Category: Misinformation

Fox News Bud Light advertising far more important than Clarence Thomas’ ethics

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

At the end of March, ProPublica released findings of an investigation that highlighted the financially swampy relationship between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Texas billionaire, conservative donor, and Nazi artifact collector Harlan Crow. Reports came out showing that not only did Justice Thomas spend an inordinate amount of time with the billionaire—after becoming a Supreme Court Justice—he received possibly millions of dollars in gifts and free travel and lodging for about two decades. 

On top of that, reports came out showing Crow’s generosity toward Justice Thomas included buying up two vacant lots where Thomas’s elderly mother lived, as well as sending $500,000 to “a Tea Party group founded by Ginni Thomas, which also paid her a $120,000 salary.” Clarence Thomas has released an unbelievably weak statement defending the allegations against him, while not denying any of the details in the stories.

It’s the kind of story that, even in passing, anyone would consider to be newsworthy. Polls show that even conservatives agree that the reports about Thomas’ gift and vacation-receiving ways are unethical.

How is the right-wing ministry of propaganda, Fox News, handling the story? What story? Have you not heard that Bud Light did a single online social media advertisement with a trans celebrity?

RELATED STORY: Clarence Thomas allegedly broke one of the few ethics laws that apply to the Supreme Court

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The Washington Post’s Philip Bump analyzed how traditional media outlets like MSNBC, C-SPAN, CNN, and Fox News were covering the news. It turns out that in the case of Fox News, they aren’t covering it all that much. Over a ten-day period after the news broke, Fox News has mentioned Thomas’ name in less than 50 segments, all less than 15 seconds long, according to The Washington Post.

To put this into perspective, over that same period, MSNBC has mentioned Thomas almost 500 times. As for the name Harlan Crow? Fox News has almost never mentioned his name. Here are the ways in which Fox News has framed the myriad stories about gifts, vacations, plots of land, and business start-up monies from Crow to Thomas:

  • April 6: “Clarence Thomas report spurs new calls from Democrats for Supreme Court code of ethics”

  • April 6: “Progressive Democrats call for Clarence Thomas impeachment after reported undisclosed gifts from GOP megadonor”

  • April 7: “Justice Thomas defends trips taken with ‘dearest friends’ after reports say he accepted gifts”

  • April 8: “Democrats press Supreme Court chief justice to investigate Clarence Thomas’ trips with GOP megadonor”

  • April 9: “Report on Clarence Thomas’ travel habits is ‘politics plain and simple’: expert”

  • April 10: “AOC doubles down on ‘ignoring’ abortion rule, Clarence Thomas impeachment: ‘abuse of judicial overreach’”

  • April 10: “Senate Democrats demand Chief Justice Roberts open investigation into Clarence Thomas over ‘misconduct’”

But if Fox News is barely mentioning the Supreme Court story, and talking all the way around the various Donald Trump legal indictments and trials and potential indictments, what are they talking about? According to the analysis, Bud Light. The beer. You see, Bud Light signed a sponsorship deal with internet celebrity Dylan Mulvaney. The deal seems to have included Mulvaney making sure to create product placement social media posts.

Mulvaney’s sponsorship deal led to former celebrities like Kid Rock to start shooting Bud Light cans with guns in protest. Fox News covered that more than 183 times. This coming from the network that spends a considerable amount of of resources trying to torture conspiratorial connections between billionaire Democratic donor George Soros and … everything happening that they don’t like.

Between Clarence and his Big Lying wife, Ginni, these two radical right wing activists have secured their spot in the annals of history under fascism.

RELATED STORIES:

Clarence Thomas’ lavish vacation getaways are so corrupt, even Republicans think they're bogus

Supreme Court Justice Thomas' Republican donor buddy also collects Nazi trinkets

Reporting on lavish trips struck a nerve: Clarence Thomas issues defensive statement

New emails show Ginni Thomas trying to get Arizona officials to overturn the election

Murdoch's Fox News empire has launched an all-out war against the makers of Bud Light

On today’s episode, Markos and Kerry are joined by a friend of the podcast, Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg. Rosenberg was one of the few outsiders who, like Daily Kos, kept telling the world that nothing supported the idea of a red wave. Simon and the crew break down his strategy for Democratic candidates to achieve a 55% popular vote in all elections—a number that a few years ago would have seemed unattainable, but now feels within reach.

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Hillary Clinton Calls For ‘Global Reckoning’ With ‘Disinformation’

Posted on by Rusty Weiss

Former First Lady Hillary Clinton is advising that social media needs a “global reckoning” with disinformation, and urged the media to “rid themselves of both-sideism.”

In an interview with the Guardian, Clinton made the confusing argument that social media companies are at once too powerful, but also how they also need to tamp down more on certain kinds of views and information. 

She also bashed the mainstream press, saying, “They’ve got to rid themselves of both-sidesism.”

“It is not the same to say something critical of somebody on the other side of the aisle and to instigate an attack on the Capitol and to vote against certifying the election.”

“Those are not comparable, and it goes back to the problem of the press actually coming to grips with how out of bounds and dangerous the new political philosophy on the right happens to be.”

Oddly enough, Clinton never opposed anyone objecting to election certifications when Democrats did it over and over again both in 2017 and 2005.

RELATED: Meghan McCain Calls Trump ‘Cheeto Jesus’ And Defends Liz Cheney

Hillary Clinton Wants Political Opponents Shut Down Over ‘Misinformation’

Can you even recall a time in our nation when Democrats were so open and brazen about their attempts to shut down free speech in America?

Hillary Clinton proceeded to attack Big Tech companies, who have banned President Trump from ever offering his opinion on their platforms, for not doing enough to stop the spread of “misinformation.”

“The technology platforms are so much more powerful than any organ of the so-called mainstream press,” she claimed.

“And I do think that there has to be not just an American reckoning but a global reckoning with the disinformation, with the monopolistic power and control, with the lack of accountability that the platforms currently enjoy,” Clinton continued.

Clinton, who has repeatedly blamed her 2016 presidential election loss on Russian conspiracies, called for world governments to step in and regulate Big Tech.

“So governments are going to have to decide right now that the platforms have to be held to some kind of standard, and it’s tricky,” Clinton said.

Former President Donald Trump was banned from social media for daring to claim the 2020 election was stolen. Here you have Clinton, who claimed that Trump was an “illegitimate” President, saying this isn’t enough.

And Democrats think Republicans are fascists?

RELATED: Hillary Clinton Urges Trump Officials Involved in Impeachment Inquiry to ‘Tell the Truth’

She Needs A Global Reckoning With Herself

Where to even begin with this obvious case of projection on the part of Hillary Clinton? Perhaps the media needs a global reckoning with her own history of lies and misinformation.

Clinton, after all, admitted that her lawyer, Marc Elias, paid for the infamous Steele dossier.

Elias, in a lawsuit filed by former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, was accused of using “false information, misrepresentations and other misconduct to direct the power of the international intelligence apparatus and the media industry against” him to “further their political agenda.”

The dossier, which the Wall Street Journal has described as uncorroborated “junk,” was the basis for the Russia/Trump conspiracy news that dominated media during the former President’s administration.

Clinton, of course, was also integral in the lie that the Benghazi attacks were the result of an obscure YouTube video.

Former National Security Adviser under Barack Obama, Susan Rice, even claimed in her book that she was pushed to do five Sunday television interviews by the Obama administration to cover for Clinton by insisting on that story.

What other misinformation came from Hillary Clinton? Well, you could write a book.

Dodging sniper fire in Bosnia, claiming she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, being “dead broke” after leaving the White House, and trying to join the Marines come to mind.

All of these are provable lies, some mundane, some quite serious. All misinformation that, if social media giants had a global reckoning over, would result in her banning as well.

The problem being, the media isn’t interested in ‘both-sideism.’ In essence, Hillary has already been granted her wish to stifle free speech.

 

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The post Hillary Clinton Calls For ‘Global Reckoning’ With ‘Disinformation’ appeared first on The Political Insider.

Desperate to avoid impeachment talk, Tucker blames Black Lives Matter, George Floyd for … something

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

The sinking ship that is Fox News is helmed by the ghost of William F. Buckley Jr.’s toilet bowl, Tucker Carlson, financial liability Sean Hannity, and hoax racist Laura Ingraham. Tucker Carlson has been purveying his solid brand of fact-free, intellectually bankrupt, rhetorical monologue skills to promote racist COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and racist fearmongering of Black Lives Matter protests most of the year. Now, with Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial making it hard for Fox News to ignore, Tucker turned his attention on becoming a low-grade version of Infowars’ Alex Jones for the evening. But like everything Tucker, he adds a dash more white supremacy on top of what even Alex Jones has the capacity for.

Tucker went full deep state corporate conspiracy theory on Wednesday night in a long-winded, roundabout opening 12-minute monologue where he questioned the facts of the Capitol insurgency, arguing that Trump both didn’t incite the coup attempt, and then saying that it wasn’t a long-planned event, while also saying that it had to be either or of those two things. It’s a rhetorical trick where you create a straw man argument and then you step out of the fake argument to say that both positions are not real, thus negating your entire argument while pretending you have proven your argument. It’s the kind of intellectually vacuous dirtbaggery Carlson has made his entire existence on. But Tucker wasn’t done there, he needed a motivation for why everything we have seen has happened but also not happened the way we all seem to have seen it happen.

Black people, y’all. It’s socialism and Black people. It’s socialism and Black people that is funded by corporations—an organization well-known for loving both socialism and Black people? And that’s just one small piece of how offensive Tucker goes in his conspiracy theory.

Tucker explains that the facts Fox News viewers know—make-em-up things Tucker pretends are facts—contradict the impeachment proceedings. He explains that the reason this grand lie is being told to the American people dates back to this summer “beginning of Memorial Day, BLM and their sponsors in corporate America completely changed this country. They changed this country more in five months than it had changed in the previous 50 years.” Whoa! How’d this happen?

Well, as Carlson tells it, after George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derrick Chauvin, protesters “upended society.” But even more importantly, the whole thing was a lie. According to Tucker, “The story they told us about George Floyd's death was an utter lie. There was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered by a cop. The autopsy showed that George Floyd almost certainly died of a drug overdose fentanyl.” Let’s pretend for a moment that one of the top reasons George Floyd’s death, unlike so many thousands of Black people’s deaths at the hands of law enforcement, set off mass protests, was because it was filmed by onlookers, while the sun was still out, and people were pleading with the officers to stop. Let’s pretend that that irrefutable fact does not exist.

Tucker is lying. His assertion about the autopsy is a lie. Not a misrepresentation of things but a straight-out lie. The autopsy notes the drugs in his system but the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's Office autopsy report determines Mr. Floyd died of "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Tucker Carlson is a liar. He’s a weak-minded and cynical white supremacist apologist asshole, whose lazy mind cannot even come up with decent bullshit defenses for his obtuse attitudes and positions. Tucker goes on to make the textbook white American racist claim that these BLM protests “destroyed” the “fabric” of American society.

Here’s a man who has never been a good person but now finds himself grabbing at the empty void that their destitute morality has left them protecting. The 11-minute mark is around the moment where Tucker Carlson takes his final steps off the ledge of last night’s drivel.

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This is infowars shit, just a completely batshit conspiracy theory blasted into your meemaws face pic.twitter.com/pjHzzeo5At

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) February 11, 2021

With Trump out of office, the Republican Party is having an identity crisis

Posted on by PBS NewsHour - Politics
The Republican Party is out of power on Capitol Hill and deeply divided on issues from the attack on the Capitol to the impeachment of former President Trump. Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman and chief strategist at the Network Contagion Research Institute, and Whit Ayres, the president of North Star Opinion Research, join Judy Woodruff to discuss.

Obama’s office slams GOP investigation into Ukraine, Joe Biden, in private letter from March

Posted on by Marissa Higgins

In a letter from March, the office of former president Barack Obama condemned a congressional investigation into former vice president and now presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. You likely remember the Republicans’ incessant focus on Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural energy company. Trump and various Republican allies have alleged that there’s a scandal there, and alleged possible conflict of interest for Joe Biden, who was key on Ukraine policy at the time. And of course, Republicans had claimed this investigation had nothing to do with wanting to distract from Trump’s impeachment proceedings or the upcoming general election. 

In the private letter signed by Obama’s records representative and now available because the office released it to BuzzFeed News upon request, Obama’s office described it as an effort to "to shift the blame for Russian interference in the 2016 election to Ukraine” and said it was “without precedent." The letter, which was first obtained and reported on by BuzzFeed News, does not actually explicitly mention Biden by name, and does agree to release the requested presidential records.  

"The request for early release of presidential records in order to give credence to a Russian disinformation campaign--one that has already been thoroughly investigated by a bipartisan congressional committee--is without precedent," the letter, dated March 13 and sent to the National Archives and Records Administration (which maintains presidential records), says in part. 

As a quick review, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson made the record request in November 2019. The two senators have effectively spearheaded the investigation into the Bidens and Ukraine, and have been doing so since last fall. Both wanted records on meetings between Ukrainian officials and the Obama administration from the National Archives. 

The letter from Obama’s office refers to former National Security Council analyst and Russia expert Fiona Hill’s now-viral opening testimony about the notion that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had a misinformation effort in the 2016 election. She said it’s “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”

The Obama office relented and has allowed the records to be released "in the interest of countering the misinformation campaign underlying this request.” Former presidents (and technically, current presidents, though it’s no surprise that representatives for Trump wouldn’t do so) are allowed to review and use executive privileges on record requests thanks to a federal mandate. But neither Obama’s office nor Trump’s did so. Obama’s office released the records essentially to counter the message that is beneath the request.

The letter finishes: “We emphasize that abuse of the special access process strikes at the heart of presidential confidentiality interests and undermines the statutory framework and norms that govern access to presidential records.”

At the time of Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, Republicans went out of their way to distract from any perceived weakness and create an enemy—in this case, Hunter Biden and Ukraine. But it didn’t end there. For example, Sens. Grassley and Johnson have reportedly recently dug into Secret Service documents to see whether Joe and Hunter Biden ever overlapped on trips to Ukraine. It’s endless. Even now, as a global pandemic rages on and the United States continues to fumble public health crisis management, GOP senators continue to dig into the Burisma theories. 

Trump’s new press secretary on Feb. 25: ‘We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here’

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

On Tuesday the White House announced that scam artist phantom Stephanie Grisham was out as press secretary. Vapid right-wing talking head Kayleigh McEnany was announced as the new White House lying machine. While Grisham decided to be mysteriously invisible during her time as the White House’s main liaison to the media, McEnany has a more boisterous personality with a more storied history of spewing lies and wrongheaded predictions. For example, here she is on Fox News with now-fired Trish Regan on Feb. 25 of this year. What’s she predicting? That Trump will stop the spread of COVID-19 by way of a travel ban on China? Yes. Let’s hear about it, Kayleigh!

KAYLEIGH MCENANY: This president will always put America first. He will always protect American citizens. We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here. We will not see terrorism come here, and isn't it refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama.

You can even watch her saying it!

On the same day Larry Kudlow said coronavirus was �contained� on Feb. 25th, Trump�s campaign spox made an even more bold claim. �We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here..and isn't it refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama." pic.twitter.com/O0DDH3Rvkw

— andrew kaczynskiðÂ�¤Â� (@KFILE) April 4, 2020

McEnany has been auditioning for this part for some time now, as has virtually everyone who appears regularly on state misinformation channel Fox News. She’s checked all of requisite boxes of fealty, like saying impeachment proceedings—and in fact any criticism of Donald Trump—amounted to participating in a coup d’etat of our government. 

McEnany began her right-wing career speaking on CNN as a talking head, but quickly found that running into even the most modest of pushback on her talking points led to her stressing out and blinking strangely, as can be seen in this clip from a couple of years ago.

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McEnany has done all the things one expects. She’s called the Mueller report an “exoneration” of Donald Trump; she’s done the softball interviews of truly awful Trump cabinet members like Betsy DeVos; and she’s tweeted out real through-the-looking-glass misinformation, like this:

BIG NEWS from President @realDonaldTrump�s Chinese Virus task force briefing! Dr. Birx shared that 40% of the country now have "EXTRAORDINARY LOW NUMBERS" of cases�� 19 of 50 states have less than 200 cases!

— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) March 26, 2020

But what may have finally gotten Kayleigh the job is her loud, fact-free, and enthusiastic delivery of conservative talking points with seemingly no shame whatsoever. But let’s never forget McEnany’s humble, racist, beginnings.

The new White House press secretary, ladies and gentlemen pic.twitter.com/y3m9YAPtAr

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) April 7, 2020

Tuesday, Apr 7, 2020 · 7:44:15 PM +00:00 · Walter Einenkel

This quote from Grisham, given to Axios before she was officially replaced, is worth adding here: “Sounds like more palace intrigue to me, but I’ve also been in quarantine. If true, how ironic that the press secretary would hear about being replaced in the press.”

Delusional Trump supporter denies coronavirus exists

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

Donald Trump’s handling of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, aka the coronavirus, has been terrible. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has lined up behind him to turn the whole affair into a partisan one. The Trump administration’s basic incompetence and the damage caused by GOP policies of cutting the CDC’s funding aside, the partisanship and rhetoric coming from the Republican Party have dire consequences. They include slowing down the process of getting emergency funding and dragging down the speed and efficacy of testing and diagnosing the true nature of the problem. But the biggest problem is the disinformation that results from turning medical experts’ fears into political footballs.

At a South Carolina rally last week, President Trump claimed that COVID-19 was a “hoax” being perpetrated by the Democratic Party. He analogized it with the impeachment probes and the Mueller investigations into his administration. Forget about the fact that, like COVID-19, the facts of Trump’s corruption are scientifically proven. Even if you believe Trump did nothing wrong and the Democratic Party is just trying to relitigate the 2016 election, COVID-19 is a virus that even world leaders have caught and are suffering from. But how dumb is the racist death cult following Donald Trump? 

CNN did a report on Trump’s misinformation and its consequences on the MAGA elite. The report included an interview from NBC where Trump supporters, possibly tailgating at some sporting event or waiting outside of a rally, told the reporter that COVID-19 isn’t worrying them because it isn’t real.

REPORTER: You don't believe coronavirus exists?

WOMAN: I don't.

REPORTER: So the two people who have been reported to have died from it in Washington state you don't trust that that's true?

WOMAN: I don't trust anything the democrats do or say.

The Centers for Disease Control already said in no uncertain terms that the coronavirus is not just real, it is in the United States. That means that this woman not only sticks to the most right-wing media outlets, she only pays attention to her television in the moments that Trump is talking.

The clip below made me wash my hands, and I haven’t even gone anywhere today.

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