABC, CBS and

NBC to defame and defile the Tea Party, claiming it was racist based

on the false narrative that the N-word had been hurled at congressmen

Andr=C3=A9 Carson and John Lewis. And I had proof, not just through the

$100,000 reward that went unmet. Nobody came to me with any evidence

that it had been said once, in a group of 400 people. There was no

audio or video that showed it had happened even once, let alone 15

times. I was also able to produce four videos from the exact moment

the incident allegedly occurred, and they prove beyond a reasonable

doubt that the incident didn=E2=80=99t happen, that it was made up. Yet Ben

Jealous of the NAACP resurrected that falsehood as a means to

propagandize against the Tea Party, to politically destroy it, to try

to make it appear to be racist when it is not racist. So the Thursday

before the Monday when the two videos and the 1,400-word article came

out, I said, =E2=80=9CBen Jealous, you can go to hell. You=E2=80=99re tryin=

g to split

this country on the schism of race. How dare you?=E2=80=9D I said, =E2=80=

=9CI have

evidence that shows your group acting in a racist manner.=E2=80=9D And I st=

and

by that. If the NAACP gets to go on ABC, CBS and NBC and falsely claim

that the Tea Party is racist but doesn=E2=80=99t have any audio or video

evidence and is able to propagate a provable falsehood, I said, =E2=80=9CTh=

ose

who live in glass houses should not throw stones.=E2=80=9D So when you have=

a

video of an NAACP-sanctioned event at which Shirley Sherrod is getting

nods and then murmurs of approval, it is far greater evidence of the

NAACP acting racist than anything the left and the NAACP have been

able to collect of the Tea Party behaving racist. And my point

stands=E2=80=94those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

KRASSNER: But getting back to Sherrod=E2=80=99s speech, after making her po=

int

that it wasn=E2=80=99t about black and white, it was about haves and

have-nots, that she had overcome her own racial prejudice stemming

from the fact that when she was 17 her father had been killed by a

white man, later in the video she says, =E2=80=9CWhat we have to do is get

that out of our heads. There is no difference between us. The only

difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power,

and=E2=80=A6whatever it is, they=E2=80=99ll do what they need to do to keep=

that

power.=E2=80=9D And that=E2=80=99s when they did applaud.

BREITBART: But they had reacted in a positive fashion that caused the

NAACP to acknowledge it and say it was going to investigate the

audience=E2=80=99s behavior at the point in the actual speech that I had

pointed out. On day one, Sherrod blamed the NAACP. She said it had

gotten into a battle with the Tea Party, and the NAACP said it was

going to investigate the audience for its behavior. I had hit the

target perfectly and shut up the NAACP. It could no longer go on ABC,

CBS or NBC, because it had been exposed. But when Sherrod said to the

administration, =E2=80=9CBut I helped the white farmer,=E2=80=9D they still=

stood by

the firing. If that is such an important crux, that she was allegedly

fired because she discriminated against a white farmer, why is it that

they stood by the firing even after she said she=E2=80=99d helped the white

farmer? The two-and-a-half-=C2=ADminute video includes the redemptive part

of the narrative. Who is my number one defender on that, not once but

twice? Chris =C2=ADMatthews on MSNBC, a guy who does not agree with me on

anything, said to Joan Walsh and Howard Dean, =E2=80=9CI=E2=80=99ve looked =

at the

video. Breitbart included the part where she talks about =E2=80=98It=E2=80=

=99s not

about black versus white, it=E2=80=99s about rich versus poor.=E2=80=99=E2=

=80=89=E2=80=9D In addition,

my 1,400-word piece, which everybody ignored, mentions the NAACP 17

times and Sherrod four times. It says, =E2=80=9CEventually her basic humani=

ty

informs her to help the white farmer.=E2=80=9D The redemptive part that you

just talked about is included in the video. Chris Matthews defends me

on that critical point.

KRASSNER: Just to balance Chris Matthews, ironically Glenn Beck

discredited you on Fox News and said you needed to apologize. You

responded, and this is the quote: =E2=80=9CNext thing I know, I=E2=80=99m u=

nder

complete attack without the support of Glenn Beck, who I thought was

somebody I could count on. He threw me under the bus.=E2=80=9D And it wasn=

=E2=80=99t

the Merry Pranksters=E2=80=99 bus. Maybe Beck should apologize to you.

BREITBART: I agree with that. I was able to find out why Beck threw me

under the bus. He had used so much of my content to build up his name,

and why was he throwing me under the bus? Well, it=E2=80=99s pretty

interesting, because the president=E2=80=99s team fired Sherrod too quickly,

without due process, because they were fearful it was going to be on

the Glenn Beck show. So when Beck went on TV to talk about it for the

first time, he took the stance =E2=80=9CI didn=E2=80=99t touch this because=

I knew

there was something wrong with the video. I saw the video in my

office, and I knew something critical was missing, so I didn=E2=80=99t go w=

ith

it.=E2=80=9D Well, wondering why he would state that given what Chris Matth=

ews

had to say on the issue, we found out later that he didn=E2=80=99t do it on

the TV show, but he did do it earlier in the morning on his radio

show, before more information started to come out that granted greater

context. He was the one who cut the two-and-a-half-minute video into

15-second clips that isolated and eviscerated Sherrod and removed the

NAACP angle entirely. So he screwed the pooch on his radio show, then

found out that she had been fired based on the administration=E2=80=99s fear

that it would be on the Glenn Beck show, so he went on his TV show and

pretended he had not touched it on his radio show. He was doing damage

control for Glenn Beck=E2=80=99s brand, period.

KRASSNER: I=E2=80=99ve said that =E2=80=9Ctruth is perceived through the fi=

lter of an

agenda,=E2=80=9D and you=E2=80=99ve said that =E2=80=9Ctruth has no agenda.=

=E2=80=9D I=E2=80=99d like to apply

our slogans to the ACORN scandal that you produced, which, because it

was believed, resulted in Congress defunding the agency. But a

Congressional Research Service report commissioned by the House

Judiciary Committee says that ACORN didn=E2=80=99t violate any federal

regulations in the past five years, that there were no instances of

individuals who had been improperly registered to vote by ACORN

employees, that the undercover video makers who allegedly caught ACORN

employees breaking the law may themselves have violated state law in

their filming operation. The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles

Hynes, announced that his office had found no criminal =C2=ADwrongdoing by

ACORN. Another law enforcement source said that James O=E2=80=99Keefe and

Hannah Giles had edited the tape to meet their agenda. Former

Massachusetts attorney general Scott Harshbarger=E2=80=99s report states, =

=E2=80=9CThe

videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some

cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute

voice-over for significant portions of Mr. O=E2=80=99Keefe=E2=80=99s and Ms=

. Giles=E2=80=99s

comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which

ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of publicly available

transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the

original video have been omitted from the released versions.=E2=80=9D And

California=E2=80=99s then attorney general, Jerry Brown, said, =E2=80=9CThe=

evidence

illustrates that things are not always as partisan zealots portray

them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller

truth is found on the cutting-room floor.=E2=80=9D O=E2=80=99Keefe admitted=

he was out

to make a point and to damage ACORN. In the sensational San Diego

video that featured Giles discussing prostitution by underage girls 13

to 15, human trafficking from Mexico and cheating on taxes in the

U.S., the ACORN worker acted as if he would help them. But when they

left, he immediately called the police with the misinformation he had

solicited from this couple of propagandists. And so the question is,

did you ever share the fact that he called the police with your

readers?

BREITBART: There=E2=80=99s so much propaganda in that collection of data th=

at

I don=E2=80=99t even know where to begin, but I=E2=80=99ll start at the beg=

inning.

When Hannah and James came to me with their edited video=E2=80=94which is w=

hat

all news services do; they take raw footage and create a narrative

that allows the story to be told so one doesn=E2=80=99t have to watch hours

and hours of footage=E2=80=94I said, =E2=80=9CEven though ABC, CBS and NBC =

truncate

time and selectively edit video and we just trust implicitly that

they=E2=80=99re telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth and not

manipulating the narrative, you=E2=80=99re going to be held to a higher

standard, not just by the public but by the mainstream media, which is

going to challenge you by virtue of your avowed conservative

politics.=E2=80=9D So when they came to me with those videos, I said, =E2=

=80=9CIf I=E2=80=99m

going to help you get this story out, I=E2=80=99m going to ask that we

simultaneously release the full transcripts and the full audio so

nobody will be able to claim that words were put into these people=E2=80=99s

mouths and that the context of your edited videos makes it perfectly

clear that you did not manipulate the situation.=E2=80=9D For you to cite

Scott Harshbarger as a resource when John Podesta and Andy Stern of

SEIU were the ones who hired Harshbarger to allegedly investigate

ACORN=E2=80=99s behavior on the case.=E2=80=A6 I said immediately, =E2=80=

=9CYou=E2=80=99re going to

tell me that John Podesta=E2=80=99s going to investigate ACORN? They=E2=80=

=99re going

to investigate James, Hannah and me and come up with an =E2=80=98independent

investigation=E2=80=99 to place us on the defensive.=E2=80=9D And that=E2=

=80=99s precisely

what they did by looking at the selectively edited videos. And to come

up with sound bites such as =E2=80=9Cselectively edited=E2=80=9D doesn=E2=

=80=99t mean

anything, because we provided the full content for everyone to see

from day one. Congress voted to defund ACORN because those who looked

at the full tapes and the full transcripts saw there was no

explanation other than absolute insanity that so many people in so

many offices would offer service with a smile when a pimp and a

prostitute walked through the door stating that they wanted to create

an underage-sex-slave operation. Political hacks like Scott

Harshbarger and Jerry Brown are apparatchiks whose careers are

dependent on organizations like ACORN. I would think that your

skepticism of government and government officials would cause you to

go, =E2=80=9CWait a second. Let=E2=80=99s look at the full tapes.=E2=80=9D =

I have said to

Harshbarger, Brown, Podesta, Stern and Media Matters, =E2=80=9CLet=E2=80=99=

s sit down

once and for all and watch, in front of an auditorium of people, for

all the world to see=E2=80=94we=E2=80=99ll film it=E2=80=94the full, unedit=

ed videos. And at

the very end, you=E2=80=99re going to tell me that the selective editing

changed anything?=E2=80=9D It=E2=80=99s laughable garbage, and I am willing=

to put my

name and my reputation on all of those ACORN videos.

KRASSNER: Okay, Andrew, thanks very much for this.

BREITBART: I thought it would be funnierx

>

--

Shea Morenz

STRATFOR

Managing Partner

office: 512.583.7721

Cell: 713.410.9719

shea.morenz@stratfor.com

>

(Sent from my iPhone)

>