FINALLY! Jane Mayer’s New Yorker Story Asks if Fox News has Become Trump Propaganda

Posted by on March 4, 2019 at 1:41 pm. 1 Comments :

Twenty-three years ago Rupert Murdoch (an international, ultra-conservative newspaper baron) and Roger Ailes (a Republican media consultant) joined forces to launch Fox News, an avowedly right-wing cable news network. It’s mission was to advance the agenda of the far-right and to malign Democrats and other liberals. Any objective observer recognized their intentions. They were spelled out openly in the slogan, “fair and balanced,” which implied that all the other news outlets were not. It’s a tactic they borrowed from cult marketing.

Donald Trump Fox News

Over time Fox News transformed into a mouthpiece specifically dedicated to Donald Trump. While it still promoted Republican policies, it was through a filter that first took into consideration the best interests of Trump. The evidence of this bias was everywhere. And now Jane Mayer of the New Yorker has compiled an exhaustive collection of it that seals the case. She may be two years late, but the historical value of her documentation is still worthwhile. Some of the key observations included this description of the place that Fox News came to occupy in American media:

“It has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of ‘Messengers of the Right,’ a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, ‘It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.’ […] ‘Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. ‘It’s a radicalization model.'”

Indeed. Fox News set out to stir up the Trump Deplorables into a army of angry misfits who have literally threatened to start a civil war over what they regard as the mistreatment of their Dear Leader. And Trump has helped to inflame those sentiments by declaring that the media (which doesn’t include Fox News) is “the enemy of the American people.” He persists in that calculated characterization even after several domestic terrorists have targeted the media for assassination.

Mayer also noted that the intertwining of of the White House and Fox News turned it into a hybrid creature that interacted “so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead.” Actually, it isn’t that hard. Trump is too ignorant to come up with an original idea. It is clearly Fox News that is running the President’s show. Numerous examples of him live-tweeting what he sees on Fox have been documented.

This bizarre embrace is further evident in the revolving door relationship between Fox and the Trump administration, wherein his staff was littered with former Foxies, while former staffers often ended up on the network’s payroll. Perhaps the most egregious example of that was when Trump hired Bill Shine as his Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications. Shine was the former Fox News president who was fired for his role in enabling the sexual misconduct of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. He was also Sean Hannity’s producer before moving into the executive suites.

Mayer’s article covered a broad array of Fox News history. She wrote about Trump’s long personal relationship with Rupert Murdoch. She revealed that Fox had the Stormy Daniels story before other media, but declined to publish it because “Rupert wanted Trump to win.” She detailed how Trump sought to intervene in the AT&T/TimeWarner merger in order to punish CNN.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The whole article is worth the read for anyone interested in how Fox News became Trump’s propaganda division. But most of it is a just a very compelling retelling of the incestuous political/media affair that raged between Trump and Fox News. It’s useful to have this much information all in one place. And hopefully it will persuade some of the laggards who have been willfully blind to this conjoining of wingnuttery that allowing a criminal government to merge with an unethically biased media enterprise is both un-American and dangerous.

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Trump’s Lies are Crushed By Senate Intel Vice-Chair: ‘There’s Plenty of Evidence’ of Collusion

Posted by on March 3, 2019 at 2:35 pm. NO Comments :

Donald Trump has been stuck in a frantic and tedious loop of whiny denials for the past couple years. It consists primarily of him impotently proclaiming his innocence with regard to his nefarious associations with Russian operatives in an effort to steal the 2016 presidential election. For the most part his factless proclamations have only served to make him look more guilty.

Mark Warner, CNN

Among his most persistent citations of innocence has been a repeated reference to remarks by the Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr. Last September Burr told reporters that he had not seen any direct evidence of collusion or conspiracy with Russia on the part of the President. Note that he did not say it didn’t happen, only that his committee had “no hard evidence” of it. But that was enough to trigger Trump into making multiple identical tweets on the subject. It began on Sep 12, 2018, and continued on Feb 7, 2019, and Feb 8, 2019 and Feb 9, 2019 and Feb 10, 2019 and Feb 22, 2019 and Feb 25, 2019.

Some of these tweets were Trump unleashing his standard “Witch Hunt” rants, and others were retweets from the likes of Sean Hannity. But they all said exactly the same thing incorrectly quoting Sen. Burr: “No Collusion!”

Well, on Sunday morning Trump’s favorite proof that he was a squeaky clean paragon of virtue fell apart. Sen. Mark Warner, the Vice-Chair of the Intelligence Committee appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and explicitly contradicted Trump’s distorted version of events. His remarks could not have been more clear:

“Anyone who says there’s no evidence of collaboration – there’s plenty of evidence. […] The notion that there’s no evidence is just factually wrong. Just in the public domain there are literally reams and reams of evidence of Russian outreach to Trump officials and clear interest from Trump officials, including the President’s own son, welcoming the opportunity to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.”

Warner outlined a small portion of the evidence that was just revealed during the recent House Oversight Committee’s hearing with Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen. He cited three pieces of evidence from Cohen’s testimony:

“One, the fact that Donald Trump and Michael Cohen mislead the American public for months about the whole notion of trying to continue to get a Trump Tower project going in Moscow. […]

“The second is the evidence that Mr. Cohen put out that he was in the presence of Donald Trump when Roger Stone called indicating that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange from Wikileaks, indicating that Wikileaks was about to drop a bunch of very damaging information about Hillary Clinton. […]

“And finally we have this whole question wherein Mr. Trump knew about the meeting in Trump Tower that included Don Jr, Jared Kushner, the campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Clearly a meeting that was not about Russian adoption, but was about the idea of turning over dirt on Hillary Clinton.”

For good measure, Warner’s counterpart in the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, spoke on the same issues on CBS’s Face the Nation, saying that “there is both ‘direct evidence’ and ‘abundant circumstantial evidence’ of collusion with Russia.” He elaborated:

“They offer that dirt. There is an acceptance of that offer in writing from the president’s son, Don Jr., and there is overt acts in furtherance of that. That is the meeting at Trump Tower and all the lies to cover up that meeting at the Trump Tower, and apparently lies that the president participated in.”

So this should put an end to the fallacy that there is no evidence against Trump for conspiracy with Russia. Quite the opposite is true. There are mountains of evidence. And that’s even the position of the Vice-Chair of the Senate committee that Trump is so fond of citing on his own behalf. But don’t expect this to end Trump’s plaintive wailing that he’s innocent. When has reality ever interfered with his determination to disgorge obvious lies to shield himself from the consequences of his criminal behavior?

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

https://youtu.be/x4qhUWYnMNo?t=195


Trump’s 2 Hour CPAC Freak Out (Only on Fox News) Exceeds Even His Own Standards for Lunacy

Posted by on March 2, 2019 at 5:03 pm. 4 Comments :

Just when you thought you could never use the preface “Just when you thought” again when referring to Donald Trump, he makes an appearance at the Wingnut-Palooza festival, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Scheduled for a fifty minute address, the long-winded, rambling President spoke for a little over two hours.

Donald Trump

The entire speech was lousy with lies, insults, and imaginary recitations of events that obviously never took place outside the confines of his diseased mind. He revisited Hillary Clinton’s emails, his inauguration crowd size, and some totally incomprehensible blathering about tariffs that goes back to the eighteen hundreds. He even took some time out to hump the American flag.

It would be a monumental waste of time to do an analysis of the whole brain dump that Trump unloaded. But there are a few moments that set the tone for an afternoon of utter idiocy. Let’s begin with Trump’s descent into the sort of profanity that right-wingers would roast any Democrat for engaging in. Having something to do with the Reagan administration forty years ago, he said that:

Don’t bother trying to figure out what he’s talking about. Just move on to the next part where Trump exhibits his fear of the future that holds puts him in extreme legal jeopardy. He predictably attacked special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation as a “Witch Hunt,” and asserted falsely that one of Mueller’s team was running the Clinton Foundation (that he calls the Hillary Clinton foundation). He also said that another team member “has perhaps the worst reputation of any human being I have ever seen.” Seriously, that’s as specific as he got. Then he repeated one of his favorite lies that former FBI Director James Comey and Mueller are best friends. In the real world they are at best acquaintances. They had dinner once and have never visited each other’s homes.

But perhaps the most offensive portion of today’s Trump tirades was when he tried to emulate the McCarthyist rhetoric that insinuated that America’s enemies infiltrated the government and the Congress:

“We have people in Congress right now that hate our country. And you know that. And we can name every one of them if they want.”

So now Trump has a list of America-haters that he can (but won’t) make public. If the list has any accuracy at all, his name will be at the top of it. After all, he’s the one that openly expresses his love for Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and any other foreign dictator he has met. And somehow Trump wandered off at the end into an immigration rant that questioned how these members of Congress did in “their country.” What countries he’s talking about remains a mystery.

This CPAC speech is officially Trump’s longest to date. For two hours, he managed to entertain the Deplorables at the conference. But the good news is that the damage was limited to the convo attendees and to what’s left of the audience at Fox News. Fox proved their devotion to the President by being the only cable news network that aired the speech live and uninterrupted. They have truly earned their reputation as State TV. But unfortunately for them and Trump, their audience is rapidly shrinking in the face of strong competition from MSNBC, led by the top rated program on cable news, the Rachel Maddow Show. And that, at least, is good news.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


Rachel Maddow Stomps Sean Hannity with 4th Straight Monthly Win vs State TV (aka Fox News)

Posted by on March 2, 2019 at 10:40 am. 3 Comments :

A couple of years ago Fox News was regarded as an invincible monolith on cable news that no other network could challenge. It was a fallacy created by their catering to a hard-core right-wing constituency that behaved like mesmerized cult worshipers, but it had the effect of corralling the whole demographic into a plurality of viewers while the other networks divided the rest of the audience.

Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity, Fox News

However, that tactic has lost its potency. Ever since the midterm election in early November, the Rachel Maddow Show has dominated her time period and helped to boost the ratings of her MSNBC colleagues. For four straight months Maddow has beaten the previous time period champ, Sean Hannity, by significant margins.

For the month of February Maddow’s ratings improved by nine percent over the prior year. She was the most-watched cable news program among adults 25-54. She won all but three nights in the entire month. Meanwhile, Fox News has been struggling to keep people tuned in. Tucker Carlson was down four percent year-over-year in total viewers. Laura Ingraham was down six percent. And Hannity was off seven percent. In the coveted advertiser demo of 25-54 year olds, Hannity has lost nearly a quarter (23%) of his audience. In fact, the whole Fox News primetime roster is down in the demo by twenty percent.

The dominance of Maddow’s program has increased over time. And on February 27 (the day following the House Oversight Committee’s hearing with testimony by Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen), she had the highest rating ever for her show. This performance has resulted in MSNBC achieving ratings records overall. From Morning Joe in the AM, to Nicolle Wallace in the afternoon, to primetime, MSNBC has enjoyed double digit growth.

In addition to Fox’s ratings woes, they are also suffering an exodus of advertisers. Some of that is due to their declining ratings, but most of it is because advertisers just don’t want to be associated with programs that advocate bigotry and promote violence. It’s gotten so bad that the ad sales folks at Fox are afraid to even try selling these shows to advertisers. Consequently, Trump has had to be enlisted in a campaign to rescue the failing network’s biggest “stars.” And it’s a two-way street with Fox hosts like Hannity and Jeanine Pirro showing up at Trump’s cult rallies.

Television ratings can be fluid and swerve back and forth between various networks and programs. But the rise of MSNBC has defied the predictions of most analysts. And their sustained dominance over many months has been particularly surprising. This is no fluke. And it is not likely a coincidence that this success has occurred as Democrats have increased their presence in Washington, and the legal peril for Trump has exploded.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

As Trump’s prospects continue to decline, more people will tune in to MSNBC for the real news that Fox ignores and suppresses. And as more people become informed, Trump’s fortunes will wither even more. It’s beautiful downward spiral for a criminal president and his TV sycophants.


Plead the 25th: Trump Disgorges an Insane Tweetstorm About an Imaginary Michael Cohen Book

Posted by on March 1, 2019 at 10:46 am. 4 Comments :

Like Clockwork. Whenever Donald Trump is the most fearful about his snowballing legal peril, he lashes out from his Twitter throne with the most deranged and groundless spasms of utter nonsense he can contrive given his obviously advanced mental infirmity. And on Friday morning he didn’t disappoint. The fury that he unleashed only affirms just how recent events have driven him to near incapacitation.

Donald Trump

Trump just returned from Vietnam where he engineered an historic failure to achieve any of the progress that he promised prior to his meeting with his girlfriend (“We fell in love”), Kim Jong Un. As Jimmy Kimmel put it, “Trump literally got more done in his summit with Kim Kardashian.” And while Trump was embarrassing America abroad, his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was dishing on him in a hearing before the House Oversight Committee. His testimony was so damaging that even the senior judicial analyst at Fox News recognized that Trump could be liable for as many as four felonies.

It’s at times like these that Trump totally freaks out and decides to go public with his delusions and make things even worse. The following tweets are some of the best arguments that Trump is suffering from senile dementia and needs to be evaluated for a possible invocation of the 25th Amendment. He starts off with this pile of blathering falsehoods:

First of all, nothing about this was either “new” or “just released.” In fact, the Daily Beast reported on a proposal for a book by Cohen last May. It was tentatively titled “Trump Revolution: From The Tower to The White House, Understanding Donald J. Trump.” But it was scrapped due to his legal problems that were beginning to spin out of control. Also, why is Trump always so obsessed with people writing him “love letters,” ala Kim Jong Un? And then Trump tweets that:

Congress cannot demand something that doesn’t exist. There was never a book published or even submitted to the publisher. So it’s impossible to figure out what Trump is referring to that is so head spinning. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the pitch for the book featured a vastly different characterization of Trump than the one that Cohen is presenting now. A year ago he was still shilling for the President and telling what he now concedes were lies. The difference between his statements then and now is that now he’s making them under oath. Nevertheless, Trump continues:

No – It’s clear that Trump does not see. The case for his conspiracy with Russia is stronger than ever. And there is still no evidence of any wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton, even after thousands of hours of investigations by a Republican congress. If there were, Trump’s Justice Department would have brought indictments. What’s more, the only reason Trump’s finances are being scrutinized is that there is so much evidence of criminal activity. If this is a “Witch Hunt” then it’s already found a vast coven of witches. And finally:

How does Trump know what Cohen’s book manuscript shows? Does he have a copy? Why doesn’t he just release that to the public? Perhaps because it doesn’t exist. Even the prospective publisher said that he never received a manuscript. And Trump shouldn’t be portraying others as lying “on a scale not seen before,” considering the documentation of his lies since taking office that now exceed over 8,000. As for Lanny Davis (who is not Hillary Clinton’s lawyer), why does Trump care what he has to say? He is representing Cohen and will surely take positions that advance Cohen’s interest. And he’ll probably be more effective than Trump’s legal team headed by the always entertaining Rudy Giuliani.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

So Trump is once again displaying the signs of a man consumed by fear who has no idea how to respond to the numerous and legitimate allegations swirling around him. So he posts incoherent tirades on Twitter that are filled with lies and slander. And for some reason he thinks this will be helpful. Well, he’s kind of right. It will be very helpful to special counsel Robert Mueller and the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.


UH-OH: Michael Cohen Paints ‘Grave Picture’ for Trump, Says Fox News Sr. Judicial Analyst

Posted by on February 28, 2019 at 10:56 am. 2 Comments :

The testimony in the House Oversight Committee by Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen on Wednesday provided both fireworks and yawns. Much of what was discussed was already known, but was given more weight by the dramatic nature of a congressional hearing. The fireworks were mainly due to Republican efforts to malign Cohen while obediently defending the President and deflecting from any potentially bad news.

Fox News Judge Napolitano

However, there were some revelatory moments that could expose Trump to some legal jeopardy if they are confirmed by other evidence or testimony. The risks for Trump were so apparent that even the senior judicial analyst on Fox News noticed. Andrew Napolitano was interviewed by Neil Cavuto after Cohen’s hearing (video below). His observations were decidedly unlike those that might be expected on Trump’s favorite propaganda network. He began by addressing the coordinated strategy of the committee’s Republicans to portray Cohen as an incorrigible liar. “If he’s that kind of a monster, Mr. President,” Napolitano asked, “why did you keep him around for ten years?”?

That’s a good question. He might also have pointed out that if lying was such an unforgivable sin, then how can the GOP continue to excuse Trump, whose documented record of lying has exceeded more than 8,000 falsehoods since he took office. But it was Napolitano’s legal analysis that really put Trump’s troubled future into perspective. He offered a brief synopsis of the legal peril that the President may soon find himself in. The upshot, according to Napolitano, is that in Cohen’s testimony “there’s at least four potential felonies” that Trump faces. Napolitano said that:

“[Cohen] paints a potentially grave picture for the president. If the conversation he says he overheard with Roger Stone is true, then the President lied under oath. Because the President swore to the accuracy of his answers to the written question from [special counsel] Bob Mueller, one of which was ‘Did you speak to Roger Stone about Julian Assange?’ Answer: ‘No’

“If what Michael Cohen says is true about the President meeting with the Russians in Trump Tower in June of 2016, then he lied under oath, because he told Bob Mueller he didn’t know about it.

“The payments by Donald Trump, signed while he was president, to Michael Cohen, showing a debt to Michael Cohen. The President swore in his financial statements filed with the Department of the Treasury, he didn’t have any debts with Michael Cohen. And two months after he swore to the accuracy of that he starts writing checks of $35,000 a month to Michael Cohen. That extends the conspiracy to defraud the Federal Election Commission of accurate campaign information into the President’s presidency.”?

If this were an analysis by a Democrat or a liberal pundit it wouldn’t be especially notable. But for the senior judicial analyst at Fox News to be pointing out these legal problems for Trump is rare and, from Trump’s perspective, worrisome. Not that Trump isn’t already worried. His incessant tweeting about “Witch Hunts” and his childish insults aimed at his critics is the obvious behavior of someone consumed by fear. In remarks Trump made about Cohen’s testimony from Hanoi, he reinforced that image of a cornered rat:

“He lied a lot, but it was very interesting, because he didn’t lie about one thing: He said no collusion with the Russian hoax.”?

Actually, Cohen never said that there was no collusion. He only said that he had no direct evidence of it, but that he had his suspicions. So Trump is still desperately trying to distort reality to fit his twisted version of it wherein he can be free of the frightening consequences of his unlawful acts. And if his precariousness legal status is so apparent to a Fox News analyst, then he truly does have something worry about.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

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Trump and Fox News Seek to Deflect from Michael Cohen Testimony By Accusing Democrats of Infanticide

Posted by on February 27, 2019 at 10:33 am. 6 Comments :

On Wednesday morning the long anticipated testimony of Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, began before the House Oversight Committee. His prepared opening statement revealed that he intends to provide both testimony and documentary evidence that Trump is “a racist, con man, and cheat.” This has predictably triggered Trump who retweeted an absurd comment that did nothing but expose his flagrant fear of the truth.

Fox News, Laura Ingraham, Planned Parenthood

The fear of Cohen’s testimony has also infected Trump’s sycophantic defenders at State TV (aka Fox News). But their strategy for diverting attention away from the hearing has devolved into one of the most repulsive and dishonest series of accusations ever made, even by the low standards of the Trump era Republican Nationalist Party.

The onslaught began the night before the hearing with Fox’s primetime host, and devoted white supremacist, Laura Ingraham. In a segment that featured a chyron saying that the “Left Wants to Destroy Everything Traditional,” Ingraham practically drooled while asserting that “”Hitler, just like Planned Parenthood, practiced and defended mass extermination.”

So it’s Ingrahams’s position that individual women who choose to exercise their Constitutional rights regarding difficult health decisions are the equivalent of a murderous dictator who purposefully engaged in genocide? And this is the issue that Ingraham needed to raise on the eve of the Cohen testimony? Clearly her intent was to inflame a hostile fury among Fox’s viewers with the hopes of inciting an anger that would cloud their perspective of the pending hearing. And she wasn’t alone.

The following morning the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends broached the very same topic with the help of Trump’s White House counsel, Kellyanne Conway. And even though the subject of the segment was spelled out in the chyron reading “Michael Cohen Testifies on Capital Hill Today,” Conway unleashed a searing assault on Democrats that was completely false and defamatory:

“[Democrats] are for infanticide. They are for late-term abortion, taxpayer funded abortion, mid-term pregnancy abortion, sex selection abortion – when you don’t want another daughter, fine – just find out the sex of the baby and then exterminate it. Guess what? Now they’re for post-birth abortion.”

None of that is remotely true. However it is provocative and incendiary and intended to whip up a hysteria among the Deplorables watching Fox News that would shove aside any real discussion of the Cohen hearing. But these attempts to suppress any leakage of the news from the hearing only affirm just how terrified they are of the truth getting out. It’s a tactic that drips with fear. And it will work pretty well on Fox News viewers. Unfortunately for Trump, that is an ever-shrinking sector of the population.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


The Fox News Fetish for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Just Keeps Getting Creepier: Ivanka Trump Edition

Posted by on February 26, 2019 at 12:48 pm. 10 Comments :

Ever since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected last November, the right-wing media has been beside themselves trying to slander her as an ignorant and un-American little brown girl who has no business having an opinion, much less serving in Congress. And no one has been more determined to disseminate this disparagement than Fox News.

Fox News, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson

Consequently, the State TV network reached out to Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, to deliver the administration’s smackdown on Ocasio-Cortez. Unfortunately, her interview merely revealed that she is a spoiled rich kid with no comprehension of what ordinary Americans are experiencing. She tried to respond to Ocasio-Cortez’s announcement that she intended to pay her staff a {gasp} living wage. Previously on Fox News this was greeted with a pathetic display of math illiteracy. And Ivanka’s response was equally embarrassing:

“I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last 4 years. People want to work for what they get. So, I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want.”

So a woman who has lived her entire life off of what she was given by daddy is certain that other Americans wouldn’t want fair compensation for their work, which is all that Ocasio-Cortez is proposing. If this is what Ivanka learned from four years of traveling around the country, she has a severe learning disability. But she does have an excellent grasp of the sort of harebrained talking points required to be a Fox News pundit.

The obsession that Fox News is nursing every day is evidence that Ocasio-Cortez is one of the new class of representatives who Fox fears the most. There is no other explanation for how maniacally focused they are on her. She was only sworn in a month and a half ago, but Fox’s most prominent hosts are fixated squarely on her every word (as well as her youth, clothes, and dancing ability). The entire primetime roster on Fox all featured her on their programs Monday night. They were also transcribed into op-eds for the Fox website. The amusingly alarmist headlines and ledes were:

  • Sean Hannity: It’s scary how prominent Dems, the media are supporting Ocasio-Cortez and her socialist views.
    “We are once again featuring the 29-year-old socialist from New York who is both revered and feared inside her own party. […] But now, she is taking her insane views even a step further.”
  • Laura Ingraham: Spike Lee, Smollett, Ocasio-Cortez and her mini-mes tell us lots about modern day liberalism.
    “Like most of today’s social justice warriors, Ocasio-Cortez truly believes she is always morally right. And that notion entitles her to be one of the leaders of not the #MeToo movement, but the ‘Me-me-me’ movement.”
  • Tucker Carlson: How dumb, arrogant Ocasio-Cortez became the boss of the Democratic Party
    “It’s a measure of how cowardly impassive everyone has become all of a sudden that a chorus of right-thinking Democrats hasn’t told this idiotic windbag to be quiet and take a seat.”

These are the extreme, unhinged, and disrespectful lengths that the Foxies will go to in order to malign a committed, intelligent young woman who stepped up to serve her country. And the fear that she has stirred in their shriveled hearts is unmistakable. This is the sort of full-court press that the right generally reserves for Kenyan-born, terrorist-sympathizing, Muslim atheist commies who stole the presidency by actually getting a majority of the popular vote.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Ocasio-Cortez has earned this vitriol in record time. She should be proud that she has these dimwits from Fox News stalking her. It’s a validation of her effectiveness as an activist and a communicator. And at the same time it exposes Fox as a puerile confederacy of dunces who are utterly incapable of making a coherent response to someone they belittle as immature and inexperienced. Which, by the way, is a much better description of their Dear Leader, Donald Trump.


Whiny Baby Trump Lashes Out at Spike Lee for Telling Oscar Viewers to ‘Do the Right Thing’

Posted by on February 25, 2019 at 12:08 pm. 2 Comments :

The 91st Academy Awards was broadcast on Sunday night to the millions of fans of the cinema and celebrities. But there was one viewer that wasn’t especially pleased with what he saw. Although the Oscars were aired on the eve of Trump’s trip to Vietnam for a second summit with his BFF (“We fell in love”) Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump wasn’t bothering to prepare. Instead, he was gathering rage at what he assumed was Hollywood liberals disparaging him.

Spike Lee, Donald Trump, Oscars

Perhaps the most notable incident of Trump projecting himself into the event involved Spike Lee’s acceptance speech (video below). He won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for his film BlacKkKlansman. He concluded his remarks by saying:

“If we all connect with our ancestors we will have love and wisdom regained. We will regain our humanity. It will be a powerful moment. The 2020 presidential election is around the corner. Let’s all mobilize. Let’s all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate. Let’s do the right thing.”

Notice that Lee never mentioned Trump by name. He was speaking about history, humanity, love, and morality. So naturally Trump took it as a insult directed squarely at him:

First of all, Trump’s swipe at Lee’s note reading is a peculiar line of attack for him. After all, he cannot speak coherently without his ever-present TelePrompter (or even with it). And when Trump goes off script, that’s when he usually commits his most idiotic and damaging gaffes. But Trump went further by calling Lee’s remarks a “racist hit on your President.” What part of Lee’s speech could possibly be characterized that way?

Finally, Trump rattled off his routine ego-boosting self-praise about what a god-send he has been for African-Americans. Never mind that nothing he’s done has contributed to the welfare of the black community. To the contrary, Trump has exacerbated hostilities and the rise of racist hate groups across the country.

Nevertheless, Trump personalized Lee’s inspiring comments and turned them into a perceived put-down. It’s impossible for Trump to see anything as not being about him. And whether it’s a holiday or a funeral, Trump can only view it in terms of how it affects him.

However, in this case he’s got a point. Because any reference to overtly racist behavior can easily be associated with Trump, the first president to receive an endorsement from a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (David Duke), and the full support of the Nazi website, Daily Stormer. And if you are ever asked to “do the right thing,” you can be confident that that really means to vote against Donald Trump.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

https://youtu.be/tTo3XYm33WU?t=133


HUH? Fox News’ Math-Challenged Hosts Declare that Free Market Salaries are Communism

Posted by on February 24, 2019 at 1:13 pm. 4 Comments :

The disease that infects the talking headcases at Fox News is apparently degenerative and causes its victims to decline ever further into the abyss of cognitive infirmity. This is especially true of the “Curvy Couch” potatoes on Fox and Friends, whose combined IQ has yet to break the grass ceiling.

Fox News, Pete Hegseth

Donald Trump’s favorite morning show has a long history of hysterically offbase utterings. Their ratio of wrongness is in the stratosphere. Which is probably why Trump loves it so much. And a stinging example of this dumbassedness was aired on Sunday morning in a segment (video below) that was trying to make Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look dumb. They failed miserably.

The segment was a response to the recent announcement by Ocasio-Cortez that she would be paying all of her congressional staffers a living wage of at least $52,000 per year. The thought of people being treated with respect, and compensated fairly for their work was just too much for the Fox Newsies, so they concocted an argument that they were certain would slay the newest Democratic monster at their gates. It went a little something like this:

Griff Jenkins: Get a load of this. A tweet went out yesterday. She said “Leadership begins at home,” whatever, or however she put it. She’s basically announcing that she is going to ‘redistribute’ the money appropriated to her congressional office to make sure that the entry level staffers get a fair share of money.

Heaven Forbid! Whatever will become of our country if the representatives we elect to serve our interests start actually behaving in accordance with our values? Notice how Jenkins worked in the term “redistribute,” in order to invoke the memory of some imagined socialist nightmare. Never mind that redistribution of wealth is common in free societies (even capitalist ones) where some measure of equity is sought through taxation and public assistance. In fact, the Trump Tax Scam was textbook redistribution, except it went from the working class to the wealthy.

Jenkins then went on to “Fox-plain” what was so terribly wrong with Ocasio-Cortez’s salary plan. He failed to observe that it was completely in line with the free market decision making of any employer. Instead, he complained that in order to pay entry level staffers a little more, she would have to pay her chief of staff a little less. Holy Crap! Anything but that. Our nation was built on the principle that the elitists at the top should receive all the benefits and the peons should be grateful for scraps. And this is when Jenkins’ co-host chimed in to agree:

Pete Hegseth: She said, “Everyone in my office will be paid a living wage. So I’m going to pay $15 an hour.” Which means your entry level intern is making fifty-two grand, while your chief of staff, who has a very important role in a congressional office, now is capped at eighty, as opposed to the actual market rate on Capitol Hill, which is closer to $150,000. So everyone’s between 52 and 80. It’s actually socialism and communism on display.”

You have to wonder how much Hegseth is getting paid, since being able to do simple math is apparently not a requirement for his job. His claim that $15.00 an hour would be $52,000 per year is only off by $20,800. But more importantly, his contention that an employer choosing to set salaries as she sees fit is tantamount to communism proves that he is as bad at political science as he is at math.

Employers make these decisions based on multiple factors, including experience, recruiting, workplace morale, retention, and yes, even personal values. But according to Hegseth, all employers should be bound by externally imposed rules that may not satisfy their business goals. That’s actually closer to communism than anything Ocasio-Cortez has done. And it’s closer to assholery than anyone spewing opinions on television should be allowed to get away with.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.