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Moms for Liberty founders, Tiffany Justice, left, and Tina Descovich

After '60 Minutes' Debacle, Mom For Liberty Scurries To Bannon 'War Room'

Following a disastrous interview on 60 Minutes, Tiffany Justice – a co-founder of the extremist group Moms for Liberty – retreated to the friendlier terrain of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast in an attempt to mitigate the damage she’d done to her organization.

Bannon and Justice spent nearly 11 minutes criticizing CBS’ Scott Pelley for supposedly subjecting the anti-LGBTQ activist to unfair scrutiny, primarily by reading Moms for Liberty’s own tweets to her and asking for her response. At one point, Pelley asked Justice and her fellow Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich what they meant by “grooming.” At another, Pelley asked for clarification on what ideology they claimed kids were being indoctrinated into. Justice and Descovich responded by dodging and retreating to their standard talking points.

It’s no surprise that Justice sought to clean up her mess using Bannon’s show. She usedWar Room and other right-wing media programs to build up Moms for Liberty in 2021 and 2022, and then leveraged that growth into a series of friendly mainstream media profiles and interviews. Now, as parents and communities become more aware of her organization’s extreme, anti-LGBTQ and anti-Black positions, they are fighting back, as demonstrated in the 60 Minutes segment.

During the War Room interview, Justice accused 60 Minutes of deceptively editing her responses.

“You’re saying they selectively edited out your answers?” Bannon asked.

“Yeah, they wanted to make it seem like Tina and I didn’t know what we were talking about, I guess,” Justice responded.

On X (formerly Twitter) Descovich posted what she claimed were excerpts from the official transcript of the interview, purportedly exposing CBS’s omissions. The only problem with the Moms for Liberty counter-narrative is that the exchanges Descovich posted were just as incoherent as the responses CBS aired.

“If there are any lawyers watching this and you’d like to try to help me to navigate dealing with 60 Minutes, I’m open to ideas,” Justice said later in the interview. “But I’ve been talking with a few and trying to figure out —”

“Are you thinking of suing 60 Minutes?” Bannon interjected.

“I want to make sure I’m releasing information in a legal way,” Justice responded.

Bannon also said CBS was trying to make Moms for Liberty look like “bad and evil people, that are hurting people, bullies, whatever you want to call it,” as though that were self-evidently false. Unsurprisingly, Bannon didn’t mention the myriad examples of Moms for Liberty harassing and intimidating teachers and administrators, including an incident where Justice’s conduct was “so disruptive and disrespectful,” according to a superintendent, that she “could be barred from the campus.”

Later in the War Room segment, Bannon told Justice that Moms for Liberty was “trending” on X and that “one of the terms is Klansman Karenhood,” adding, “They’re trying to say you’re the new Klan.”

“They are out to destroy you,” Bannon said to conclude the interview. Despite Bannon’s trademark bombast, it might just be that parents and teachers are opposed to a group that has repeatedly quoted Hitler and attempts to ban books in schools.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Conspiracy Theorists Defame Religious Charities That Aid Migrants

Conspiracy Theorists Defame Religious Charities That Aid Migrants

Right-wing media figures have ramped up their attacks on charities and NGOs that help resettle refugees and assist asylum-seekers as part of a broader campaign to demonize migrants and the Biden administration’s immigration policies. These types of broadsides go back years, but have increased recently as fearmongering about immigration becomes a central plank in Republicans’ 2024 electoral strategy.

Non-governmental organizations and charities, like Catholic Charities and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, have long assisted the federal government in welcoming refugees and other new arrivals to the United States and easing their transition. At its best, this system facilitates the smooth integration of people into communities ready to accept them, as was the case in mass resettlement of Ukrainian refugees following Russia’s invasion of their country two years ago.

This largely decentralized system has its weaknesses, though, primarily stemming from a lack of strong coordination at the federal level. Xenophobic and opportunistic politicians have been able to fill that vacuum and manufacture a crisis, exemplified by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to bus tens of thousands of migrants to cities like New York, Chicago, and Denver with the apparent goal of creating a crisis in Democrat-led cities in order to score political points.

That manufactured crisis has created an opportunity for right-wing media outlets to attack the organizations tasked with helping refugees and asylum-seekers. Recently, some right-wing figures have promoted a conspiracy theory claiming that these NGOs and charities are engaged in what amounts to an extortion racket, fueling migration in the hopes of inflating federal spending on the issue and capturing the additional money.

In reality, the money that comes from the federal government that these groups spend has been specifically allocated by Congress. Without providing any evidence, right-wing figures make wild assertions that migrant organizations are enriching themselves at the expense of the American public. Todd Bensman, a senior fellow at anti-immigrant think tank the Center for Immigration Studies, has also pushed this myth. (CIS is part of the Tanton network, a constellation of xenophobic organizations funded by John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center refers to as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.”)

In February alone, right-wing figures have attacked charities and NGOs that provide direct services to immigrants over a dozen times. It’s notable that this messaging is largely the same whether it’s coming from fringe sources, like Infowars, or conservative outlets which are ostensibly more respectable, like Fox. The narrative has also appeared on CNN, pushed by a former NYPD officer.

  • On February 1, a correspondent for conspiracy theory site Infowars described a new facility opened by Mission: Border Hope, a Methodist church, as a place where “the migrants are being bussed and processed and then distributed across the country.” The correspondent, Chase Geiser, then said the organization was “one example of sort of a mysterious NGO that’s involved in this giant industry of distributing migrants all across our country." [Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 2/1/24]
  • The next day, Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade pushed the myth that resettlement organizations are getting rich off of serving migrants. He claimed that “Catholic charities are making a ton of money,” providing migrants with “school supplies” and overcrowding American public schools. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 2/2/24]
  • Former NYPD officer and current CNN analyst John Miller peddled a separate falsehood, blaming a resettlement charity for supposedly helping migrants flee from law enforcement following an altercation in New York City. “Yesterday we learned that they went to a Catholic charity that helps migrants, they got four bus tickets under false names and got on a bus headed for Calexico through St. Louis,” Miller said. All of the suspects later showed up for their court date. [CNN, This Morning, 2/2/24]
  • On the podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, guest Liz Yore said, “The only way that we can do something is to cut off the funding to these NGOs.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 2/2/24]
  • Kilmeade returned to the topic on February 5, claiming, “The other thing that bothers a lot of people is the amount of money that goes to the NGOs, Catholic Charities, and others making a ton.” He repeated that falsehood at least one other time that morning, saying, “Let's talk about the NGOs, Catholic charities. They get huge money to house and provide accommodations to illegal aliens who are trying to get into this country.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 2/5/24; 2/5/24]
    • On The Charlie Kirk Show, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller portrayed social structures to assist new arrivals as nodes in a vast conspiracy. “To understand [immigration], you have to understand the money,” Miller said. “You have to follow the money. You have to follow the NGOs. You have to follow the corporations. You have to follow the Chamber of Commerce. You have to follow all the people who profit off of unchecked immigration.” [Salem Media Group, The Charlie Kirk Show, 2/5/24]
    • Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, referred to “funding for NGOs” as a “poison pill” that should be removed from a border militarization bill that was already a wishlist of right-wing priorities. [Fox News, America Reports, 2/7/24]
    • Charlie Kirk suggested that liberal philanthropist George Soros was personally shaking down Arizona for supposed resettlement funding it had received from the federal government. “Makes you wonder, what is George Soros doing in Arizona if it's true, and sounds like it was,” Kirk said. “Maybe he's, you know, meeting with a lot of the NGOs that he's funding on the border. Maybe he's getting an update about pouring money into the state.” [Salem Media Group, The Charlie Kirk Show,2/12/24]
    • On War Room, guest Jackie Toboroff baselessly suggested resettlement organizations were arming migrants. “We don't even know where they're getting their weapons,” Toboroff said, referring to migrants. “Are our politicians giving them to these illegal aliens? Is it the NGOs?” Toboroff did not cite any evidence to back up the claim that migrants are “sitting on stockpiles of weapons and drugs.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 2/13/24]
    • Blogger Peachy Keenan said on Fox News, “Catholic charities spend billions of dollars, taxpayer money that the federal government gives them, to fly people over to Central America and sort of get them into this country, and they set them up. And we are paying for it.” [Fox News, Fox News at Night, 2/21/24]
    • On War Room, Bannon said in reference to the refugee resettlement organization HIAS: “They got the Hebrew group that used to get the poor Jews out of the Russia with the pogroms, and Poland with the pogroms, and now they're there to exacerbate the invasion on our southern border.” Bannon then said, “These NGOs are demons” and “anti-American.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 2/26/24]
    • Retired NYPD officer and Fox News contributor Paul Mauro echoed the line Bensman and others had pushed. “If you look down deep enough, the NGOs and the faith-based institutions that are running the buses and running the sponsorships, they can't let this go because the money is coming from the American taxpayer,” Mauro said. [Fox News, America Reports, 2/26/24]
    • Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy similarly cast resettlement groups as malevolent actors in a broader conspiracy. “They are part of the journey all the way into Latin America, all the way into where they fly everyone out into the cities,” Campos-Duff said. She added: “[NGOs] sound like they’re a charity because they’re associated with Catholic relief services or Lutheran relief services. But the real way to understand them is to see them as a shadow government, a shadow bureaucracy, even a shadow political party, they are able to operate in secrecy and do what the government can’t do with no oversight.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 2/27/24]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

'Hellfire Missiles' For Mexico: Anti-Migrant Rhetoric Escalates At CPAC

'Hellfire Missiles' For Mexico: Anti-Migrant Rhetoric Escalates At CPAC

Anti-migrant rhetoric took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference as right-wing pundits and politicians unleashed a torrent of xenophobia over the course of several days, signaling the central role that nativism will likely play in the 2024 presidential election.

With former President Donald Trump now the de facto Republican presidential candidate, the entire right-wing media ecosystem has embraced his signature anti-immigrant positions. At CPAC, which took place just outside of Washington, D.C., this week, speakers baselessly blamed migrants for a host of perceived social ills and proposed radical policies to punish them and their home countries.

Fox News contributor Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, pledged that his former boss would bomb Mexican drug cartels if given a second term.

“President Trump will declare them a terrorist organization, he will send a Hellfire rocket down there, and he’ll take the cartels out,” Homan said.

Even though launching missiles at the United States' neighbor and largest trading partner poses a number of obvious risks, Homan has long supported designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations to empower federal law enforcement to wage war against cartels on their home soil. Under Trump, Homan was one of the architects of the administration’s family separation policy, and he has extensive ties to the nativist Tanton network.

During a panel discussion about immigration, Homan — who has promised to return to government if Trump gets reelected and once again nominates him to lead ICE — repeated his promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in the country’s history.

"For the millions of illegal aliens that have been released in this country — don’t get too comfortable, because we’re coming looking for you,” Homan threatened. “There has to be an historic deportation operation at the end of historic illegal immigration,” he added.

Trump adviser Stephen Miller made similarly extreme comments and repeated his call for the military to establish “large-scale staging grounds for removal” of migrants. In Miller’s telling, “You grab illegal immigrants, and then you move them to the staging grounds, and that’s where the planes are waiting.”

“The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border, and to say ‘No one can cross here at all,’” Miller added.

If a future Trump administration attempted to enact Miller’s policy wish list, it would almost certainly run into a number of legal, diplomatic, and logistical obstacles — not least of all that federal law bars the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement.

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles dismissed the central role immigration played in the development of the United States.

“We are told that we must tolerate the destruction of our borders, and the invasion of our country, because we are a nation of immigrants,” Knowles said. "As a matter of history, we are not, in fact, a nation of immigrants,” he added.

Knowles is exactly wrong, though he is correct that the United States has a long history of anti-immigrant bigotry.

Last year, Knowles said that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” a comment he referenced in his speech this year, folding it into his anti-immigrant rant.

“We know the difference between a man and a woman,” Knowles said. “We know the difference between an American and everyone else.”

Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and current hopeful to co-run the Republican National Committee, fearmongered about the “millions and millions of people flooding into our country illegally” across the southern border who have been “given a red carpet rollout and reception by Joe and Kamala."

Ben Carson, who served as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Trump, warned that immigration is an existential threat to the United States.

Carson asserted: “Our leaders are determined to repeat every mistake that led to the collapse of empires before us.” Among those mistakes, he cited “mass immigration and infiltration by foreigners who don't share our values and culture or even our language."

For months, Trump and his advisers have previewed extreme plans to deploy the military and use law enforcement to deport as many as 10 million people living in the United States without authorization. The speakers at CPAC are joining others in right-wing media in helping to lay the foundation for that horrifying proposition — to standing ovations from an audience that demands nothing less.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Right-Wing Media

Right-Wing Media Escalate 'Civil War' Threat Over Supreme Court's Border Decision

In response to a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing Border Patrol agents to cut razor wire Texas laid along the border with Mexico, right-wing pundits are claiming the Biden administration has sparked a second American Civil War. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, two members of the court’s conservative block, sided with the three liberal justices in ruling for the federal government.

The issue stems from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to stretch razor wire over dozens of miles along the state’s southern border, a cruel policy that has failed in its stated objective of deterring unauthorized border crossings. The Biden administration opposes the measures, and has ordered the Border Patrol to remove the barriers. The stand-off between Border Patrol and the Texas National Guard escalated earlier this month, with federal officials blaming Abbott for the deaths of a mother and her two children who drowned in the Rio Grande. (Texas authorities dispute this version of events.)

For his part, Gov. Abbott pledged that Texas will “continue to deploy this razor wire to repel illegal immigration.” Although it may appear that Abbott is in direct defiance of the Supreme Court, the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explained that the ruling overturned an “order saying Border Patrol COULDN’T remove Texas razor wire to process migrants. It didn’t affirmatively rule that the Border Patrol COULD remove Texas razor wire.” Or, as the New Republic's Matt Ford put it, the Supreme Court “lifted an injunction” on the Department of Homeland Security, so there's “nothing in this case for Texas to obey or defy at the moment.”

This simmering confrontation is the new backdrop for an old story. During election years, conservative media outlets generally ramp up their attacks on immigrants. Separately, over the last year, conservatives have become increasingly comfortable calling for, threatening, or warning about a coming civil war in the country. Responses to the recent court ruling have married these two trends.

As the news broke on January 22, conservative YouTube streamer Tim Pool said it “looks like a Fort Sumter-esque type scenario,” referencing the first battle of the Civil War, adding that “it does feel like it could be escalating to this federal versus state conflict.”

That evening, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson posted on X (formerly Twitter), asking: “Where are the men of Texas? Why aren’t they protecting their state and the nation?”

The same night, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) wrote that “the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.”

Then on January 23, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon appeared to favorably reference that post, saying “as Clay Higgins said” there is “kind of a civil war between the federal government and the state of Texas.”

Hours later, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk fantasized about Gov. Abbott openly defying the court’s ruling at the barrel of a gun.

“So someone says right here, ‘Charlie, what would happen if Texas ignores the ruling? Will the government go to war with Texas?’” he asked.

“The federal government would come in, and some people would say, ‘Well, that's the seeds of a civil war.’ Is that what you want? Where does this end?” Kirk added moments later. “By the way, I'm all on board.”

“If we had an actual governor of Texas that was willing — 100% defy this,” Kirk continued, before advising Abbott on the logistics.

“If you're going to defy, here's how it works: press conference flanked by your most loyal Texas Rangers. ‘I am ignoring the Supreme Court's decision,’” Kirk said, adopting Abbott’s point of view. “‘I will enforce the border of Texas. If you're going to arrest me, you have to go through the Texas Rangers.’”

“If we had more governors on the border, it would be even more powerful,” he added, implicitly invoking the Confederacy. “Get every red state on board. Fly in every Republican governor.”

On Wednesday afternoon Abbott issued a statement invoking “Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” which he claimed is “the supreme law of the land.” Throughout the day, at least nine governors backed Abbott on X, even if they fell short of Kirk’s demand that they travel to the border. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp all posted their support for Texas, as did Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

In the same episode, Kirk told his audience that they had “better buy weapons,” and “have a lot of guns at your disposal.”

That afternoon, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh echoed Kirk. “Red state governors will need to ignore the Supreme Court and do what needs to be done to protect their citizens and the border,” Walsh said. He later added, “The last civil war was unimaginable until it wasn't.”

In the early evening, Bannon returned to the topic with guest Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). “That Supreme Court decision that was made has now put the federal government at war with the state of Texas,” Greene said.

“If they fund a war in Ukraine when Zelensky is raising the white flag, asking for peace talks in Switzerland, and they weaken our border policy while the federal government is at war with Texas, that is truly, possibly the start of a civil war in this country,” she added.

Blaze TV’s Steve Deace also invoked the memory of the Civil War. “Basically, the Supreme Court has told Texas your choices are: be invaded or secede,” Deace said.

On January 25, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade adopted the same framing on Fox & Friends.

“It feels like almost like a soft civil war,” Kilmeade said. “You’ve got all the Republicans saying, ‘Can we secure our borders?’ the Democrats saying, ‘I want this to go away’ and blaming Republicans, the President against the governor of Texas — the most independent state in the union. I mean, this is getting a little crazy.”

Fox News sounded little different than the fringe. “This is a constitutional crisis,” said conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in a video titled: “Supreme Court Decision Provokes Civil War in Texas.”

The story was the same in the right-wing blogosphere, too, with conservative news site PJ Media asking, “Is Joe Biden Mounting a Civil War at the Border?”

Conservative influencer Jordan Peterson posted: “So is it the case that @TheDemocrats are truly ready to go to war with Texas?”

While right-wing media figures fantasize about a new civil war, their rhetoric has real implications for immigration policy. They are stoking xenophobia and nativism, and endorsing cruel policies that are already injuring and killing some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Steve Bannon

How Right-Wing Media Promoted Big Lies About January 6 (VIDEO)

Multiple organizations tied to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon were listed for the first time in a superseding indictment against his longtime associate Miles Guo, a Chinese businessman facing a litany of charges in the Southern District of New York.

The ties between Guo and Bannon have long been known, but the new court document provides additional clarity about Guo’s alleged conspiracy, which the indictment says defrauded victims of approximately $1 billion. It could also signal increased legal exposure for Bannon, who has been financially intertwined with Guo since at least 2018.

The updated indictment alleges that Guo — also known as Guo Wengui and Ho Wan Kwok — used social media company Gettr, media outlet G News, the supposed government-in-exile New Federal State of China in a conspiracy to defraud his victims and furnish his lavish lifestyle.

Bannon is linked with each of these organizations, none of which were listed as directly implicated entities in the original indictment.

Most significantly, Bannon has long been a champion of Gettr, a far-right competitor to X (formerly known as Twitter). The Washington Post reported that Bannon’s War Room podcast had received $50,000 from Gettr as late as December 2022.

“One of the things about Miles, in my time of knowing him — just the, you know, the music, the fashion, G News, GTV, association with Gettr, all these things you see popping off has been such successes really in such a short period of time,” Bannon said in a November 17, 2021, interview on Guo’s GTV.

That was just one of many instances where Bannon hyped Guo’s G News and its related media property GTV.

“G News and GTV, great article today, comes out that GTV, Miles Guo, Steve Bannon, saving western civilization,” Bannon said. “Hey, I don’t know if I’d go that far but let’s say this: I’m so proud of G News and GTV for stepping up.”

Their alliance extended beyond media ventures and into the realm of political organizing. In June 2020, Guo and Bannon jointly launched the New Federal State of China, billed as an initiative to counter the Chinese government. As Media Matters reported following Guo’s initial indictment, Bannon praised the New Federal State of China and other Guo properties in a joint panel appearance the following year.

“The New Federal State, the whistleblower movement, the Rule of Law Society and Foundation, Gettr, G Fashion, all this — what the world is seeing is a new China and a new Chinese,” Bannon said.

Following the announcement of the initial indictment, Media Matters reported that Bannon promoted Guo’s cryptocoin and exchange platform, which the SDNY alleges were central to the Chinese businessman’s scheme.

Bannon also served on the board of the nonprofit Rule of Law Society — founded by Guo — but left at some point in the summer of 2020, and agreed to serve as chairman of Guo’s Rule of Law Fund. Like the New Federal State of China, both initiatives were aimed at undermining the Chinese government.

In August 2020 Bannon was arrested on Guo’s superyacht by the U.S. Postal Service for alleged fraud connected to a scheme to build a wall at the U.S. southern border. The trial is set for May of this year in New York state court. (As one of former President Donald Trump’s last acts in office, he pardoned Bannon on related federal charges.)

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Longtime Bannon Associate Miles Guo Hit With Racketeering Charges

Longtime Bannon Associate Miles Guo Hit With Racketeering Charges

Multiple organizations tied to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon were listed for the first time in a superseding indictment against his longtime associate Miles Guo, a Chinese businessman facing a litany of charges in the Southern District of New York.

The ties between Guo and Bannon have long been known, but the new court document provides additional clarity about Guo’s alleged conspiracy, which the indictment says defrauded victims of approximately $1 billion. It could also signal increased legal exposure for Bannon, who has been financially intertwined with Guo since at least 2018.

The updated indictment alleges that Guo — also known as Guo Wengui and Ho Wan Kwok — used social media company Gettr, media outlet G News, the supposed government-in-exile New Federal State of China in a conspiracy to defraud his victims and furnish his lavish lifestyle.

Bannon is linked with each of these organizations, none of which were listed as directly implicated entities in the original indictment.

Most significantly, Bannon has long been a champion of Gettr, a far-right competitor to X (formerly known as Twitter). The Washington Post reported that Bannon’s War Room podcast had received $50,000 from Gettr as late as December 2022.

“One of the things about Miles, in my time of knowing him — just the, you know, the music, the fashion, G News, GTV, association with Gettr, all these things you see popping off has been such successes really in such a short period of time,” Bannon said in a November 17, 2021, interview on Guo’s GTV.

That was just one of many instances where Bannon hyped Guo’s G News and its related media property GTV.

“G News and GTV, great article today, comes out that GTV, Miles Guo, Steve Bannon, saving western civilization,” Bannon said. “Hey, I don’t know if I’d go that far but let’s say this: I’m so proud of G News and GTV for stepping up.”

Their alliance extended beyond media ventures and into the realm of political organizing. In June 2020, Guo and Bannon jointly launched the New Federal State of China, billed as an initiative to counter the Chinese government. As Media Matters reported following Guo’s initial indictment, Bannon praised the New Federal State of China and other Guo properties in a joint panel appearance the following year.

“The New Federal State, the whistleblower movement, the Rule of Law Society and Foundation, Gettr, G Fashion, all this — what the world is seeing is a new China and a new Chinese,” Bannon said.

Following the announcement of the initial indictment, Media Matters reported that Bannon promoted Guo’s cryptocoin and exchange platform, which the SDNY alleges were central to the Chinese businessman’s scheme.

Bannon also served on the board of the nonprofit Rule of Law Society — founded by Guo — but left at some point in the summer of 2020, and agreed to serve as chairman of Guo’s Rule of Law Fund. Like the New Federal State of China, both initiatives were aimed at undermining the Chinese government.

In August 2020 Bannon was arrested on Guo’s superyacht by the U.S. Postal Service for alleged fraud connected to a scheme to build a wall at the U.S. southern border. The trial is set for May of this year in New York state court. (As one of former President Donald Trump’s last acts in office, he pardoned Bannon on related federal charges.)

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

How Fox Invented A Fake Terrorist Attack To Demonize Muslims

Fabricating Fear: How Fox Invented A Fake Terrorist Attack To Demonize Muslims

Fox News falsely reported last Wednesday that a car accident at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara, New York, was an act of terrorism. Much of the network’s coverage was based on reporting from correspondent Alexis McAdams, who attributed her information — later debunked — to anonymous law enforcement sources. A close look at Fox’s treatment of this event shows how the network manufactured a terrorist event out of thin air, and then blamed it on Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and their supporters.

Fox News personalities and guests made at least 97 claims alleging or speculating that the crash was an act of terrorism or an attack from when the incident happened at 11:30 a.m. ET, until about approximately 5:15 p.m. ET, when Gov. Hochul stated that the explosion was not related to terrorism. From when the network first began reporting the crash, around 1:15 p.m. ET, through Gov. Hochul's statement, Fox News aired 1 hour and 45 minutes of on-screen text that speculated that the car crash at the U.S.-Canada border was an act of terrorism or an attack. Several Fox guests and personalities backpedaled their statements over the course of the timeframe.

The incident occurred on November 22, one of the busiest travel days of the year, at a border checkpoint between the United States and Canada. By 9:40 p.m. ET Wednesday evening, the FBI had concluded its investigation, determining that “no terrorism nexus was identified.” Local police have now taken over the investigation, and a cause of the crash has yet to be released. The Niagara police chief criticized media outlets for spreading misinformation about the crash, which he said had “created significant and unnecessary anxiety in the community.”

Right-wing media outlets including Fox News have consistently fearmongered about the purported threat of Muslims and Arabs looking to cross into the United States to carry out violence following an attack in Israel on October 7 by the armed wing of Hamas, the Palestinian organization that governs the occupied Gaza Strip. An estimated 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack; Israel responded with a bombardment and invasion of Gaza that has reportedly killed more than 14,000 Palestinians, an estimated 10,000 of whom are women and children. Incidents of anti-Muslim discrimination in the United States have skyrocketed over this period.

Fox quickly suggests Niagara crash was terrorism

Fox News was an early source to falsely claim the accident in Niagara was an act of terrorism, with the clear implication that it had been carried out by Islamists.

“High level police sources tell me this is an attempted terrorist attack,” Fox’s McAdams posted on X (formerly Twitter) at 1:53 p.m. ET on Wednesday, November 22. “Sources say the car was full of explosives. Both men inside dead.” By 3:16 p.m. ET, The New York Times reported, “A preliminary investigation has found that the car did not contain explosives,” which users on X added to McAdams’ post as a community note.

Fox's claim spreads, and a Fox anchor suggests Hamas may be to blame

McAdams’ post spread fast. Fox News border reporter Bill Melugin shared McAdams’ post to his more than 350,000 followers and made his own post paraphrasing and citing his colleague. Melugin later deleted that post, but his repost of McAdams’ initial message is still viewable on his timeline.

Around the same time, Fox News anchor John Roberts read McAdams’ reporting on air, including information not contained in her post.

“Alexis McAdams is reporting that according to high-level police sources, the explosion was an attempted terrorist attack,” Roberts said. “A lot of explosives in the vehicle at the time, the two people who were in the car are deceased, one Border Patrol officer was injured. Driving from the U.S. apparently to Canada, and were trying to drive toward the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] building.”

Roberts also suggested that Hamas might be behind the attack, claiming the “unrest in the Middle East that has spilled out past Israel” means there “could be operatives in this country sympathetic to terrorists who want to send a message here in the United States.”

Supercharged misinformation

From there it was off to the races, as other Fox News on-air talent and guests began pushing the narrative that the incident was an act of terrorism. “When you are talking about radical Islamic terrorism and the attacks against the United States, this has happened before," said senior correspondent Eric Shawn.

During the 2 p.m. hour of America Reports, Roberts speculated whether the two people involved were "acting alone” or if the explosion was “part of a larger plot.”

“How long have these people been in the country — are they American, are they foreign-born, are they radicalized, are they just trying to make a statement here?” he continued. “I mean, there’s so many possibilities.”

McAdams joined the program as well, reporting that there may have been a “second car possibly involved” and that the original car was “full of explosives, according to those high-level sources.” She added that “there’s going to be big crowds of people coming here to New York City for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade," insinuating it could be a target, and also repeated that the explosion was “a planned terrorist attack, according to high-level police sources who were on the ground."

Former Homeland Security adviser suggests “jihadists” may be behind it

Later that hour, former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend suggested, like Shawn before her, that Hamas or another group of “jihadists” may be to blame.

“We don't know yet whether or not this is attributed — can be attributed to Hamas or another terrorist group, but I will tell you from our own experience we know that this sort of bomb, this kind of a vehicle bomb is sort of a classic technique of, you know, jihadists,” Townsend said. “So I don't think law enforcement yet understands who it was or what the intended target was, but the detonation of an explosive, a vehicle explosive this size, is regrettably — look, there could have been many more casualties — but as I say, very much a hallmark of jihadists.”

Roberts interviewed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who used the opportunity to go on an anti-migrant tirade. “We have a number of people, by the tens of thousands, who have entered this country with bad intentions,” Ramaswamy said.

Fox reporter stands by the terrorism claim even as it falls apart, before finally retracting it

At 4 p.m. ET, McAdams joinedYour World with Neil Cavuto to double down on her initial reporting, only to then retract it — all over the course of a few minutes.

“We’ve been checking in with police sources who were very confident just in the past hour or so saying that they believe this was a terrorist attack there, at that border crossing,” McAdams said. But the story had already started to fall apart.“
The bomb techs, who have lots of experience, thought that this was an explosive — that the car, I was told, had explosives in it, several explosives were in that vehicle,” she continued. “Now they’re backing that up, saying it was the way that the car landed that caused such an explosion.

”Finally, McAdams was forced to retract her initial claims. “We started seeing those conflicting reports, but that’s what happens with breaking news,” McAdams said. “They get new information, they give it to us, and we bring it back to the viewers.”

“So as of now, they’ve walked back that it was a possible terrorist attack,” she concluded.

Even after the report was retracted, Fox used the crash to attack Palestinians and migrants

Still, McAdams’ walkback didn’t prevent Fox from continuing to weaponize the incident against Palestinians and migrants.

On The Ingraham Angle, guest host Jason Chaffetz acknowledged the explosion might not have been an act of terrorism, but used it to argue for a nativist immigration policy anyway.

“Today's explosion at the border, regardless of the motive behind it, is a chilling reminder that we are all on high alert and living in a post-9/11 mindset, which means that our borders need to be secure,” Chaffetz said, adding, that the Biden administration doesn’t “have the political will to actually shut down the border."

Later that evening, Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany insinuated that it was only natural to assume the explosion was tied to Hamas or connected with Palestinian solidarity demonstrations.

“The crash was so fierce and in such a sensitive location that everyone's mind of course went to the same place — terror,” McEnany said on Jesse Watters Primetime. “With war in the Middle East, violent domestic protests, radicals calling for days of jihad, the FBI director telling us to be vigilant — we are all on edge.”

Fox's false reporting spread beyond Fox

McAdams’ misinformation reached far beyond the confines of Fox News.

On The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, host Clay Travis interviewed former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie about the incident, also citing McAdam’s reporting. “Alexis McAdams, who is at Fox News, says: 'High-level police sources tell me this is an attempted terror attack,'” Travis told his listeners.

“This should not be surprising to any of us,” Christie concluded.

On X, a paid X Premium account called The Insider Paper posted Fox News’ supposed confirmation that the car crash was an “attempted terrorist attack,” which was reposted by right-wing media figures including Richard Grenell and Colin Rugg, racking up thousands of reposts and millions of views.

Right-wing sites American Greatness, The Gateway Pundit, The Daily Caller, and PJ Media also amplified McAdams’ false report, only to be forced to update their stories after she retracted her initial claims.

There was no terrorist attack at the U.S.-Canadian border on Wednesday, November 22. But Fox News’ manufactured panic was very real, and risks exacerbating the threats that Muslims and Arabs in the United States already face.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original programming on Fox News Channel for any of the terms “U.S,” “America,” “Canada,” “New York,” “Ontario,” “Niagara,” “Buffalo,” “border,” “rainbow,” “bridge,” “cross,” “checkpoint,” “FBI,” “CPB,” or “Villani” (including misspellings) within close proximity if any of the terms “car,” “vehicle,” “sedan,” “luxury,” “Bentley,” “crash,” “blast,” or “flame” of any variations of any of the terms “explosion,” “fire,” or “terror” from 11:30 a.m. ET November 22, 2023, when a luxury vehicle fatally crashed into a checkpoint at the U.S.-Canada border, through approximately 5:15 p.m. ET November 22, 2023, when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul held a press conference indicating that the crash was not a terror attack.

We included claims, which we defined as instances when an uninterrupted block of speech from a single speaker speculated that the car crash at the U.S.-Canada border was an act of terrorism. For host monologues, correspondent reports, and headlines, we considered a single claim to be the speech between played clips or read quotes. We did not consider the speech within the clip or quote unless a speaker in the segment positively affirmed said speech either directly before or after the clip was played or the quote was read.

We also manually scanned all video on Fox News Channel from 1:15 p.m. ET November 22, 2023, when the network first reported on the crash, through approximately 5:15 p.m. ET November 22, 2023, and timed all visual chyrons that speculated that the car crash at the U.S.-Canada border was an act of terrorism.

We rounded all times to the nearest minute.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Nancy Pelosi and ​Paul Pelosi

Violent Pelosi Attacker Was An Avid Consumer Of Far-Right Media

The man who bludgeoned Paul Pelosi, husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer last October admitted at trial that he consumed right-wing media produced by Tim Pool, Glenn Beck, anti-LGBTQ activist James Lindsay, and others.

On Thursday, David DePape was found guilty of “one count of assault on the immediate family member of a federal official, and a second count of attempted kidnapping of a federal official,” according to CNN. He had pleaded not guilty to both charges, and now could face decades in prison.

DePape took the stand on Tuesday to explain his transformation from liberal to conspiracy theory-minded conservative who embraced beliefs similar to the QAnon movement. According to SFist, “It was Lindsay who convinced him that there are academics out there trying to poisong the nation's children and indoctrinate them into some sex cult.” The QAnon conspiracy theory holds that a cabal of elite liberals are engaged in a global conspiracy to kidnap, traffick, and sexually abuse children.

Lindsay has a long record of promoting anti-LGBTQ bigotry. He has repeatedly violated the terms of service of X (formerly Twitter) by spreading the “groomer” myth, which alleges that gay, trans, and nonbinary adults are a threat to children. In one instance, Proud Boys showed up at a public library hosting a drag event three days after Lindsay posted “ok groomer” in response to the library’s promotional tweet. Last December, he claimed that drag queens were attempting to provoke conservatives to murder them in order to spark a national uprising similar to the summer of 2020. “You guys remember George Floyd?” Lindsay said, “The goal is to have Drag Floyd.”

DePape was also apparently a fan of prominent YouTube streamer Tim Pool, making him at least the second person who has recently committed political violence to have specifically mentioned Pool’s show. In May, a man in Allen, Texas, shot and killed eight people and injured seven in an outlet mall. As the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, the shooter had posted several screenshots of Pool’s show, Timcast IRL, to X. Pool has a history of platforming racists, antisemites, and other extremists, and apparently found it funny that the Texas shooter liked his show. Like Lindsay, Pool has baselessly accused people of being pedophiles.

Just months before DePape attacked Pelosi, he might also have heard The Blaze’s Glenn Beck fantasize about the good old days when “a kid could go in and buy a handgun” and a “box of bullets” without so much as a note from their parents. What changed, according to Beck, was the emergence of “wokeness,” critical race theory, and “bathrooms that anybody can use.” Beck’s attack on “wokeness” and CRT are clear examples of anti-Black racism, and his panic about bathrooms is explicitly anti-trans.

Although there’s no evidence to suggest DePape watched Fox News, the network has consistently exploited his actions to push conspiracy theories and insinuate that the police or the Pelosis were involved in a cover-up. Just days after DePape attacked Paul Pelosi, Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth declared that it didn’t “add up” and that “something doesn’t make sense” about the event. Fox News host Jesse Watters went further, spreading the baseless claim that there was a third person involved in the attack. “If we’ve learned anything about the Pelosis, you just got to keep asking questions.”

Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson added more fuel to the fire, repeating the theory about a third person being involved and suggesting that DePape and Pelosi were friends, or potentially secret lovers — a false claim embraced by many in right-wing media. After referencing a retracted claim that DePape had been found “in his underwear,” Carlson said, “You can't blame people watching all of this at home for thinking that maybe there's something weird going on here.”

The following morning, Fox’s so-called “news side” was spreading misinformation as well. “There are a number of unanswered questions regarding the case, like who opened the door for police, and why did Paul Pelosi allegedly describe DePape at one point in a conversation with authorities as ‘a friend’?” Fox correspondent Kevin Corke asked during a segment on Fox & Friends.

Even after authorities released body cam footage, Watters continued to push conspiracy theories. “We still don’t know who opened the door. Was it Paul? Was it the cops?” he asked, “Did they not play that part of the footage in the courtroom? Why is this, such a simple detail, so hard to pin down?"

Now, with DePape at trial and the facts beyond dispute, Watters is using the attack to demonize immigrants and fearmonger about social disorder. “Just a reminder: this DePape maniac shouldn't have been in the country,” Watters said. “He was an illegal alien from Canada using San Francisco as a sanctuary, where he descended into a mentally ill, drug-addicted, bizarre alternative lifestyle — living in a bus and fantasizing about fairies.”

DePape has apologized for his attack on Paul Pelosi. Don’t expect the same from the right-wing media stars whose content DePape consumed, and who have opportunistically taken advantage of his violence.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Steve Bannon

Bannon, Trump, And Cronies Plot To Deploy Military Against American Civilians (VIDEO)

The podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is the media home of a sprawling right-wing effort, known as Project 2025, that’s designed to prepare policy papers and staffing assignments should a Republican win the presidency in next year’s election.

Bannon’s show, War Room, is a hub of election denialism, anti-immigrant bigotry, and promises to carry out retribution against insufficiently loyal Republicans — all hallmarks of former President Donald Trump’s first term in office and his campaign to retake the White House. Although Bannon has at times found himself isolated from Trump, he is once again “one of Trump’s most important advisers,” according to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.

As a leading advocate for the MAGA wing of the conservative movement, Bannon has been a champion of Project 2025, organized by the increasingly far-right think tank The Heritage Foundation. The initiative has brought together more than 80 groups to provide hard-right personnel and white paper proposals for Trump — or another Republican administration — should he win next November.

According to The Washington Post, Trump and his allies at Project 2025 “have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”

From his perch at War Room, Bannon has sought to normalize all of those ideas: deploying the military against protesters, weaponizing the Department of Justice against critics, and replacing the federal civil service with loyalist reactionaries.

Jeffrey Clark, who Trump attempted to install as acting attorney general in January 2021, has been on War Room several times this year and is also reportedly “leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025,” according to the Post. A Heritage spokesperson told the Post that “there are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.”

Heritage’s denial notwithstanding, Clark — who is widely believed to be an unindicted co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment against Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election — has a record of supporting the use of the military to quash dissent. In July, Clark appeared on War Room to explain how he had advocated for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020.

“I was actually summoned up to a meeting, you know, to discuss how to proceed in terms of that — what I would call an insurrection, because it was happening night after night,” Clark recalled to Bannon.

“Remember that [former Attorney General William] Barr is the one who had participated, when he was attorney general, in using the Insurrection Act against the L.A. riots, after the Rodney King case,” Clark said. “Why wasn’t that same aggressiveness used against the riots that were all across the country in the summer of 2020?”

Referring to a memo he’d written to Barr that included “some very creative ideas about how to enforce the law against those rioters,” Clark added, “If you want to see the legal advice I gave, it’s all blacked out,” strongly suggesting he’d supported deploying the military against civilian protesters.

The next month, Smith indicted Trump for his actions to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Clark was reportedly referred to in the indictment as “unindicted co-conspirator 4,” and is alleged to have suggested Trump use the military against civilians. On January 3, 2021, White House Council Patrick Philbin told Clark — who had just accepted the job of acting attorney general — that if the Trump-Clark coup plans went forward, “there would be riots in every major city in the United States."

“Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark responded.

In the Bannon interview from July, Clark also rejected the conventional wisdom that the Department of Justice is — or should be — independent from political pressure from the White House. In Clark’s telling, the DOJ shouldn’t be walled off, as it has been by most presidents following Richard Nixon’s targeting of his enemies during the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s.

Past administrations put in “post-Watergate ‘norms’ that say the president actually can’t make decisions about law enforcement,” Clark said. “It’s ridiculous, it’s unconstitutional, and the reason why they’re having a meltdown, Steve, is that the queen position in the administrative state is the Justice Department.”

“To say that the Justice Department is not independent is sort of the ultimate heresy,” Clark added. “This is all just post-Watergate ‘norms.’ Who cares about post-Watergate norms?”

Clark is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-aligned think tank run by Christian nationalist Russ Vought — another major player in Project 2025 and frequent War Room guest. Vought wrote the second chapter of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a combination manifesto and outline detailing how the coalition would approach the next Republican administration. In his chapter, Vought levies a broad critique of career staffers at executive branch departments and agencies, writing that “many agencies are not only too big and powerful, but also increasingly weaponized against the public and a President who is elected by the people and empowered by the Constitution to govern.”

Vought’s argument flows directly from Bannon’s long-running goal of a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In an interview on War Room, Vought advocated for a change to budgeting rules that would allow Congress to target individual government workers, potentially canceling their funding, slashing their salary, or even firing them. He’s also a proponent of using so-called “Schedule F” to reclassify federal employees as at-will workers, an open attack on public unions and career staffers.

Vought is especially interested in remaking the DOJ into a more explicitly reactionary institution, and his think tank has been clear that its goal is to unleash the FBI against its political enemies. As he told the Post: “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”

On November 6, Bannon floated a name for attorney general who would fit the bill: “Jeff Clark, you're on the short list of being attorney general for Trump, and I mean the very short list.” Bannon pitched Clark for the role at least once earlier this year and has suggested disgraced former national security advisor and QAnon adherent Michael Flynn serve as secretary of defense.

Bannon isn’t just engaging in a fantasy football-style draft though — he has interviewed Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, several times this year. Although that’s a long way from installing Flynn as secretary of defense, it’s a sign that Bannon’s personnel preferences shouldn’t be dismissed simply as the rantings of a crank.

“Let me just say to the [War Room] posse: The posse has landed at Heritage, and, you know, I really respect what your program does,” Dans gushed during an appearance in June. “I’ve been a devotee since 2020.”

Dans added, with a hat tip to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: “He brought me in in April. I started playing the War Room in May. We learned the word ‘based,’ and it's been spreading around the building. But we’re really taking over and infusing America First throughout the whole movement.”

Dans was back on the show in September with a promise to decimate the federal civil service by firing thousands of workers. “With 2025, we’re going to flood the zone,” Dans said, “It’s going to be more than 3,000 people.”

“Schedule F is one of our tools, but really the proposition of Schedule F is just saying: Look, when you come into the office, federal worker, each morning, and you’re in charge of policy, you’re not guaranteed your job when you walk out that afternoon,” Dans continued, “You have to perform. You’re going to become an at-will employee like the rest of us in real life, you know? Let’s make it look a lot more like America."

“Amen,” Bannon repeated as Dans spoke.

According to the Post, one of the top goals of another Trump administration and Project 2025 is investigating “onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former Attorney General William P. Barr.” War Room frequently indulges in these impulses.

On June 12, Bannon baselessly argued that FBI director Christopher Wray and former Attorney General Bill Barr had suppressed evidence that proved Joe Biden and his family had committed financial crimes, thereby installing him in the presidency as the result of an illegitimate election.

“You are freaking guilty of treason,” Bannon said, addressing an imaginary Barr.

Back in January, former Trump advisor and right-wing pundit Sebastian Gorka went after Kelly on War Room. “You are an insult to Quantico,” Gorka said, referring to the Marine base. “You were never a Marine.”

“Go to hell, John Kelly,” he concluded.

“Wow,” Bannon responded.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Heritage Foundation, Once Reputable, Veers Toward Far-Right Fringe

Heritage Foundation, Once Reputable, Veers Toward Far-Right Fringe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Mike Johnson

Mainstream Media Ignore Johnson's Record As Ultra-Right Ideologue

Several mainstream media outlets ignored the anti-LGBTQ history of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), the new Speaker of the House. Johnson was the fourth member up for the role, after Reps. Steve Scalise (R-LA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Tom Emmer (R-MN) all failed to secure it following the ouster of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) more than 20 days ago.

Johnson is a four-term representative and constitutional lawyer who worked to overturn the results of the 2020 election by leading an amicus brief in a Texas lawsuit that would have delayed the electoral vote in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He also voted not to certify the election results in Congress.

Johnson has a long history of anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion extremism, including working as senior legal counsel for the extreme anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. (The group was formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund.)

Since entering Congress, Johnson has introduced a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which would eliminate federal funding for libraries, schools, and other organizations that discussed aspects of gay and trans identities. In July, he argued against parents having access to gender-affirming care for their children, falsely claiming it constituted “abuse and physical harm.” As a member of the Louisiana legislature, he introduced a bill that could have permitted de facto discrimination against gay couples, including allowing landlords to deny rental applications or employers to fire someone in a same-sex relationship. A recent CNN report reveals that Johnson wrote op-eds in which he called homosexuality a “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle,” and called for the criminalization of gay sex.

Johnson has also co-sponsored a bill that would ban abortion nationwide and sued Kentucky for religious discrimination on behalf of Ark Encounter, a creationist theme park. But major U.S. news outlets largely ignored Johnson’s record of anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion positions following his nomination as the GOP House speaker-designate.

Here's a rundown of mainstream media coverage leading up to today's vote:

  • At least two stories in The Wall Street Journal failed to mention Johnson’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election or his anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion positions, instead noting obliquely that he is “known for conservative stances on cultural issues and spending.” A podcast from the Journal also failed to include any of that information.
  • One article from The New York Times also failed to include any of those details.
  • Another Timespiece included Johnson’s role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election. The piece referred to him twice as a “social conservative,” and informed readers that he had “sponsored legislation that would effectively bar the discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity at any institution serving children younger than 10 that receives federal funds.” The story didn’t mention Johnson’s anti-abortion positions or his anti-same-sex marriage stance, but did mention Emmer’s support for marriage equality.
  • An Associated Press article mentioned Johnson’s work to reverse the 2020 election but didn’t include his anti-LGBTQ or anti-abortion stances. Instead, AP characterized Johnson as “deeply religious … with a fiery belief system.” Another AP article included Emmer’s support for federal same-sex marriage equality, but failed to mention Johnson’s opposition to it.
  • One Washington Poststory mentioned Johnson’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, but failed to mention his opposition to marriage equality. The story did mention Emmer’s vote to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and therefore enshrine federal marriage rights for same-sex couples. The Post referred to Johnson as having a “staunchly conservative streak” but didn’t make his anti-LGBTQ positions explicit.
  • A Washington Postanalysis and listicle both mentioned Johnson’s role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election as well as his anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion stances.
  • A USA Todaystory noted that Johnson didn’t vote to certify the 2020 election but failed to mention his authoring of the Texas amicus brief or his anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ positions.

Mainstream outlets have focused much of their attention on the backroom drama engulfing the House Republican Caucus. That’s understandable enough, but it’s a disservice to readers to exclude Johnson’s well-documented history of pushing extreme anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion policies and laws.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Viktor Shokin

Fox News Promotes Crooked Ukraine Prosecutor To Smear Biden

On August 25, Fox News previewed an interview of former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by network host Brian Kilmeade that is set to air in full on August 26. In the preview segment, Shokin accused President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden of “corruption” and “being bribed” to push for the prosecutor’s removal from office in 2016.

In fact, there was widespread agreement at the time across the political spectrum in the United States and the European Union that Shokin should be fired for being soft on corruption, including State Department allegations that Shokin himself was corrupt. Additionally, at the time of his removal, Shokin wasn’t actively investigating Hunter Biden or Burisma, an energy company that had hired Hunter Biden to serve on its board of directors. Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer recently testified that it would have been better for Burisma if the Ukrainian government had kept Shokin because he was unlikely to move against the company.

Shokin’s claims are part of a longstanding smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani on behalf of former President Donald Trump, which ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment. Fox News knew Shokin’s claims were baseless then and continues to know it now, but the network is airing Shokin’s baseless allegations regardless.

Pushing for Shokin to be fired was the policy of not only the United States, where it was supported by leading Republicans, but also the international community


  • European nations, the United States, and over 100 members of Ukrainian parliament had pressured the Ukrainian government for months to fire Shokin. The international community concluded that Shokin was “turning a blind eye to corrupt practices” and “defending the interests of a venal and entrenched elite.” [Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2/11/16; The New York Times, 3/29/16]
  • In 2015, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt called Shokin “an obstacle” to anti-corruption efforts. Ukraine’s refusal to act on anti-corruption measures, including keeping Shokin, resulted in the International Monetary Fund threatening to withhold $40 billion in aid. The European Union applauded his removal. [The Wall Street Journal, 9/22/19]
  • Protests in Ukraine demanded Shokin’s removal after he launched an investigation into an anti-corruption watchdog group and had fired various anti-corruption prosecutors. The group, Anti-Corruption Action Center, had publicly criticized Shokin. [Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 3/28/16; Kyiv Post, 3/25/16]
  • In 2016, Republican Sens. Rob Portman, Mark Kirk and Ron Johnson and Democratic colleagues addressed a letter to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, calling for him to “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.” The bipartisan letter was also signed by five Senate Democrats, underlining that removing Shokin was the consensus view in Washington, D.C. — not a pet project of the Biden family. [CNN, 10/3/2019]
  • Johnson would later lead a committee that investigated Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma and failed to uncover any evidence of wrongdoing. The New York Times noted, “In fact, investigators heard witness testimony that rebutted those charges,” and Johnson acknowledged there were no “massive smoking guns” in the report. [The New York Times, 9/23/20]
  • George Kent, the State Department’s expert on Ukraine, testified during Trump’s first impeachment trial that Shokin’s corruption led to his removal. Shokin was fired over corruption allegations and was not actively investigating Burisma when he was removed. The Washington Post reported in 2019 that Kent confirmed that Joe Biden called for the removal of “a corrupt prosecutor general … who had undermined a system of criminal investigation” into Ukrainian corruption cases, and “destroyed the entire ecosystem that we were trying to create.” Kent, who was the No. 2 official in the embassy at the time, explained that Biden was following the official U.S. government position that Shokin must be removed because he was “an impediment to the reform of the prosecutorial system, and he had directly undermined in repeated fashion U.S. efforts and U. S. assistance programs.” In fact, Kent testified that the idea to fire Shokin originated in the State Department before being pitched to others, including then-Vice President Biden. [The Washington Post, 11/19/19; Media Matters, 11/12/19]

At the time of his removal, Shokin was not actively investigating Burisma, and Hunter Biden was never the subject of an investigation into the company

  • Former Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaliy Kasko said in May 2019 that the investigation into Burisma had been “shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.” Shokin had stalled investigations into Burisma and its co-founder Mykola Zlochevsky. In 2014, he undermined an attempt by British authorities to freeze $23 million worth of Zlochevsky’s assets. [Bloomberg, 5/7/19]
  • Devon Archer testified that he was not aware of any Shokin-led investigation into Burisma. He also testified that he had no reason to believe that then-Vice President Biden called for Shokin’s removal “was driven by anything other than the U.S. Government’s anticorruption policy in Ukraine,” and confirmed that firing Shokin “was bad for Burisma because he was under control.” [Media Matters, 8/3/23]
  • Investigations involving Burisma targeted Zlochevsky, who had been accused of “abuse of power, illegal enrichment and money laundering,” rather than the company itself. Shokin had allegedly “dragged his feet” on these investigations, and Hunter Biden, as a board member, was not a target. [The Wall Street Journal, 9/22/19]

Fox News knew its sourcing on the Ukraine conspiracy theory was unreliable

  • Conservative writer John Solomon was a key distributor of Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy theories regarding Shokin’s firing. From March 20, 2019 — when Solomon published his first story on the Ukraine conspiracy theory — through October 2, 2019, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times, including 51 appearances on Sean Hannity’s prime-time show [Media Matters, 10/17/19]
  • During that period, Fox News senior political affairs specialist Bryan S. Murphy produced an internal “research briefing book” that “openly question[ed] Fox News contributor John Solomon’s credibility, accusing him of playing an ‘indispensable role’ in a Ukrainian ‘disinformation campaign,’” according to The Daily Beast. Murphy’s research came from what was known as Fox’s “Brain Room,” which the network later disbanded, and described Solomon as having “played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication of elements of this disinformation campaign.” [The Daily Beast, 2/6/20]
  • Murphy’s research book also advised that Giuliani had a “high susceptibility to disinformation” that was being fed to him by unreliable Ukrainian sources. [The Daily Beast, 2/6/20]
  • Fox News continues to accuse Joe Biden of taking bribes regarding Shokin’s firing even when confronted with contradictory evidence. On August 9, a panel discussion on The Five descended into chaos after co-host Jessica Tarlov attempted to get her co-panelists to acknowledge recent testimony from Hunter Biden business associate Devon Archer. Archer “was asked, if someone concluded … that Joe Biden was bribed, would you disagree with that? ‘Yeah, I would.’ Devon Archer said that,” Tarlov said to the panel. [Fox News, The Five, 8/9/23]

Giuliani, a Trump lawyer who would later be arrested for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was the lynchpin to the entire scheme

  • Solomon’s reporting laid the groundwork for Giuliani’s investigations in Ukraine, which ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment. Some of Solomon’s key sources were “disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko and the allies of Dmytro Firtash, an indicted Ukrainian oligarch and accused high-level Russian mafia associate,” who “have been seen as forces driving Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine to dig up dirt on Trump’s political enemies.” [Media Matters, 10/17/19; The Daily Beast, 2/6/20]
  • Giuliani ultimately sent his findings to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, complete with “with unproven allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden” with the goal of undermining a future Biden presidential run. Giuliani used his documents “to bolster unproven allegations that Biden pressured Ukraine in order to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who has been involved with a business interest there, and that the Obama administration was using Ukraine to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.” [NBC News, 10/3/19]
  • After Trump’s phone call attempting to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was revealed, Giuliani engaged in a press strategy to redirect the focus back to the Bidens. Some mainstream outlets took the bait, with headlines like “Scrutiny over Trump’s Ukraine scandal may also complicate Biden’s campaign” and “Why Trump’s Ukraine scandal could backfire on Biden.” [Media Matters, 9/23/19]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Kyle Rittenhouse

White Nationalists And Conspiracy Kooks Behind Kyle Rittenhouse Foundation

A new foundation for Kyle Rittenhouse — who killed two people during an anti-racist protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020 — is run by a far-right gun extremist who once appeared on a white nationalist program, as well as a Christian nationalist who defended the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

According to the Texas Tribune, the Rittenhouse Foundation lists two directors in addition to Rittenhouse himself — Texas Gun Rights President Chris McNutt and Defend Texas Liberty PAC treasurer Shelby Griesinger.

The foundation’s registered agent is the law firm of Tony McDonald. McDonald’s firm has also represented the conservative organization Empower Texans which — along with Defend Texas Liberty PAC — has received millions of dollars from fossil fuel billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who were early funders for conservative media outlets PragerU and The Daily Wire.

Rittenhouse became a celebrity in right-wing media after shooting three people at a Black Lives Matter rally in August 2020, and moved to Texas last year following his acquittal. He has since become increasingly active in state politics, including appearing at a rally with Daniel Miller, who advocates for Texas’ secession from the United States. Rittenhouse’s new foundation appears to be part of an effort to expand his footprint on the right, in which he has surrounded himself with predictably extreme figures.

On May 13, 2021, McNutt appeared on The Stew Peters Show, whose eponymous host had by that time already pushed election denial and Covid-19 conspiracy theories, and called for increased police militancy following the killing of Daunte Wright, a Black man, by Minnesota cop Kimberly Potter, who is white. Just days before McNutt’s appearance, Peters said a guest of his “rightly compared this jab to the Holocaust.” Peters has fully adopted white nationalist, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

Most of McNutt’s social media presence is dedicated to celebrating reactionary gun culture, but he also veers into other right-wing topics. Like many conservatives, he opposes the Covid-19 vaccine, and once claimed that Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “is responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler.”

McNutt frequently posts anti-trans, anti-drag, and anti-gay comments, and has advanced a conspiracy theory that Planned Parenthood “targeted … black babies” with the aim of subjugating African American communities.

Griesinger, McNutt’s fellow director, is a young but prominent activist in Texas’ far-right scene. She was profiled as one of the state’s “Under 30 in Politics” by Current Revolt, a media organization the Texas Tribune identifies as “associated with the far right in Texas politics.” In that interview, Griesinger said she “100%” supported then-gubernatorial candidate Don Huffines, who had months earlier referred to migrants crossing the border as an “invasion” and called a state-sponsored resource page for LGBTQ people “offensive.” Just weeks after Griesinger’s Q&A was published, Huffines declined to fire a staffer with deep ties to white nationalists.

Like McNutt, Griesinger frequently espouses far-right views on Twitter, now known as X. In April, she pushed a conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the vigilante shooting at Comet Ping Pong, specifically that the agency was attempting to “destroy” a “computer server” at the restaurant. This baseless accusation is an extension of the broader Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a precursor to QAnon. In August, she tweeted a full embrace of Christian nationalism.

Also in August, Griesinger retweeted a racist post from James Kirpatrick, the pseudonym of white nationalist writer Kevin DeAnna, a writer at the virulently anti-immigrant website VDare. One month earlier, she’d retweeted a post — quoting tweeting another racist post — that celebrated the deaths of asylum seekers in the Mediterranean Sea (the original post was later deleted by the author and the account was suspended).

Griesinger engages in bigoted rhetoric under her own name as well. She tweeted that “Jews & Muslims worship a false god,” and encouraged her followers to be “okay with saying ‘I have a problem with my child’s teacher being gay.’” She argued in favor of laws to restrict abortion rights despite their unpopularity, analogizing anti-abortion activists with the abolitionist movement. “Ending slavery wasn’t a winning issue,” Griesinger tweeted. “Most of Germany supported Hitler.”

Like McNutt, Griesinger advanced the conspiracy theory that the goal of abortion providers is “exterminating the black race.” She denied that structural racism plays a role in community violence, arguing instead that “black people are disproportionately shooting each other” absent any other political context.

The Rittenhouse Foundation “ensures the Second Amendment is preserved through education and legal assistance,” according to the Texas Tribune. The specifics of what that looks like remains to be seen, but the foundation may not be especially transparent. Several hours after theTexas Tribune report, Griesinger temporarily locked her Twitter account.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Report: Funder Of Right-Wing Anti-Trafficking Film Busted In Child Abduction

Report: Funder Of Right-Wing Anti-Trafficking Film Busted In Child Abduction

One of the funders behind Sound of Freedom, an anti-trafficking film that was widely embraced by right-wing media this summer, was arrested in July on felony child kidnapping charges, according to Newsweek and a Missouri court website.

Fabian Marta appears to have referred to himself as an “angel investor” in the film, according to a screenshot of a since-deleted Facebook post. (Media Matters has not independently verified the Facebook post.)

Newsweek reported:

Fabian Marta was charged with felony child kidnapping in July, while since-removed Facebook posts appear to show the same person revealing their pride in funding the film. Marta's name appears in the movie's credits among the "investors [who] helped bring Sound of Freedom to theaters."

St. Louis Metropolitan Police confirmed to Newsweek that Marta, 51, from Chesterfield, Missouri, was charged on July 21, and was arrested on July 23.

Police also provided a booking photo of Marta, which appears to show the same person pictured on a Facebook account of the same name. Screenshots of since-removed posts from multiple online sources, seen by Newsweek but which could not be independently verified, show Marta speaking about his involvement with the film.

Sound of Freedom stars Jim Caviezel, who pushed several QAnon conspiracy theories while promoting the film earlier this summer. Caviezel claimed that centralized cabals of pedophiles were torturing trafficked children to extract adrenochrome from them — what’s known in QAnon jargon as the “adrenochrome empire.” He additionally said Ukrainian biolabs were involved in the conspiracy and that the CIA and FBI were implicated in a cover-up.

Marta’s arrest isn’t the only controversy surrounding the film, which is based on the life of Operation Underground Railroad founder Tim Ballard. Ballard has long claimed that his organization saves children from trafficking rings, but critics allege that most of OUR’s work has been in service of glorifying Ballard and building his brand.

Following the film’s release, Ballard and OUR parted ways “after an internal investigation into claims made against him by multiple employees,” according to Vice News. Ballard was later removed as CEO of The Nazarene Fund, an anti-trafficking group funded by Glenn Beck. He had previously been ousted from the same position in 2021.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump's Coup Conspirators Run Groups Planning His Second Administration

Trump's Coup Conspirators Run Groups Planning His Second Administration

Two reported co-conspirators in former President Donald Trump’s scheme to remain in office after his loss in 2020 are high-ranking members of organizations working to staff the next Republican administration.

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election lists six unnamed co-conspirators, two of whom have been widely reported to be John Eastman, senior fellow at The Claremont Institute, and Jeffrey Clark, senior fellow and director of litigation at the Center for Renewing America. According to the indictment, Clark suggested deploying the military to suppress political unrest in the event that the coup proved successful. Eastman appears to have been comfortable with that plan as well.

The Claremont Institute and the Center for Renewing America are both coalition members advising on Project 2025, an effort led by right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation to provide the next Republican president with policy papers and vetted personnel on day one of their administration. The Center for Renewing America is run by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and right-wing media regular guest with sweeping plans to gut the federal civil service and weaponize federal law enforcement against his group’s enemies under a future Republican administration. Both organizations are closely aligned with Trump and the far-right wing of the Republican Party.

If Trump is reelected, he is expected to either pardon himself or appoint an attorney general who would dismiss federal charges against him, meaning that two of the figures most closely associated with Trump’s failed coup could help determine how he quashes the case if given the chance.

Under Trump, Clark was a mid-level Department of Justice official who embraced the former president’s false allegations of voter fraud more than his colleagues did. Like CRA boss Russ Vought, Clark regularly appears on Steve Bannon's War Room show. After Trump’s loss, Clark proposed sending letters to election officials in key states claiming, without evidence, that the Department of Justice had “identified significant concerns” about the election results and suggesting that they should send “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump,” according to congressional testimony.

According to the indictment, on the morning of January 3, 2021, Clark also accepted an offer from Trump for the position of acting attorney general, a fact not previously known to the public. That afternoon, deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin told Clark “there is no world” in which Trump would not leave office on January 20, 2021, and that if Clark pushed forward with the coup attempt “there would be riots in every major city in the United States.”

“Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark responded, referring to the vague and outdated law that gives the president the authority to deploy the military against civilians. Trump later rescinded the appointment following threats of mass resignations from the Justice Department.

Eastman is a constitutional lawyer who attempted to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to claim authority to invalidate the certification of the election on January 6, 2021. That role is purely ceremonial, and Eastman faced a disbarment hearing in California this summer related to his bogus legal claims. Axios has reported that, between January 4 and January 7, 2021, Eastman sent 101 emails offering advice to Trump and others in his circle detailing strategies to prevent Congress from certifying the election results. On August 2, Eastman appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where he doubled down on his theory behind the illegal attempt to over turn the 2020 election.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Timcast IRL

Right-Wing Media Reject Clear Evidence That Mall Shooter Was Neo-Nazi

Right-wing media figures responded to news that the gunman who committed a mass shooting at a mall in Allen, Texas, on Saturday had an account on a Russian social media website where he posted neo-Nazi material, calling the discovery a “psyop.”

Many conservative commentators attempted to discredit the information by claiming the researcher who found the account, Aric Toler, was acting as a cut-out for the CIA or other intelligence agencies attempting to control the U.S. population through disinformation. Toler is the director of training and research at Bellingcat, an award-winning open-source investigative organization widely cited in journalistic and academic publications.

These commentators argued that Toler’s investigation couldn’t be trusted because of Bellingcat’s supposed ties to the U.S. government — it is in fact an independent organization — and also because the shooter’s alleged account often shared content from right-wing media figures including Tim Pool and anti-LGBTQ activist Chaya Raichik, who runs Libs of TikTok. They claimed that some sort of conspiracy was responsible for the fact that the media found and reported on the Texas shooter’s posts quickly, while the supposed “manifesto” written by the perpetrator who committed a mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27 has yet to be released.

In fact, the head of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said in mid-April that the Nashville shooter’s so-called manifesto was not a statement of political ideology and was closer to a collection of notes praising other school shooters. Regardless of its content, it bears no relation to Toler’s ability to find and post open-source information that is not controlled by law enforcement.

Toler posted his findings about the Texas gunman’s account in a May 8 Twitter thread which included a screenshot showing episodes of Timcast IRL, leading Toler to comment, “The Allen shooter was apparently a @timcast fan.” That news was widely shared online throughout the course of the afternoon.

That evening, Pool responded on his YouTube stream, saying the profile “does not seem to be real” without offering any evidence to support his claim.

“So there's a tragic story coming out of Texas, a mass shooting, and leftist researchers and the corporate press are running with this story that they've discovered the profile of this individual and lo, this Mexican man is actually a white supremacist,” Pool said. “Now the thing is, it seems like researchers have dug through this profile, it does not seem to be real. This person was posting weird things in the past couple of weeks to no followers and to no one, but of course the media's going to run with it.”

“On this profile, there are posts about Libs of TikTok and I believe it’s four clips from this show from one particular episode,” he continued.

“You see, here's where we get into the psyop: No one knows if this Russian social media profile is — actually belongs to this guy,” Pool said several minutes later. “A Bellingcat researcher named Aric Toler just said, ‘I found this profile that looks like it’s his.’ In fact, I’m pretty sure he even said, ‘I didn’t verify it, I don’t know.’”

Pool is incorrect. Toler did verify that the account belonged to the shooter, as he detailed in a Google doc to supplement his original thread. Pool may have been referring to a tweet Toler deleted about being unsure if a photo of Nazi tattoos showed the gunman; Toler clarified he deleted it because he had later verified the photo.

Pool’s unsubstantiated accusations that the social media account was a “psyop” were widespread in conservative media.

Steven Crowder echoed that line on the May 9 edition of his Rumble show, Louder With Crowder.

“We also have some information that's, I should say, curious regarding the Allen shooter,” he said. “We have more information now, and the more information that comes out, the more you don't believe said information because the purveyors of information are CIA plants.”

After incredulously listing off Toler’s findings, Crowder contrasted it with the relative lack of information about the Nashville shooter’s writings, clearly insinuating that a conspiracy is afoot.

“All of that, but still nothing on the Nashville shooter? Oh, it's for our safety,” Crowder said. “Alright. Let's just buy it wholesale. Curious coincidences, don't you think?”

Anti-LGBTQ right-wing pundit Allie Beth Stuckey made a similar argument on her Relatable podcast.

“The media believes that they have landed upon what the motive is for this — very quickly they turned out a narrative,” Stuckey said, before immediately discussing the “Nashville shooting” and subsequent delayed release of that shooter’s writings.

“The media hasn't even surmised why this person who went to Covenant Christian school grew up, decided they were the opposite sex, clearly rebelled against her Christian upbringing, went to this Christian school, shot it up, and killed nine people,” she added. “Like they can't even put those pieces together but they think they've landed on the clear motivation for the shooter who committed these acts of violence on Saturday, two days ago.”

Like Crowder and many other right-wing figures, Stuckey also suggested that the Texas gunman couldn’t hold white supremacist beliefs because he had a Hispanic surname.

“His name is equivalent to — and I'm sorry, this is just a fake name that I am making up, OK, this is not a real person, this is not the name of the shooter — his name though is equal to Pablo Rodriguez, OK?” Stuckey said. “So they're saying that someone apparently named something like Pablo Rodriguez, who looks like a Pablo Rodriguez, was a raging white supremacist.”

Fox Corp.’s Outkick Media founder Clay Travis also argued that the media has concocted a narrative that supporters of former President Donald Trump are uniquely violent, and when the evidence doesn’t support that, mainstream outlets will “manufacture” it.

“This guy is Hispanic, as you have mentioned, his parents do not speak English,” Travis told his co-host. “They have tried to turn him into a white supremacist.”

“All of the shootings that are happening, they don't really seem connected to Donald Trump and they certainly don't seem by and large connected to far-right-wing ideologues,” Travis later said. “So they're trying to manufacture them now. That’s what I see coming out of this coverage so far.”

These conspiracy theories spread far and wide on Twitter, in part from amplification by the site’s owner, Elon Musk. He responded to several posts claiming Toler’s work was a “psyop,” including at least three from Josie Tait, who works at Timcast and tweets under the handle “The Redheaded Libertarian.”

Right-wing troll account Catturd2 also said it was a psyop, somehow related to the authorities decision to delay releasing the Nashville shooter’s writings.

Misinformation activists Andy Ngo and Ian Miles Cheong similarly cast doubt on Toler’s findings without providing any counter evidence.


Toler’s findings have been corroborated by other researchers, and no one in conservative media has presented any evidence to counter them or to support their “psyop” theory. All available evidence shows that the Allen shooter was a neo-Nazi who consumed right-wing media, despite the baseless claims to the contrary.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Christian

Why 'Christian' Nationalists Plan To Destroy The Federal Civil Service

Mainstream media outlets are ignoring Christian nationalism’s central role in a new conservative operation to ensure that a future Republican president implements “Schedule F,” a radical plan to eliminate job protections for federal workers who don’t share an extreme, right-wing ideology.

If successful, the effort could convert up to 20,000 career federal staff positions into political appointments, which usually top out at around 4,000, effectively gutting agencies of experts with decades of institutional knowledge. The order could theoretically expand to make hundreds of thousands of federal workers with union protections into at-will employees. That kind of “rightward move on the federal civil service is unheard of among Western democracies, and has only really reappeared as a policy goal in states with recent authoritarian backsliding, such as Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro or Viktor Orban’s Hungary,” according to GovExec.

The man behind the push to make Schedule F a fait accompli under the next Republican president is Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and the founder of MAGA-aligned think tank the Center for Renewing America. Vought served as head of the Office of Management and Budget under former President Donald Trump, and oversaw a brief rollout of Schedule F in the final weeks of the administration.

As Media Matters has previously reported, Vought explicitly wants to draft an “army” of conservative activists with a “Biblical worldview” to staff the federal bureaucracy under the next Republican administration. Last September, Vought agreed with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s suggestion that there should be “ideological purity tests” to serve in the federal workforce, a position Trump has now adopted as well.

Vought also advocated for changes to congressional rules to target individual civil servants, potentially removing their funding or firing them, further demonstrating his desire to purge career staffers who don’t share his views. He is also advising House Republicans in the ongoing debt ceiling negotiations, hoping to use the threat of default to slash funding for anti-poverty programs and add new work requirements to Medicaid.

Within the last several days, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NBC News each covered aspects of this behind-the-scenes campaign, but omitted crucial details about Vought’s extreme ideology and the stakes of this looming fight. Although all three stories provided some valuable insights into Vought’s efforts, none included his open embrace of Christian nationalism in their coverage.

On April 20, the Timeswrote about conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation’s efforts to create a massive database of potential applicants to staff the next Republican-led executive branch, dubbed Project 2025. Vought’s think tank is one of Heritage’s partners, and he’s mentioned although not quoted at the end of the piece. (Vought was previously vice president at Heritage Action for America, the Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm.)

The Times’ headline and subhead significantly downplayed the ambitions animating Project 2025.

Like the subheading, the body of the story analogizes the effort to a “right-wing LinkedIn,” and focuses on the difficulties of creating a single database that could satisfy the various potential Republican primary winners.

To the Times’ credit, the story eventually lays out the stakes of Schedule F, though not until the 11th and subsequent paragraphs.

Typically, a new president is allowed to replace around 4,000 “political appointees” — a revolving layer that sits atop the federal work force. Below the political layer lies a long-term work force of more than two million, who have strong employment protections meant to make it harder for a new president of a different political party to fire them. These protections, enshrined in law, established a civil service that is supposed to be apolitical — with federal officials accumulating subject matter and institutional expertise over long careers in the service of both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Mr. Trump wants to demolish that career civil service — or what he pejoratively calls “the deep state.” He has privately told allies that if he gets back into power he plans to fire far more than the 4,000 government officials that presidents are typically allowed to replace. Mr. Trump’s lawyers already have the legal instrument in hand.

The Times then mentions Vought in its closing paragraphs, and although the piece describes him as working to “gut the federal civil service in a second Trump administration,” it omits any mention of his theocratic views.

The Washington Post, similarly, offered some valuable contributions in its recent coverage of Trump and Vought’s emerging scheme. The Post’s April 21 headline warns of Trump’s “authoritarian vision for second term,” clearly foregrounding the gravity of the situation in a way the Times’ headline failed to do.

The piece also includes criticism from good government experts on the dangers of Schedule F, though it doesn’t mention that term specifically.

Some of Trump’s proposals for overhauling the merit-based civil service would require congressional action. The result could be to undermine the ability of professional public servants to reliably deliver government services without political interference, warned Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports federal workforce development.

“He is proposing changes that would create the world that he is objecting to,” Stier said. “It does have real-time consequences in terms of undermining public trust in our government. That’s a real problem because trust in government is a core part of our democracy.”

The article quotes Vought and mentions CRA, but, like the Times’ piece, doesn’t include mention of his Christian nationalist beliefs. Instead, readers learn about Vought’s sense of his own centrality in the larger movement.

“I guarantee the stuff we’re putting forward is not going to get thrown in the trash,” said Vought, who contributed the transition project’s chapter on exercising authority through the Executive Office of the President, akin to a playbook for a White House chief of staff. Some of Vought’s ideas have found their way into Trump’s proposals, such as a recent announcement on bringing independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission under White House supervision.

“There’s a glove of power needed to beat back the administrative state or deep state,” he said, “and if you’re not willing to put your hand in that glove you will fail, regardless of how much credibility you have with the base.”

The piece has much to recommend it as a big-picture overview of Trump’s goals for a second term, but readers would immensely benefit from a clearer understanding of Vought’s ideology, not just his proximity to power.

Like the Times and the Post, NBC’s coverage of this topic had some strong aspects to it. Both the headline and the subheading of NBC’s April 26 piece makes clear that this is a labor protection story in addition to a story about overseeing policy.

NBC also quotes Max Stier, the good government expert cited by the Post. But Vought is the centerpiece.

“I think Schedule F is basically doctrine now on the right,” said Russ Vought, an architect of Schedule F when he was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. “So I think one that sits in that position does not have an ability to not do this, not unlike any other governing philosophy” widely embraced by conservatives.

“Schedule F is getting to the point where I cannot see anyone who runs on the Republican side who doesn’t put this into play,” Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank, continued.

Vought’s analysis may very well be accurate, which makes it all the more important for readers to understand his overt ideology and stated goals. Instead, all of the relevant context is outsourced to Stier, and Vought’s Christian nationalism again went unmentioned.

Although Vought speaks of reining in the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy, the reality is that his goal is to unleash the power of the federal government against his enemies. Christian nationalism is incompatible with secular, multicultural democracy, and any coverage of Schedule F needs to make that clear.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.