Pro-Palestine activists protested against the Melbourne Queer Film Festival's (MQFF) decision on Friday to go ahead with the screening of the Israeli film 'The Swimmer', despite calls for its removal from the festival's programme. Activists accused the film of "pinkwashing" Israel's image by promoting the Jewish state as queer-friendly, while portraying Palestinians as "intolerant" to distract attention from Israel's human rights record and its occupation of Palestinian land. MQFF, who queer BDS activists also say have not promoted "one film from the Arabic-speaking world", said The Swimmer wo...
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Fox News wants its viewers to think that one of Wednesday’s witnesses at the House GOP’s impeachment hearing is untrustworthy.
But the network isn’t concerned about the one who testified from federal prison after a fraud conviction, or the one who admits to having a grievance with Hunter Biden.
No, the guy Fox wants viewers to disbelieve is the witness who told the committee that he played a key role in concocting the anti-Biden Ukrainian disinformation campaign that played out on Fox’s airwaves.
Fox has long known Lev Parnas lacked credibility, thanks to research by its own staff. But now it’s finally useful to the network’s narratives to say so.
Back in 2019, Parnas was part of a Rudy Giuliani-driven campaign to smear Joe Biden and his son Hunter as corrupt because of actions and positions the senior Biden took regarding Ukraine when he was vice president. Giuliani worked with a motley crew of Fox News staples such as conservative writer John Solomon and Republican attorneys Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing to launder Russian-linked disinformation into the right-wing media ecosystem. The goal was to lay the groundwork for attacking then-President Donald Trump’s most likely opponent in the 2020 presidential election.
Parnas, along with fellow Soviet-born con man Igor Fruman, worked closely with Giuliani to feed him an endless supply of lies about Joe Biden and his supposed corruption. This effort ultimately got Trump impeached for attempting to blackmail Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Biden, but it’s nonetheless most familiar now for serving as the incredibly shaky foundation of the right’s current efforts to impeach Biden.
Media Matters extensively documented the key role Fox News played in laundering this smear campaign into the media.
Giuliani’s strategy hinged on the network’s active participation. Working with con men like Parnas and other Trump cronies, he pursued an “investigation” into Ukraine that he claimed showed both Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in 2016 and evidence that Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to benefit his son. He provided his “report” to allies in Congress to exploit while also feeding the story to conservative columnist John Solomon, who at the time worked at The Hill and dutifully reported out Giuliani’s claims in dozens of columns.
During that same time period, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times. Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity alone, with host Sean Hannity weaving Solomon’s reporting into his ever-evolving conspiracy theories that “deep state” elements were out to get Trump.
Despite what played on the network’s airwaves, behind the scenes Fox News' researchers warned that Parnas and his allies’ information was not reliable. As The Daily Beastreported, “Fox News’ own research team has warned colleagues not to trust some of the network’s top commentators’ claims about Ukraine.”
According to The Daily Beast, the 162-page brief compiled by researchers for what was then known as Fox’s Brain Room “openly” questioned “Fox News contributor John Solomon’s credibility, accusing him of playing an ‘indispensable role’ in a Ukrainian ‘disinformation campaign.’”
The document also specifically called into question Parnas’ credibility, noting: “Reading the timeline in its entirety—not a small task—makes clear the extensive role played by Rudy Giuliani and his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, in spreading disinformation.”
Indeed, when Parnas was arrested for allegedly making illegal campaign donations to Republican candidates and committees, he was at the airport, preparing to leave the country in order to facilitate an interview with disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for none other than Sean Hannity.
Shortly after his arrest, Parnas flipped, and he has since repeatedly sought to expose the misinformation campaign he facilitated and the key players behind it. During Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial, Parnas provided evidence about the pressure Trump allies were placing on Ukrainian officials to provide information about Biden.
With Parnas’ change in position, Fox suddenly became much more publicly skeptical of the claims he was making. And yesterday, when he testified in the latest of the House Republicans’ doomed efforts to invent a reason to impeach Joe Biden, he specifically called out Fox’s tendency to run with the dubious, unverifiable claims he had given to John Solomon:
REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): At what point did the campaign to dig up dirt on Biden become a campaign to spread disinformation and lies about Biden?
LEV PARNAS: At some point when we hit a few brick walls, all of a sudden, then I saw the shift between the BLT group, which included John Solomon, the media personality, and Rudy Giuliani and other Trump lawyers, to start trying to push narratives that were — we had no, they were not validated. We had no way to validate them. Basically, a letter would come over from somebody in Ukraine, I'd hand it over to John Solomon. Next thing you knew he was on Fox TV two hours later with Sean Hannity.
Predictably, Fox has sought to discredit Parnas’ testimony by attacking his credibility.
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade complained that Parnas “went to jail for lying and is talking about Ukraine” (Parnas was convicted of wire fraud and campaign finance violations, not anything related to his work with Giuliani) and said his testimony was nothing but a “head fake” on the part of the Democrats who invited him to testify.
So-called “straight news” anchor John Roberts said of Parnas: “The credibility of a witness clearly depends on which side of the political aisle you sit, because the Democrats were happy to have Lev Parnas testify there in person. He’s been in jail for wire fraud, among other things, but Jason Galanis, who’s currently in jail, oh, he had no credibility. So, I mean, pick and choose your villains here, right?”
It's convenient how Fox suddenly develops journalistic standards when the claims Parnas is making no longer fit the network’s anti-Biden narratives.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
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While we were all parsing the idiocy of Judge Aileen Cannon, presidential primary votes were being counted in several states around the nation this week. Okay, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump wrapped up enough delegates to secure their nominations last week, so turnout was probably not that great. But an argument could be made that the results of primaries that don’t really matter tell us more than results of primaries that do. Once the nomination is in the bag for candidates, it’s their hard core supporters who turn out to vote in the rest of the primaries.
So how did Republican nominee Donald Trump do? I don’t think you’re going to be surprised to hear that his support among Republican primary voters is still sagging, and in the states where comparisons can be made to his 2020 results – recall that many Republican primaries and caucuses were canceled because of COVID in 2020 – his support is lagging.
Let’s take Illinois and Florida, both of which managed to hold 2020 primaries. Yesterday in Illinois, Trump received 80 percent of the vote against Haley’s 14 percent and DeSantis with 2.8. In Florida, which Trump now calls his home state, Trump got 81 percent yesterday, while Haley pulled down 14 percent. The state’s governor, DeSantis, got 3.7 percent of the vote.
But that’s not the news that should have their numbers scaring Trump. In 2020, Trump won 96 percent of the Illinois primary vote, and in Florida, he won 94 percent. So, he’s running 16 points behind his 2020 numbers in Illinois and 13 percent behind his 2020 total in Florida. His lagging numbers don’t count in solidly Democratic Illinois, which Biden will carry easily in November.
But folks, Haley and De Santis aren’t even running anymore, and between them they managed to get 17.7 percent of the primary vote in Florida.
In Kansas, it was worse. Trump won 75.5 percent of the vote. Haley won 16 percent, and get this, 5.2 percent of Kansas Republicans voted for none of the names shown, which was also an option on the Kansas ballot.
In Arizona, a state Biden won in a tight race in 2020, Trump is also in big trouble. Trump won 77.9 percent of the vote, while Haley and DeSantis, neither of whom campaigned in the state or had campaign operations there, combined to get 20 percent of Arizona Republicans to vote against Trump.
We are looking at a significant anti-Trump vote, and it’s among Republicans. Arizona is a battleground state this year, as it was in 2020, so every vote is going to count. And Donald Trump can’t even convince 20 percent of Republicans to vote for him in the primary.
In Georgia, another battleground state that went to Biden by a slim margin in 2020, Trump managed 84.5 percent of the vote in the primary last week, while 13.2 percent of Republican voters decided they would vote for someone whose campaign for president isn’t even operating anymore – Nikki Haley.
Trump’s numbers were terrible in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire while Haley was still running. In both states Trump lost over 40 percent of the vote to Haley, and in South Carolina, he lost about the same percentage to her again.
That the anti-Trump Republican vote is still hanging on even after he’s become the nominee means that a significant percentage of Republicans are sending a message to the man who’s going to be asking them to turn out for him in November. At least some of them have already made up their minds they won’t vote for him in November, which means they probably won’t turn out to vote at all, so they’re lost to him. But it’s the rest of what the pundits are calling “the Haley voters” who have got to worry Trump the most. They are probably prepared to hold their noses and vote for Trump in November, but if something happens between now and then that bothers them, like a loss in a criminal trial in New York or some sort of sweating, babbling breakdown at a rally even the New York Times will be forced to put on its front page, Trump is bound to lose more of those voters.
In a presidential race that one pundit after another is saying will come down to several hundred thousand voters in a few states, there isn’t any way these primary vote totals are good news for the Donald Trump for president campaign.
Trump is being reminded week after week that he can lose this election. His fund raising is sick and getting sicker. He’s facing multiple felony counts in multiple jurisdictions. His rally rants are getting weirder and wilder.
It’s starting to get to him. Watch this space.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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