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Fox Strains To Justify Trump Extending His Tax Cut For Wealthiest

Fox Strains To Justify Trump Extending His Tax Cut For Wealthiest

Fox News personalities have gone all in supporting President Donald Trump’s plan to extend his unpopular 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, offering a hodgepodge of justifications for why it’s necessary to keep taxes low for rich people and businesses as Congress moves to slash billions in social safety net programs.

Fox’s charm offensive comes as congressional Republicans debate the fine points of the looming budget, including how deeply they’ll reduce spending on Medicaid and nutrition assistance programs for working class families to offset the lost tax revenue. The two chambers have passed separate budget outlines, and both have Medicaid and other social safety net programs in their sights.

Extending Trump’s 2017 giveaway to the ultrawealthy

If the Republican Party were a factory, perhaps its only reliably produced widget would be regressive tax legislation. During Trump’s first term, his tax law — the main legislative achievement prior to the COVID-19 pandemic — primarily benefited the wealthy, with the astronomically rich realizing the greatest gains.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the top one percent of taxpayers were expected to pay about $61,000 less in taxes on average as a result of the law, and the top 0.1 percent could expect an average of about $252,000 in tax savings. By contrast, the bottom 60 percent of tax filers were expected to average less than $1,000 in relief — with the bottom 20 percent averaging a paltry $70 in tax savings.

Expert analysis shows that making Trump’s first term tax cuts permanent would exacerbate wealth inequality and mainly benefit the richest people in the United States. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that if Congress made the 2017 law permanent “the richest 1 percent of Americans would receive $44.1 billion in tax cuts” as a class, and would benefit from “an average tax cut of nearly $26,000.” As with the 2017 bill, the bottom 60 percent would save about $1,000 or less per year.

Large corporations also laughed all the way to the bank. A separate ITEP report found that Trump’s 2017 cuts meant that the country’s “largest, consistently profitable corporations saw their effective tax rates fall from an average of 22.0 percent to an average of 12.8 percent.” That same group of 296 firms saved a cool $240 billion in taxes from 2018 to 2021 relative to what they would have paid absent Trump’s giveaway.

Now, as Trump’s tariff policies threaten the domestic and international economy, Fox News appears determined to ensure the richest people in the country continue to benefit at the expense of working people.

Fox personalities oppose increasing top tax rates on moral grounds

All signs suggest that the eventual tax policy Trump and congressional Republicans enact will be a boon for the wealthy. Still, several Fox News figures reacted with horror to leaks from the White House that the president was potentially considering an increase in tax rates for top earners. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has been pushing to let the tax cuts expire for those in high-income brackets, and some within the White House have argued in favor of raising taxes on people who take home more than $1 million per year.

That outcome was always exceedingly unlikely — Trump put the notion to bed during a recent Oval Office presser — but even a whiff of progressive taxation was too much for Fox pundits.

On April 15 — Tax Day — Fox Business host and former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow appeared on Special Report With Bret Baier and offered a familiar argument against raising taxes on the wealthy.

“I thought the Republicans wanted to reward success, not punishing it,” Kudlow said. “This loose talk about a higher top — another new bracket for millionaires — I don’t think it’s a crime to be a millionaire by the way, small businesses would pay this top bracket. I do not understand this.”

“I can't believe Mr. Trump is going to go along with this,” Kudlow added. “He campaigned on, you know, extending his tax cuts.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Right-Wing Media Figures Defamed IRS To Benefit The Super-Rich

Right-Wing Media Figures Defamed IRS To Benefit The Super-Rich

Right-wing media figures have spent years attacking the Internal Revenue Service, including spreading conspiracy theories about armed agents targeting conservatives. Now, President Donald Trump is gutting the agency in a move that experts say will benefit the richest of the rich in the United States.

According to The Washington Post, the IRS’ “burgeoning efforts to more closely inspect the taxes of some of the country’s richest people and most powerful companies are stalling because of layoffs imposed by the Trump administration."

The Post went on to report that the IRS had fired “7 percent of its roughly 100,000-person workforce in February, including at least 5,000 in the enforcement and collections divisions,” and that “tax experts say the cuts undermine the agency’s much-touted effort to crack down on wealthier Americans — who for years have faced slimmer and slimmer odds of being audited."

The Trump administration’s hobbling of the agency follows years of attacks on the IRS by right-wing media — most notably by spreading a myth that the Biden administration was planning to hire 87,000 armed agents to investigate and persecute conservatives. A Biden-era law did increase funding for the IRS, but didn’t specify the number of new employees and certainly didn’t mandate that they carry weapons. The false number comes from a Treasury Department report that suggested how many total employees the IRS could hire over 10 years to “maintain current levels,” according to PolitiFact. And, crucially, the new hires were tasked with investigating high-income tax avoiders.

Right-wing media attacked Biden-era funding for IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats

In August 2022, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, adding $80 billion to the IRS’ budget to go after wealthy tax cheats. That month, Fox News repeated the falsehood that the IRA added 87,000 IRS agents more than 200 times, including at least 40 instances of falsely saying the agents would be armed.

Host Laura Ingraham said the IRS was the “new Gestapo,” and host Brian Kilmeade claimed “Joe Biden’s new army” is going to “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers.” (In fact, then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin instructed the IRS not to increase audits for filers making less than $400,000 annually.)

Former Fox News marquee star Tucker Carlson repeated the armed-agents conspiracy theory at least nine times, in one instance telling his audience Biden was hiring “87,000 armed IRS agents to make sure you obey.” Earlier that month, Carlson falsely claimed that the IRS was being used “as a military agency."

Turning Point USA founder and MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk said on his radio show that the “87,000 new IRS agents will be used to go after mom-and-pop restaurants, donors to MAGA candidates, people like you,” and that their assignment was to target “dissidents."

Fox ignored IRS collection of back taxes from the wealthy — while demonizing immigrants

The attacks continued throughout the rest of Biden’s term. In January 2023, right-wing outlets rehashed the 87,000 armed-agents myth as House Republicans voted to slash IRS funding. That fall, conservative pundits cheered on newly minted Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s attempts to cut IRS funding. On November 20, Ingraham again accused the IRS of “targeting conservative groups."

In February 2024, Fox News almost entirely ignored a report from the IRS and the Treasury Department that found the agency was “poised to take in hundreds of billions of dollars more in overdue and unpaid taxes than previously anticipated,” according to The Associated Press. As Media Matters reported at the time, Fox spent only 5 minutes discussing the report — which estimated the government would be able to collect $56 billion per year over 10 years — and 55 minutes criticizing a New York City program to provide migrants with prepaid credit cards that cost $53 million.

Right-wing media pushed tax avoidance for the ultra-rich, austerity for the working class

The long-running right-wing media campaign against the IRS has always had one clear goal: to protect the ultrawealthy from IRS enforcement. The Trump administration is now realizing that goal. The recent Washington Post article reported that a West Virginia revenue agent said some of the recently “laid-off employees had about 40 cases between them, each looking at people making $400,000 or more.” Some reports now estimate that the Trump administration could ultimately fire half of the IRS’ 100,000 person workforce.

The programs that Trump is eviscerating have already been successful. As of last July, the IRS had collected more than $1 billion in back taxes from wealthy individuals and families. Right-wing media figures have cheered on these cuts, which will primarily benefit rich tax cheats, as they simultaneously push for austerity measures for the working class.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Russ Vought

Project 2025 Operative Wrecking Consumer Finance Protection Bureau

The new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a former top architect in the controversial transition plan known as Project 2025 — reportedly told its employees on February 10 to “not perform any work tasks this week,” at least temporarily shuttering an agency that has been the target of right-wing media attacks for years.

Russ Vought, who also serves as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote over the weekend that the CFPB “will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not 'reasonably necessary' to carry out its duties.”

The CFPB has saved working Americans tens of billions of dollars since it was founded in 2011, including more than $6 billion in annual overdraft fees alone from 2019-2023. Calling it “one of Wall Street’s most feared regulators,” The New York Times reported on February 9 that the bureau’s success has put it “squarely in the Trump administration’s cross hairs.”

It has clawed back $21 billion for consumers. It slashed overdraft fees, reformed the student loan servicing market, transformed mortgage lending rules and forced banks and money transmitters to compensate fraud victims.
It may no longer be able to carry out that work.
…
In less than 36 hours, Mr. Vought threw the agency into chaos. On Saturday, he ordered the bureau’s 1,700 employees to stop nearly all their work and announced plans to cut off the agency’s funding. Then on Sunday, he closed the bureau’s headquarters for the coming week. Workers who tried to retrieve their laptops from the office were turned away, employees said.

Now, Vought appears to be fulfilling a Project 2025 promise — and a longtime right-wing media goal — by taking an axe to the CFPB.

Vought and Project 2025 envision massive White House power grab

Prior to joining the Trump administration, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, one of more that 100 conservative organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025. He also wrote the chapter in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, on the Executive Office of the President of the United States, calling “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

Vought laid bare Project 2025’s broad ambitions in a secretly recorded video last year, saying that he and his collaborators had prepared “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are — we’re planning for the next administration.”

The Trump administration has already begun following through on Project 2025’s goals, and dismantling the CFPB is no different. Mandate for Leadership refers to the bureau as a “highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency” that is “unconstitutional,” writing that the “next conservative President should order the immediate dissolution of the agency—pull down its prior rules, regulations and guidance, return its staff to their prior agencies and its building to the General Services Administration.”

In his dual role at the top of OMB and the CFPB, Vought is well-positioned to enact this sweeping agenda, and he is already taking steps that would amount to a massive power grab for Trump’s White House.

Vought and his colleagues at the Center for Renewing America are leading supporters of a radical theory that the executive branch can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Toward that end, Vought issued an OMB memo that temporarily froze all federal funding. (The memo was later retracted after widespread backlash.)

Vought outlined his extreme vision for expansive control in a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“There are no independent agencies,” Vought said, specifically mentioning the CFPB among others. “So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Right-wing media have long attacked the CFPB

Right-wing media figures have targeted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since its inception in the wake of the Great Recession.

In 2015, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board attacked the CFPB for its multiyear investigation into racially discriminatory car financing practices. The Journal’s board called the effort an “outrageous regulatory campaign” and called on Congress to implement additional hurdles to the CFPB’s enforcement capacity. The CFPB ultimately clawed back tens of millions of dollars for racial minorities who had been subject to higher-than-average loan rates across several lenders.

In November 2017, Fox News anchor Dana Perino invited a guest on to criticize the CFPB without disclosing that they represented clients opposed to the bureau’s regulations. Right-wing blog The Federalistpublished an article the same day with the headline: “This Is The Perfect Time To Destroy The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” A day later on Fox News, never-Trump conservative Jonah Goldberg referred to the CFPB as a “hate crime against the Constitution.”

More recently, right-wing media figures targeted a Biden-era initiative at the CFPB that went after predatory credit card gouging schemes and other junk fees that cost working people in the United States more than $10 billion every year.

Trump administration following through on Project 2025’s goals

“This morning he's [President Biden] talking about late fees, and he's talking about corporate America, and it's companies' fault that people are facing inflation,” Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo said. The next day she again criticized Biden’s focus on “late fees,” directing her viewers’ anger toward undocumented immigrants instead of credit card companies.

On February 5, Fox published an opinion piece calling for Trump to “delete Elizabeth Warren’s failed experiment once and for all,” claiming that “CFPB is doing more harm than good, and its dissolution is not just a policy preference but an economic necessity.”

As news of Vought’s takeover broke, several conservative outlets cheered what they saw as the demise of the CFPB. The Daily Wire framed Vought’s actions in its headline as the “Latest Trump Admin Move To Cut Government Waste.” Conspiracy theory website The Gateway Pundit celebrated: “The corrupt agency which was the ‘brainchild’ of Senator Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren (D-MA) could be on its last legs.” The think tank Vought founded also weighed in, publishing a white paper titled: “The CFPB Should Be Shut Down.”

On Fox News, host Laura Ingraham defended the good name of several financial institutions against the intrusions of the CFPB.

“Now, to give you a sense of how partisan that place has become, in December its chief rushed to file several lawsuits against the payment platform Zelle, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, alleging this amorphous failure to protect consumers,” Ingraham said. “It's ridiculous. And it amounts to another shakedown of business by anti-capitalist crusaders. That’s all it is.”

Ingraham was a lonely voice at Fox News celebrating the news, despite network figures campaigning against the CFPB for years. A Media Matters study found that between Vought’s appointment to head the agency on February 7 and 3 p.m ET on February 10, “network personalities mentioned the CFPB just 5 times for a total of about 40 seconds.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Russ Vought

Project 2025 Plotter Is Behind Federal Funding Freeze

A new memo issued by the Trump administration directing the federal government to temporarily cease disbursing billions of dollars in funds appears to draw on arguments made by Russ Vought, the president’s selectee to run the Office of Management and Budget.

Vought was a primary architect of Project 2025, a sprawling effort organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and staffing recommendations for President Donald Trump’s second term. In addition to that role, Vought is also the founder of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has spent over a year arguing that the president can unilaterally refuse to spend funds allocated by Congress, an authority known as the impoundment power that was severely curtailed by Congress in 1974.

The new Trump administration memo was issued by Matthew Vaeth, acting director of OMB pending Vought’s confirmation vote. The document calls for federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.”

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the memo states.

Although the two-page memo doesn’t use the term impoundment, law professor Steve Vladeck argued that the Trump administration is claiming “the unilateral power to at least temporarily ‘impound’ tens of billions of dollars of appropriated funds—in direct conflict with Congress’s constitutional power of the purse, and in even more flagrant violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.” The existence of the document was first reported by journalist Marisa Kabas and later confirmed by The Washington Post and The New York Times. (OMB issued a follow-up memo claiming the freeze does “not apply across-the-board” and withheld funds are “not an impoundment under the Impoundment Control Act.”)

Direct effects of the memo are unknown but they could be highly detrimental

“Experts said the memo as written was poised to bring a rapid halt to scores of federal functions, from assistance to homeless shelters to financial aid for college students,” the Post reported. “Health grants distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state aid for disaster reconstruction, might face delays.”

The memo appears to exempt Social Security and Medicare recipients, and it says the halt “does not include assistance provided directly to individuals.” It isn’t clear whether Medicaid recipients will be affected, although some early reports indicated that payments had been disrupted.

The New York Times additionally reported that transportation funding and loans to small businesses could also be affected. In a statement to the Times, Diane Yentel, the chief executive of the National Council of Nonprofits, warned: “From pausing research on cures for childhood cancer to halting food assistance, safety from domestic violence and closing suicide hotlines, the impact of even a short pause in funding could be devastating and cost lives.”

HuffPostreported already that some payments for Head Start — which funds preschool for low-income families — are at risk of being delayed. HuffPost also reported that officials at Meals on Wheels, the food program for elderly Americans, are worried they could face funding disruptions.

Vought long pushed for a radical interpretation of the impoundment power

In June 2023, Vought posted on X (formerly Twitter), “Making Impoundment Great Again!” Days later, the Center for Renewing America’s X account wrote that “the impoundment power is our secret weapon to totally dismantle the WOKE & WEAPONIZED federal bureaucracy.” The CRA post linked to a Real Clear Politics article quoting Vought as saying, “When you think that a law is unconstitutional” — referring to the Impoundment Control Act — the response should be to “push the envelope.”

In July 2023, CRA senior fellow Jeffrey Clark — who as a DOJ attorney attempted to overturn the 2020 election by pushing a fake elector scheme at the end of Trump’s first term — appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room to argue against the Impoundment Control Act.

“So what I’m working on, essentially, are the constitutional arguments for why that was wrong and various ways in which the Impoundment Control Act is just flatly unconstitutional,” Clark said.

Vought continued to beat the drum months later.

“The loss of impoundment authority — which 200 years of presidents enjoyed — was the original sin in eliminating the ability for a branch-on-branch to control spending,” Vought said the following February on Fox Business.

In June 2024, the Center for Renewing America released a white paper arguing that the Impoundment Control Act — passed following President Richard Nixon’s refusal to spend funds for environmental, transportation, and educational priorities — is unconstitutional and a break with legal precedent. The authors of that paper later wrote articles for The Hill and right-wing blog The Federalist making similar claims.

Vought highlighted the centrality of the impoundment power to his think tank’s project. “Why did we found the Center for Renewing America?” he wrote on X. “To write papers like this.”

During Trump’s first term, he attempted to unilaterally withhold roughly $400 billion in foreign aid funding for Ukraine, leading to his first impeachment for violating the impoundment law.

During Vought’s recent confirmation hearing to serve as director of OMB during Trump’s second administration — a job he also held during Trump’s first term — Vought refused to promise to follow the Impoundment Control Act on the grounds that both he and Trump believe it is illegal.

Last August, Vought was filmed in an undercover video claiming that he and his Project 2025 collaborators had written “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature” in preparation for a possible Trump victory. He said in the video that one of his goals is to “end multiculturalism” in America.

The OMB memo has triggered a massive reaction across the political spectrum. Bannon celebrated the move on War Room, while Senate Democrats are calling for a delay to Vought’s confirmation vote following the news. A former OMB official said the memo read like a “hostage note written directly by Russ Vought.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Mass Deportation May Rely On Extremist Sheriffs And Snitch Bounties

Mass Deportation May Rely On Extremist Sheriffs And Snitch Bounties

Organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide the incoming Republican presidential administration with policy and staffing recommendations, have responded to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory by promoting extreme approaches to carrying out his promise to deport upward of 10 million undocumented immigrants.

Right-wing think tanks the Center for Immigration Studies, The Claremont Institute, and the Center for Renewing America have all advanced anti-immigrant policies since Trump’s win. Some of their proposals include offering bounties for information on suspected undocumented people, conscripting far-right so-called “constitutional sheriffs” to serve as immigration enforcers, and attempting to make life so miserable for out-of-status immigrants that they flee the country — referred to euphemistically as “self-deportation.”

Trump has already named the two top officials who will be tasked with carrying out his mass deportation plan, and they both have direct connections to Project 2025. Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar,” is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s lead organizer. He is also credited as a contributor in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, which proposes drastic cuts to legal immigration in addition to harsh crackdowns on undocumented people. Homan has promised to “to run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen.”

Alongside Homan will be Stephen Miller — a top architect of Trump’s Muslim ban and family separation policies — who will serve as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser in the new Trump administration. Miller and his conservative advocacy organization, America First Legal, attempted to distance themselves from Project 2025 amid growing backlash to the effort, but their fingerprints are all over it. Miller appeared in a Project 2025 promotional video, a top AFL executive authored a chapter in Mandate, and AFL was on the advisory board until it removed itself following public outcry.

But the likely influence that Project 2025 partners will have on Trump’s looming immigration policy extends far beyond Homan and Miller. Below are some of the coalition’s more extreme proposals.

Center for Immigration Studies pushes bounties, self-deportation

The Center for Immigration Studies is one of the three main branches of the Tanton network, named after John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.” The SPLC has designated CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group.

On November 13, CIS published a blog under the headline “The Trump Deportation Plan: Easier Done than Said.” The article argues for a stricter version of E-Verify — which uses Social Security data to determine employment eligibility — called G-Verify, which would require employers to electronically submit the eligibility form to the Department of Homeland Security.

The blog acknowledges that these programs “would not capture unauthorized migrants who work ‘off the books’” — a common critique of E-Verify, which critics argue actually pushes immigrant workers into unregulated markets.

That’s where the bounties come in. CIS continues, “However, lawful employees, business competitors, customers, or even family members who are aware of this unlawful practice might be willing to report the employer’s criminal practice to DHS in return for a small (say $2,000) reward and a promise of confidentiality.”

In another blog — this time for the National Review — CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian revived the idea of “self-deportation,” which is to say coercing undocumented people into leaving the country by making life miserable for them.“

Persuading illegal aliens to go home on their own saves the government time and money,” Krikorian wrote.

“And it’s also preferable for the illegal aliens themselves, allowing them to return on their own terms,” he continued, “They can settle their affairs, pack up their belongings, and go home for Christmas — and not come back.” After arguing that immigrants leave the country all the time, he suggested that one reason might be that “little Mario came home one day from P.S. 666 insisting on being called Maria.”

Krikorian has been joined in resurrecting this once-radical proposition by Heritage Foundation President — and Project 2025 evangelist — Kevin Roberts, who recently pushed it on The Vince Coglianese Show. While praising his colleague Tom Homan as a fantastic hire, Roberts argued that “such a big part of this is trying to inspire self-deportation.”

As a sign of how far contemporary politics have shifted toward the nativist right, it’s worth remembering that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) was roundly excoriated for proposing “self-deportation” as a central plank of his immigration plan during the 2012 presidential race. He was denounced at the time by liberal magazines, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post editorial board, and conservatives including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and a little magazine called the National Review.

In another blog published following Trump’s win, CIS argued that “the time may have come for President Biden or President-elect Trump to deploy the [Alien Enemies Act] against Iranian nationals residing in the U.S.” Per the author’s own description, invoking the act would allow “the president to summarily detain and remove nationals of enemy nations” — i.e., Iran. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, the Alien Enemies Act “is best known for its role in Japanese internment, a shameful part of U.S. history for which Congress, presidents, and the courts have apologized.”

The Claremont Institute: Conscript right-wing sheriffs for deportations

The Claremont Institute is a MAGA-aligned think tank that publishes the right-wing blog The American Mind. While the conservative authors featured on The American Mind may not necessarily speak for the institution, they offer a clear window into the Trump movement.

On November 8, The American Mind posted a blog headlined “Mr. President, Deputize Your Local Sheriffs.” The piece was written by Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy, an SPLC-designated hate group.

“President Trump should look to sheriffs to fill U.S. Marshal roles,” Shideler argued, for the purpose of facilitating “the cross-deputization of local sheriffs’ deputies and police officers along the Southern border, which is needed to address prohibitions against state and local officials enforcing federal immigration law.”

“That manpower will be required if Trump is to meet his campaign promise of securing the border and expelling millions of illegal aliens,” he continued.

Shideler further suggested that “conservative organizations” could “identify local law enforcement leaders who support the Trump agenda” — adding that “those who have participated in the Claremont Institute’s Sheriffs Fellowship would be an excellent place to start.”

Jessica Pishko — author of a recent book about sheriffs and right-wing movements — reported on Claremont’s inaugural sheriff fellows program in 2022. She revealed that it “presented for the sheriffs two sets of people in America: those communities sheriffs should police as freely and brutally as they see fit, and those ‘real’ Americans who should be considered virtually above the law.”

As Pishko and others have noted, many of Claremont’s honorees adhere to the far-right ideology of the constitutional sheriffs movement, which holds that sheriffs “should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.”

Center for Renewing America defends “Operation Wetback”

The Center for Renewing America is a MAGA-aligned think tank founded by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and top architect of Project 2025.

On November 8, CRA published a white paper titled “Primer: U.S. Deportations — A Longstanding & Normal Process” which attempts to normalize and sanitize an earlier mass deportation undertaking officially known as “Operation Wetback” (though CRA’s authors don’t use that racist slur).

The authors argue that “mass deportations are a normal part of the president’s toolbox.”

“For example, in 1954, the U.S. government conducted a campaign that resulted in the mass deportation of Mexican nationals—1,100,000 persons,” they continue.

Left unmentioned is the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by the mass deportations. As Dara Lind wrote for Vox when Trump praised the Eisenhower-era mass deportations in 2015, immigrants were “deported en masse: by train, by truck, by plane, and by cargo ship.” She adds that a “congressional investigation described conditions on one cargo ship as a ‘penal hell ship’ and compared it to a slave ship on the Middle Passage.”

In one mass raid, 88 people died of “sun stroke as a result of a round-up that had taken place in 112-degree heat,” according to a definitive account by Mae Ngai.

And as Professors Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander argue, Operation Wetback was largely a propaganda campaign that “enforced the idea that American citizens are white.”

Nevertheless, the 1954 operation has become a touchstone for the Trumpist right. As but one example, Stephen Miller recently cited the “Eisenhower model” as justification for the potential deployment of the U.S. military “in a large-scale deportation operation.” CRA’s anodyne description of the 1950s deportations shows how embedded this history has become in the MAGA movement.

Project 2025 embeds itself in Trump 2.0

Trump’s new administration and its partners in the conservative policy ecosystem are laying the groundwork for the most nativist, xenophobic government in decades. From Homan and Miller to the think tanks providing them scaffolding, every sign suggests that the Trump administration will terrorize, surveil, and deport immigrants and their communities in record numbers. And Project 2025 and its partners will almost certainly continue to provide a roadmap for the draconian crackdown.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump Set To Name Project 2025 Architest As Top Budget Official

Trump Set To Name Project 2025 Architest As Top Budget Official

President-elect Donald Trump is planning to appoint Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist who has plotted to remake the federal workforce in MAGA’s image, to serve as his administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to CBS News. Vought held the same position during Trump’s first term. Since leaving office he has been a leading architect of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide staffing and policy options to the next Republican administration.

In his role at Project 2025, Vought was instrumental in ensuring that decimating the ranks of federal civil service became a conservative priority. He wrote the second chapter in Project 2025’s policy book — Mandate for Leadership — titled: “Executive Office of the President of the United States.” In it, he argued that “a President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

As part of his anti-woke crusade, Vought has repeatedly defended and promoted Christian nationalism, at one point calling for an “army” of right-wing activists with “biblical worldview” to staff the next Republican administration. He wrote an op-ed for Newsweek in 2021 with the headline “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?’” More recently, Politicoreported that a document from the Center for Renewing America — a MAGA-aligned think tank Vought founded — listed “Christian nationalism” as a top priority for a second Trump term.

While at the helm of the Center for Renewing America, Vought has been outspoken in his advocacy of Schedule F — a scheme to reclassify career civil servants as political appointees. Trump attempted to implement Schedule F in the waning days of his first term, but its effects were blunted by his loss in 2020. If his incoming administration moves forward with the plan, which seems all but inevitable, as many as 50,000 career staffers could be replaced with MAGA loyalists. (Some other estimates put the number closer to 20,000.)

Vought has championed the use of congressional rules to defund and remove individual government employees for punishment and deploying “ideological purity tests” to ensure federal workers are loyal to Trump.

During a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vought argued that the “whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Following a broad backlash to Project 2025, Vought was caught on hidden video discussing his work at the initiative and how it might play if Trump returned to the White House.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies, and we are working doggedly on that,” Vought said. “Whether it’s destroying agencies’ notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.”

In the interview, Vought claimed that he’d been working on “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature” for a future Trump administration.

“You may say, ‘OK, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation — what are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it?’ Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos,” Vought said. “Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not — you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”

This early preparation includes creating documents to facilitate the “largest deportation in history” and to deploy the military to “maintain law and order” against civilian protesters. Vought elaborated that the mass deportations were part of a plan to “end multiculturalism” in the country.

As a hardline conservative, Vought has pushed to implement harsh austerity measures throughout the country. The Washington Post reported that Vought advocates for eliminating trillions of dollars in “anti-poverty programs such as housing, health care, and food assistance.” He has called for massive cuts to Medicaid and floated future cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Toward that end, Vought and his colleagues at the Center for Renewing America are leading proponents of a radical interpretation of executive authority that claims the president can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Known as the “impoundment” power, Vought and his fellow travelers assert that a 1974 law that mandates presidents spend money Congress has allocated — passed after President Richard Nixon refused to spend federal funds for clean water and schools — is unconstitutional.

This theory, if Trump acts on it, would centralize budgeting power within the Oval Office and tilt the balance of power between the president and Congress even further towards the executive branch.

Aside from slashing the United States’ very limited safety net, Vought’s think tank released a budget proposal for fiscal year 2023 that would unleash the FBI against Trump’s declared enemies and “thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels that have defunded police, refused to prosecute criminals, and released violent felons into communities.”

Now, as he reprises his role as the head of OMB, he will wield considerable influence within the Trump administration and will almost certainly play a central role in the likely purge of the federal workforce.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Right-Wing Media Spread Abortion Falsehoods After Trump's Debate Defeat

Right-Wing Media Spread Abortion Falsehoods After Trump's Debate Defeat

Right-wing media figures responded to former President Donald Trump’s poor debate performance on Tuesday night by spreading falsehoods about Minnesota’s abortion law.

During the debate, Trump made false and misleading assertions about legislation enacted by Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “But her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine,” Trump said. “He also says execution after birth, it's execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay.”

As ABC News moderator Linsey Davis noted after Trump’s comments, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born.”

Trump’s comments about “abortion in the ninth month” are also misleading. In 2023, Walz signed the Protect Reproductive Options Act, or PRO Act, into law, further codifying the right to an abortion in Minnesota. As KARE11 reported this April, Minnesota healthcare providers performed only one third-trimester abortion in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. The same was true in 2019 and 2020. In 2021, a single Minnesota resident was listed as having received a third-trimester abortion, but it was performed out of state. Generally, only about one percent of abortions nationwide occur after 21 weeks.

Despite clear evidence to the contrary, right-wing figures took Trump’s comments and ran with them.

Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade falsely claimed that under Walz, Minnesota performed five “abortions” after a child had been born — in other words, had committed the crime of infanticide. “It soon turned to the fact-checking on abortion, when it come to there’s no abortion after the ninth month, when, in fact, under Gov. Tim Walz, it happened at least five times in Minnesota,” Kilmeade said. “When a moderator … fact-checks you and the moderator is wrong, that's tough on a candidate.”

It’s not entirely clear what Kilmeade is referring to, but he is completely wrong on Minnesota’s abortion laws. In 2021, Minnesota recorded five instances of a “born-alive infant” following an abortion procedure; two were not viable, two were provided “comfort care,” and in the final instance, “fetal anomalies were reported resulting in death shortly after delivery.” In no case was a so-called post-birth abortion performed.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk also mischaracterized the 2023 Minnesota legislation, writing on X (formerly Twitter), “The left believes in legal infanticide.”

Contrary to Kirk’s claims, the 2023 law clearly states: “An infant who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law.”

As 10News reported, citing a doctor who supports abortion rights, the law was designed to make “sure doctors aren't forced to prolong the suffering of an infant unable to live on its own.” An editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune further explained how the law’s changes supported families by not forcing “an infant with severe anomalies undergo extraordinary and futile medical care.”

Fox News co-host Kayleigh McEnany echoed Kirk’s mischaracterization of the Minnesota law. “Where was the question about Tim Walz allowing babies born alive after abortion to die in Minnesota and then removing reporting requirements?” McEnany wrote on X.

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles similarly wrote, “Kamala’s own running mate repealed the legal requirement that physicians attempt to ‘preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.’”

Knowles’ colleague at The Daily Wire, Mary Margaret Olohan, did as well.

Right-wing radio host Erick Erickson made a similar claim, though did not specify that he was talking about Minnesota.

This line of attack against Walz isn’t new. In August, Fox’s McEnany made similar misleading claims, telling her viewers that “his abortion policy allows abortion until birth.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Kevin Roberts

Project 2025's Extreme Agenda Is An Attack On Unions And All Workers

Project 2025, a sprawling right-wing plan to provide policy and staffing to a future Republican president, proposes an extreme anti-worker agenda that would severely curtail unions’ ability to collectively bargain on behalf of their members and reverse gains organized labor has made in recent years. It would also weaken overtime regulations, give corporations wider latitude in misclassifying workers as independent contractors, and dismantle safety regulations that prohibit young people from working dangerous jobs.

The initiative’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, is an attempt to roll back New Deal-era, working class victories by allowing state-level exemptions from the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, and by creating nonunion “employee involvement organizations” to undermine unions’ negotiating power. It additionally calls for sharp reductions in the budgets of the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor and a freeze on new hires.

Project 2025 is organized by The Heritage Foundation and includes more than 100 conservative groups on its advisory board, which have collectively received more than $55 million from groups tied to conservative megadonors Leonard Leo and Charles Koch. Leo has been pushing the Supreme Court to further erode the power of organized labor, and the Koch family has waged a war on unions for more than 60 years.

Project 2025: Eviscerate overtime and dismantle pro-worker regulations

One central proposal in Mandate that illuminates Project 2025’s extreme anti-work posture is the suggestion that employers should be allowed to eviscerate overtime regulations and potentially withhold pay. The attacks on overtime take several forms, including a proposal to allow workers to accrue vacation instead of time-and-a-half compensation — but at least 40 percent of lower- and middle-income workers already don’t use their allotted paid time off. Under this policy employers could coerce workers into “voluntarily” selecting vacation that they’re either formally or informally prohibited from taking, thereby denying them overtime compensation.

Project 2025 further recommends that workers and bosses agree to extend the overtime threshold to a period of two weeks or one month. The policy would empower management to overload busy weeks with extra-long shifts and take advantage of slow periods through under-scheduling — effectively eliminating overtime altogether.

Another related attack on overtime comes in the form of allowing workers to negotiate away national employment law rights like time-and-a-half pay in exchange for noncompensation benefits like “predictable scheduling.” Such a change could incentivize predatory scheduling practices in order to coerce workers to give up overtime. If that’s not enough, Mandate also suggests returning to a Trump-era regulation that would deny overtime to most employees making more than $679 per week or $35,000 annually, which would leave behind millions of workers.

At virtually every turn, Mandate for Leadership stacks the deck against workers, including opening up young people to exploitation in dangerous jobs.

  • It seeks to revert to a Trump-era law that allows employers to categorize workers as independent contractors, thus denying them benefits and legal protections extended to employees.
  • It significantly dismantles safety protections for workers by directing Congress and the Department of Labor to “exempt small business, first-time, non-willful violators from fines issued by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.”
  • It argues that due to “worker shortages in dangerous fields,” with “parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.” This proposal is even more alarming when paired with Mandate’s call to exempt states from the FLSA, which governs child labor laws.

Despite a superficial concern for workers from the MAGA movement, Project 2025’s recommendations would be disastrous for the working class and a boon to economic elites.

A return to company unionism

Project 2025 seeks to roll back New Deal-era labor victories by proposing that Congress “pass legislation allowing waivers from federal labor laws” — like the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act — “under certain conditions.” Allowing state-level exemptions to the NLRA and FLSA would almost certainly trigger a race-to-the-bottom dynamic, where firms relocate to states with the weakest (or nonexistent) labor protections at the expense of workers. That’s what happened in states that passed so-called “right-to-work” laws — which starve unions of resources by preventing them from collecting fees from all employees they represent, thereby creating a free-rider problem — where employers were able to depress wages and union membership.

Unions have made significant gains under the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board, which enforces labor law and investigates anti-union practices. That progress is largely thanks to NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has taken an aggressive, pro-worker enforcement posture. Project 2025 promises to fire her on “Day One.” It also calls for reductions in the budgets of the NLRB and the Department of Labor to the “low end of the historical average,” as well as implementing a “hiring freeze for career officials.”

Mandate’s anti-unionism extends beyond funding cuts and a personnel freeze to attack unions at their core — most significantly, by suggesting that Congress “pass labor reforms that create non-union ‘employee involvement organizations.’” Although Mandate offers few details on what purpose these EIOs would serve, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) proposed similar legislation in 2022; his bill makes it explicit that these organizations “are not unions and ‘cannot enter into collective bargaining agreements.’” EIOs would signal a return to the days of company unionism, stripping power from workers by providing employers with what pro-labor think tank the People’s Policy Project calls “another union avoidance tool” and diluting the membership and voting power of actual unions. Like in Rubio’s bill, Mandate’s EIOs would place a “a non-voting, supervisory member” on the board of directors at large, publicly traded companies — an entirely powerless role incapable of advancing workers’ interests.

Project 2025 would further undermine unions by eliminating “card check” — where a majority of workers who have signed union authorization forms can ask their employer for voluntary recognition — and mandating “the secret ballot exclusively.” Although the idea of a secret ballot has the veneer of democracy, in practice it’s a power grab for management. By forcing organizers to go through the byzantine NLRB election process, an employer can buy itself time to wage an anti-union campaign and bog down the process, often through illegal means. A 2019 study found that employers violated labor laws in 41.5% of NLRB-supervised union elections in 2016 and 2017 and intimidated or coerced workers in nearly a third of all elections.

The structural power imbalance is exacerbated by the huge discrepancy in resources between the parties. Every year, employers spend more than $400 million just on consultants in their attempts to thwart union drives. When coupled with anti-worker harassment, that’s money well spent from the point of view of management. A 2022 study found that union elections through the NLRB were successful “in less than 10% of cases where the employer resists the organizing effort to the point that an unfair labor practice charge is filed.”

In 2023, the NLRB under Abruzzo provided unions with a major win by ruling that if an employer is found to have violated labor law during the course of an election campaign, it must immediately recognize the union — without requiring an election — and move to contract negotiations. Mandate would reverse that ruling.

Mandate additionally looks to roll back Biden administration NLRB protections for “protected concerted activity” — that is, actions workers take to better their working conditions, even outside of attempts to form a union. Project 2025 looks to return to the Trump administration’s interpretation, which took a very narrow view of what was protected and opened up workers to retaliation from their bosses for actions like discussing workplace safety concerns with fellow workers.

Project 2025’s war on organized labor in its own words

  • Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: “Congress should rescind the federal charter of the National Education Association—the only union that enjoys a federal charter—no longer putting the federal imprimatur of support on the special interest group.” [Heritage.org, 1/9/24]
  • Jonathan Berry, author of the labor chapter in Mandate, writing at American Compass: “In practice, modern unions in the American private sector are beset by serious agency problems that limit their effectiveness as institutions for individual workers to share in the common good.” [American Compass, accessed 7/9/24]
  • The Heritage Foundation budget blueprint for fiscal years 2023: “The Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau should be eliminated.” [Heritage.org, 2022]
  • Heritage: “How to Close Down the Department of Labor.” [Heritage.org, 10/19/95]
  • War Room host and key booster of Project 2025 Steve Bannon: “If Nevada is Close They Will Steal it with the Culinary Union.” [Gettr, 3/21/24; Media Matters, 11/9/23]
  • Stephen Moore, Heritage Foundation fellow: “Why Every State Should Guarantee the Right to Work.” [Heritage.org, 7/17/2014]
  • Claremont Review of Books, a media outlet affiliated with Project 2025 advisory board member the right-wing Claremont Institute: “Right-to-work laws make it easier for states to attract businesses, because many companies prefer to locate in right-to-work states, believing that unions not only drive up costs but reduce productivity with baroque work rules and adversarial stances.” [Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2015]

Go deeper into Project 2025’s attacks on workers

  • Jonathan Berry, author of Mandate’s chapter on labor, was a top official in the Labor Department under Trump — which was catastrophic for workers. Trump’s labor secretary, Eugene Scalia, was a “wrecking ball aimed at workers” who had spent decades in his career as a lawyer “helping corporations gut or evade government regulations, including worker protections.” During Scalia’s tenure, with Berry “overseeing all aspects of rulemaking and policy development,” millions of workers were denied overtime benefits. [The New Yorker, 10/19/20; Economic Policy Institute, 9/24/19; Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
  • Unions are building power in the United States, but Project 2025 would likely curtail the National Labor Relations Board’s progress. A June study found that “workers today have a better chance of winning their union representation election than at any point in the past 15 years, with a win rate of more than 70 percent.” Project 2025’s promise to remove NLRB General Counsel Abruzzo, alongside its other anti-union proposals, would likely halt those gains and result in fewer employers being held accountable for their anti-worker, law-breaking tactics. [Center for American Progress, 6/20/24]
  • Mandate for Leadership’s policies could allow firms to discriminate against LGBTQ communities while at work. The guidebook recommends restricting the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County — which extended civil rights protections to gay and trans people — to apply only to hiring and firing decisions. Other types of workplace discrimination, such as enforcing dress codes or denying workers access to a bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, would theoretically be permitted under this regulatory regime. [GLAAD, 6/24/24; Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
  • Project 2025 further opens the door to workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people by pushing a false definition of so-called “biological binary” sex. “The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc,” the book states, adding: “The President should direct agencies to focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’” [Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
  • Like other sections of the document, the chapter on labor takes aim at abortion rights. It argues that Congress and the Department of Labor should “clarify” that states have the power to “to restrict abortion, surrogacy, or other anti-life [employee] ‘benefits.’” [Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Project 2025 Outlines Trump's Plan To Seize Autocratic Power Over Spending

Project 2025 Outlines Trump's Plan To Seize Autocratic Power Over Spending

A partner organization in a large conservative effort to provide policy and personnel recommendations to the next Republican administration, known as Project 2025, has become a leading advocate for the radical position that the president should have broad latitude to refuse to carry out Congressionally mandated spending.

The ramifications of such a policy would be wide-reaching and could potentially threaten funding for the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, or other conservative targets within the federal government.

The group pushing for this major expanse of presidential power is the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has deployed several of its top figures to make its argument across right-wing broadcast and digital media. Its most recent salvo came in June, when CRA released a white paper arguing that a 1974 law restricting a president from unilaterally refusing to spend funds allocated by Congress — the so-called “impoundment” power — represented an improper break from historical precedent. Instead, CRA argued that the White House should have the authority to halt Congressional spending virtually at will.

“Congress’s use of its power of the purse to make it illegal for the President to intentionally spend less than the full amount of what appropriated was norm-breaking, unprecedented, and unconstitutional,” CRA senior fellow Mark Paoletta wrote with his co-authors David Shapiro and Brandon Stras. Paoletta and Shaprio have written op-eds advancing the same argument at The Hill and right-wing blog The Federalist.

Paoletta’s executive branch power grab is an implicit goal of Project 2025, the right-wing policy and staffing initiative organized by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. The Center for Renewing America is one of more than 100 partner organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board; its founder, Russ Vought, was the director of the Office of Management and Budget under former President Donald Trump and remains a major figure in MAGA media, in addition to being an open Christian nationalist.

As Vought toldThe New York Times, describing his organization’s broader goal of remaking the federal government: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

Although the impoundment power doesn’t come up in Project 2025’s policy book — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — it’s easy to see how it fits in with the effort’s larger goal of transforming the federal government. A second Trump administration could theoretically withhold funds outright or use that threat to pressure career staffers perceived to be insufficiently deferential to the White House.

The ramifications of such a policy would be wide-reaching and could potentially threaten funding for the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, or other conservative targets within the federal government.

The potential targets of such a scheme are laid out in black and white in Project 2025’s Mandate. The book takes aim at the Department of Health and Human Services for its pro-LGBTQ programs and directs the department to “issue guidance reemphasizing that states are free to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans.” It also calls for drastic cuts to the Department of Energy, shrinking the EPA, and for the total elimination of the Department of Education. The Department of Justice would likely be empowered to target reformist district attorneys and directed to slash anti-discrimination efforts.

The CRA paper is an attempt to undermine the 1974 Impoundments Control Act, which Congress passed after former President Richard Nixon refused to spend federally allocated funds on “water pollution control, education and health programs and highway and housing construction,” according to The New York Times. Nixon approached the impoundment power as a tool to further centralize power within the office of the President and pursue a reactionary agenda that ran counter to the will of Congress, providing a possible historical template for CRA.

Like Paoletta, Vought has publicly opposed the 1974 law. On X (formerly Twitter), Vought wrote: “Making Impoundment Great Again!”

In another post, the Center for Renewing America’s X account paraphrased Vought’s description of the impoundment power as “our secret weapon to totally dismantle the WOKE & WEAPONIZED federal bureaucracy.” That post linked to a Real Clear Politics article that directly quoted Vought as arguing that “when you think that a law is unconstitutional,” referring to the Impoundment Control Act, a future Trump administration should “push the envelope.”

In February, Vought appeared on Fox Business to foreshadow the recently released CRA report. “The loss of impoundment authority — which 200 years of presidents enjoyed — was the original sin in eliminating the ability for a branch-on-branch to control spending,” Vought said. Other budgetary goals he named included “spending reductions,” “bureaucracy crushing,” and “welfare reform.”

According to The Washington Post, Vought made a similar comment on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. “Presidents had the ability to impound funds for 200 years until a bad law got passed that we think is unconstitutional under President Nixon,” Vought said, “We want to go back in a different direction.”

Another CRA figure, who has advanced a radical theory of executive authority in other contexts, has also argued against the Impoundment Control Act. Last July, CRA senior fellow Jeffrey Clark also appeared on War Room to discuss his “fight against the administrative state,” in the host’s words.

“President Nixon really cracked the whip and was really using his historical impoundment powers,” Clark said. “And then when he was weak during Watergate, Congress passed this Impoundment Control Act to try to take that power away from the president.”

“So what I’m working on, essentially, are the constitutional arguments for why that was wrong and various ways in which the Impoundment Control Act is just flatly unconstitutional,” Clark continued.

During the final weeks of Trump’s administration, Clark — then a lawyer in the Department of Justice — attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election by pressuring the department to claim it had “identified significant concerns” with vote totals in crucial states and should send “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump,” according to congressional testimony.

Though it remains publicly unclear which departments, agencies, or programs a second Trump administration could arbitrarily defund, he’s already shown a willingness to use federal funds as a bludgeon in his own personal protection racket. During his first term, Trump tried to withhold roughly $400 million in foreign military aid in order to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to provide him with dirt on the Biden family, which led to his first impeachment.

On X, Vought celebrated his organization’s white paper arguing against the Impoundment Control Act, which he promised was the “first of many” on the topic.

“Why did we found the Center for Renewing America?” he wrote. “To write papers like this.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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.