Tag Archive for: media bias

Liberal Media Is in Its Death Throes — What Will Replace It?

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The slow, painful death of the liberal media is hard to watch … okay, not really. Once again, the liberal media has lost all credibility, but haven’t we been here before?

It seems the apparatus of far-left talking heads and “journalists” has a zombie-like ability. The same reporters and news operations keep suffering fatal blows to their journalistic integrity, and yet they manage to struggle on as ratings — and credibility — fade away.

Take just this week, for instance. The Washington Post gleefully published a report that Israeli soldiers fired on Gaza residents waiting to receive humanitarian aid and killed more than 30. If the story sparked your skepticism, you may have better news judgment than many D.C. reporters.

This glaring lie — and the anti-Semitism that it and other lies like it help fuel — are not even surprising from the media class that is frantically grasping at the last shreds of its credibility. Meanwhile, in a move of incredible audacity, CNN’s Jake Tapper is now promoting his new book on the cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental health decline. Polling shows that most Americans could see Biden’s decline with their own eyes. Collective memory and the magic of video tape shows us that Tapper helped lead the charge of that cover-up. In fact, he once lambasted Lara Trump on air for daring to question Biden’s mental fitness. Lara Trump was not the only one to receive such treatment from Tapper.

Now, Tapper is being widely mocked on X and the new crop of center-right podcasts that have gained more political influence — and usually viewership — than cable news shows.

MSNBC saw a plummet in support after President Donald Trump’s election, though they have begun to recover in ratings, if not in credibility. The network axed a handful of anchors, including the notoriously bombastic, and often racist, Joy Reid. Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has taken a slot, which is so far a major flop as ratings plummet and MSNBC scrambles for relevance.

Tapper, Reid, and Psaki are the three horsemen of the liberal cable news apocalypse and the perfect face for this downfall. Tapper represents the hollowness of established cable anchors. Tapper has been in the business for decades and fails to perform the first function of a journalist: holding the powerful accountable. Reid symbolizes the liberal anti-white racism and anti-man sexism that has spread like a cancer through the Democratic Party and helped push an entire generation of young men into the arms of Trump. Psaki symbolizes cable news’s incestuous relationship with the politicians they are supposed to hold accountable. Psaki covered up Biden’s mental decline and was rewarded with a cushy anchor slot. On these shows, there is little room for real thinkers or diversity of thought, only rightly programmed Democratic messengers.

CNN’s Abby Phillips has managed to create a show relevant to the news cycles. Clips of her show regularly go viral, but they usually involve Scott Jennings blistering some poor Democrat. Despite how it helps prop up her show, Phillips never looks overly pleased.

We know from history that communist and totalitarian regimes cannot survive long without propaganda. China has state-owned media, as do North Korea and others.

To build its secular, communist takeover of the U.S., the far Left needs a media propaganda machine (state-owned media) to repeat lies and slander opposition. During the Biden administration, that apparatus grew sizably. The White House leaned on social media companies with great success to silence dissenting views on COVID and other topics. Shadow-banning of conservative viewpoints of all kinds became commonplace on social media. Those who did not toe the line of the LGBT agenda were accused of “hate speech” with a serious tone and deplatformed or demonetized. But the apparatus came crumbling down as the lies about COVID, the vaccine, the Russia hoax, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and more were exposed.

We have a biblical paradigm for this familiar cycle. False prophets, purveyors of the lies of the age, haunt the halls of wicked kingdoms, from the Pharaoh’s magicians in Exodus to Ahab’s 400 false prophets in 1 Kings. In our time marred by evil, do not be surprised when false prophets are found in places of influence.

What does this all mean? The far Left has a problem. Over the last five years, they have seen the credibility of the most reliable propagandists gutted all while media increasingly moves online. More importantly, it means you should expect in the next decades direct attempts to censor dissent and clamp down on internet freedom. Remember, state media shuts down opposition and propagates lies. This will likely be done by weaponized terms like “hate” and “fascism” and “far-right extremism.”

For now, liberal media is on its back foot. But political battles are only won temporarily. You can be sure the liberal media and their puppet masters are scheming about how to regain their power, both through rebuilding their operation and by silencing their opponents.

A false regime can’t thrive without propaganda. Keep exposing the propagandists. Stand up for free speech and against censorship. And the rest of us have a chance to have our children grow up in a free country.

AUTHOR

Casey Harper

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Media Participated in Coverup of Biden’s Decline, Experts Say

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As more details continue to emerge regarding the alarming extent of former President Joe Biden’s mental and physical incapacities while serving in the most powerful office in the world, insiders are pointing out that the mainstream media willingly followed the lead of White House officials who insisted that Biden was perfectly fit to perform his duties despite a multitude of audio and video evidence showing otherwise.

According to a new book coming out this week by CNN reporter Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson entitled “Original Sin,” Biden’s cognitive decline began almost a decade before his 2024 presidential campaign for reelection, when glaring examples of Biden’s mental and physical struggles began occurring in front of cameras on a weekly basis. “Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015,” Tapper and Thompson write. A ghostwriter for Biden admitted in 2017 that he “was really struggling. … His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”

Despite the clear signs of Biden’s decline to those in his inner circle years before the 2020 election, his enablers pushed ahead with his presidential campaign. By 2021, Biden’s closest aides began scripting Cabinet meetings, to the point that his agency secretaries would be asked ahead of a meeting, “‘Well, what are you going to ask? If he asks a certain question, what is your answer going to be?’” By the beginning of 2023, the president’s cognitive condition had become so serious that senior White House aides were attempting to “shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline.” Even Cabinet secretaries were eventually “kept at bay” and “didn’t get a chance to interact with the President.” The truth was that “five people were running the country,” an unnamed source close to the Biden administration told Tapper and Thompson.

Despite this, no members of Biden’s Cabinet came forward to reveal what was happening. “When they would complain internally, they were told, ‘He’s fine, be quiet,’” Tapper noted in a New Yorker interview. As Tapper and Thompson wrote, however, “The presidency requires someone who can perform at 2:00 a.m. during an emergency. Cabinet secretaries in his own administration told us that by 2024, he could not be relied upon for this.”

As observed by National Review, Biden’s inner circle “admitted to each other that Biden was becoming so physically frail that he might need to use a wheelchair in his second term. But their primary concern appeared to be that nothing be seen that would endanger his reelection — or their own hold on power, which they enjoyed as a result of Biden’s weakness.”

Notably, mainstream media reporters such as Tapper himself spent much of Biden’s term reacting with incredulity whenever the topic of the president’s fitness for office surfaced in the news. As National Review has pointed out, Tapper castigated Republicans like Lara Trump on air as far back as 2020 for highlighting Biden’s cognitive decline. “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” he snapped. Less than a year before his book “Original Sin” was released, he stated on air, “[Biden] is sharp mentally.” Tapper also insisted that a Wall Street Journal article published in June 2024 included “false claims … about President Biden’s mental fitness and acuity.” He also derisively dismissed the article on the grounds that WSJ is “owned by News Corp which is run by the Murdochs.” Tapper even remarked during a segment with Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), “[Biden]’s 81, and his memory, you know, it doesn’t seem great, it’s not horrible, but I don’t understand the outrage.”

Experts like Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway say that the media’s peculiar lack of curiosity about Biden’s noticeable decline must be held to account. “This was a man who was president until January of this year — holding nuclear codes,” she pointed out on Fox News. “Anyone who was involved in suppressing information about the true state of his mental decline should absolutely be asked questions about that, be held to account. And until the media start moving things in that direction, where you’re actually talking to the people who knew and what they did to cover this up, and how the media themselves were co-conspirators in that, there’s no accountability being had.”

Some accountability on the matter may be coming. The House Oversight Committee announced last week that it would “continue its investigation into the cover-up of President Biden’s mental decline and use of autopen.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter observed that the results of the 2024 election were partly in reaction to how Biden’s staff, reelection campaign, and the Democratic Party attempted to cover up the former president’s cognitive decline.

“As many suspected, former President Biden was never up to the task of running the country,” he noted. “Early in his presidency, it became clear President Biden was not up to the job when his administration would call it a day at 4 p.m. As soon as Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report surfaced and his recommendation against pressing charges for Biden because he was a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,’ many understood what Hur was really saying: Biden is suffering from cognitive decline.”

“This fact puts into question every policy decision, personnel decision, pardon, and other action from the Oval Office,” Carpenter concluded. “Contrast this with the high-energy pace set by President Trump in his second term, and the American people should be encouraged to raise their expectations for our nation’s top executive.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

PERKINS: Taxpayer Funds Should Respect the Will of the People

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A House DOGE subcommittee put a magnifying glass to NPR and PBS, funded in part with federal tax dollars through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The most recent budget shows that the two left-leaning media outlets rake in just shy of $550 million a year from taxpayers.

DOGE’s triad is waste, fraud, and abuse. An obvious issue lawmakers are debating in this age of multi-media — and our unprecedented $36 trillion of national debt — is whether the government’s funding of these broadcasts is a waste of taxpayer dollars. That’s a legitimate question. Add to that concern the abuse of left-leaning viewpoints, like NPR’s promotion of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts and the fact that there isn’t a single identified Republican working at NPR at the national level, and you can understand the growing concerns about the abuse of taxpayer dollars.

In addition to direct funding, NPR and PBS also enjoy various federal carve-outs that give them competitive advantages over other news providers. Many believe the government should keep its thumb off the First Amendment’s scale and force NPR and PBS to stand on their own — free of federal subsidies.

Yet, the starkest example of waste, fraud, and abuse may be found in the abortion industry — particularly at Planned Parenthood, which surpasses NPR and PBS in the scope of public funding and controversy.

Let’s Talk about Waste:

  • After the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Planned Parenthood reportedly raised nearly $500 million. Instead of using that money for health care services at their clinics, which the group claims is their priority, much of it went toward the organization’s political and legal interests.
  • Meanwhile, $699 million in taxpayer funds supported their clinics, where patient numbers have been steadily declining even as abortion procedures have risen.
  • According to The New York Times, Planned Parenthood has spent millions on CEO salaries, such as their national president, Alexis Johnson, whose annual salary in 2023 was $904,000. At the same time, very little funding was allocated to staff training — leading to incidents such as botched IUD placements and abortions.
  • I’m not alone in insisting that taxpayers shouldn’t be bankrolling the million-dollar salary of the CEO who heads the nation’s largest baby-killing operation. Even after the abortion lobby spent hundreds of millions of dollars after Roe fell, 60% of Americans still oppose taxpayer funding of abortion.

Let’s Talk Fraud:

  • Planned Parenthood has repeatedly faced allegations of trafficking fetal tissue — “baby body parts” — for profit.
  • There are also multiple reports suggesting Planned Parenthood has covered up criminal behavior and sexual abuse involving the very women it claims to serve.

Abuse?

  • The organization is increasingly pivoting toward so-called “gender-affirming” hormone therapy, including for minors — something many states are trying to prevent for their young residents.
  • Ultimately, it’s an abuse of taxpayer dollars to subsidize an entity involved in taking the lives of 400,000 unborn Americans.

Here is the bottom line: Our leaders should foster true neutrality in public funding and respect the will of citizens who object to financing controversial practices. It’s time to end all government funding for organizations like Planned Parenthood that are killing America’s opportunity to be great again.

AUTHOR

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of Family Research Council and executive editor of The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Lack of Moral Clarity,’ ‘Weakness of Political Will’ Explain the Left’s Issue with Free Speech: Expert

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After Vice President J.D. Vance made his commitment to free speech clear during an address in Munich, CBS News’s Margaret Brennan did not take to it well.

During an interview with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Brennan compared Vance to Nazis. “[H]e was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” she said. “He met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that.” Rubio promptly disagreed with the news anchor, emphasizing how “free speech was not used to conduct a genocide.”

He was also quick to explain that, “there was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none.” The tussle with free speech at CBS did not end with Brennan.

In a “60 Minutes” episode, a production of CBS, a German lawyer argued that “free speech needs boundaries.” In another episode, three German prosecutors touted similar claims. “They say, ‘No, that’s my free speech,’” remarked Dr. Matthäus Fink. “And we say, ‘No, you have free speech as well, but it also has its limits.’” The episode also featured a police raid on an individual for something they posted online. With the full support of CBS, they characterized the fact that it’s a criminal offense to insult someone in Germany as an effort “to bring some civility to the world wide web” through “policing speech online.”

On Tuesday’s “Washington Watch,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins addressed this issue head on. “So,” he asked, “why does the Left have such a significant issue with free speech?” Mary Hasson, the Kate O’Beirne senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, replied that part of the Left’s problem with free speech is that “they’ve lost their sense of moral clarity.” Ultimately, “if you don’t have a sense of what’s good … right … [and] true,” then “you don’t understand speech as being part of that search for the truth.”

As Hasson explained, speech that stops seeking after truth is “all about power. And that’s what we see here. … [W]hen you lose your moral clarity, when you no longer appreciate the truth, or even the sense that there is a truth, then it’s all about maintaining your power. And that’s where censorship comes in.”

Perkins agreed, stating that this kind of perspective makes it so that “up is down, down is up. Good is evil, evil is good.” The fact that Brennan asserted “that Nazi Germany was the product of free speech” is a clear example, he said, especially when Adolf Hitler’s Germany “suppressed any type of voice that was counter” to the regime.

In addition to the “lack of moral clarity,” Hasson suggested another factor is “a weakness of political will.” For instance, she pointed out that Germany has had “a terrible problem with criminal migrants,” which has caused their crime to spike. “[A]nd yet,” she added, “here they are spending all this energy trying to police what people are saying [online as] they’re doing a very poor job of policing criminality and actually protecting their own people.” As she put it, Germany is “no longer willing to call some things wrong and some things right.” And this, Perkins emphasized, is largely because, like with many leftist ideologies, “their ideas are indefensible.” “[T]hey don’t want to be challenged by free speech.”

Perkins noted that Hasson has experienced this “firsthand.” Hasson has been at the center of what it looks like to be called “hateful” just for disagreeing with someone. “For example, I was recently speaking at ASU and there was a segment of people among the faculty and students who protested my mere presence, even though I wasn’t there to talk about gender ideology per se. … [B]ecause I disagreed with them,” Hasson said, they felt “they were in danger and … not safe because of my ideas.” It all points to this “sense of trying to protect themselves from hurt feelings or from having their ideas challenged,” which is “not how you arrive at the truth.”

“That’s not how we have a free society,” she continued. A society “where we know what’s good and what’s true.” In fact, “we want to have this open conversation to be able to persuade others. But when you’re simply trying to avoid feeling bad, you don’t want to hear what other people have to say,” so conversation gets shut down. As Perkins stressed, “the freedom of speech, which is a part of our First Amendment freedoms, is critical.” It’s like “a pressure valve [that] allows people to vent … [and] express themselves. And when that is short circuited or suppressed, that’s when we have real problems.”

“I completely agree with you,” Hasson emphasized. “And in fact, if you look back at the … political regimes that have suppressed free speech, they don’t … stop people from thinking or seeking the truth or trying to share that truth with others. It all goes underground.” Instead of controlling society, the more authorities try to suppress these pursuits of free speech, the more likely “you’re going to have a rebellion, a revolt.”

Perkins said, “[W]e need more speech, not less, in my view. So, … how can those of us who cherish this First Amendment freedom work together, growing America’s respect for this freedom?” Especially when considering “some of the younger generation … don’t [seem to] have a healthy understanding of the importance of the First Amendment.”

“[A]gain,” Hasson stated, “part of it goes back to this idea that they’ve come to believe that they are too fragile to hear ideas that they disagree with, or that make them uncomfortable.” As such, “we need to be bold and … speak the truth, and to encourage our children to be resilient, to understand that they can and should engage with ideas that they disagree with.” If anything, she concluded, the skill of “self-censorship” often comes into play when talking to “people who are very different from [us.]”

In any conversation, Hasson concluded, we need “to listen, to engage, but then … be confident in speaking the truth.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Gulf of America Floods America’s Gulf

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The conqueror always draws the map. And when President Donald Trump issued among his first executive orders a directive to rename what was formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, it was more than simply a naming preference. It was a signal to the world that he was not a man afraid to upset the status quo, even when it came to changing the world’s maps. Without firing a shot, Trump conquered the Gulf of Mexico.

The changing of place names is nothing new. When the biblical Joshua conquered Kiriath-arba, he renamed it Hebron, which you can still find today in a place called Judea, which some now call “the West Bank” but was known long before that as Judea. The Democratic Republic of Congo became Zaire for a few decades, until it became the Democratic Republic of Congo again after another regime change. St. Petersburg, Russia was renamed Leningrad, U.S.S.R for a long minute until it once again became St. Petersburg, Russia. Closer to home, Colonel Sanders’s Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant chain became officially known as “KFC” in 1991 — the year we frowned upon fried foods. One of these is not like the other, but you get the picture. Circumstances change, and names change along with them.

Most married women in the United States (79%) still adopt their husband’s last name, and civilization somehow adapts. But because of its geographic significance, and more likely because it is Trump, not everyone is happy with the Gulf of America. Most notably, the Associated Press — the nonprofit entity that calls itself “the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news in all formats” — has come out in opposition Trump’s name change:

“The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.”

This is not insignificant. The “AP Stylebook” is indeed the standard style guide to which most news outlets look to write news copy. From everything to how to handle the Oxford comma (you should handle it!), to whether or not to use “canceled” or “cancelled” (use “canceled” in American publications), the AP sets the standards. If you’ve ever wondered why news outlets use the standard abbreviations for states (e.g., “Tenn.” for Tennessee) instead of the postal abbreviations (“TN”), the AP is the reason. Most news organizations will have their own house style that will supersede the AP on certain items, but by and large, the AP is the defining framework for most news copy out there.

However much the AP gives the appearance of being principled when it comes to name changes, it hasn’t exactly borne that out in practice. The AP has led the way in the pronoun wars, and the way in which it has led is nowhere near the way language has operated “for more than 400 years.” For example, in 2017, the AP issued guidance saying, “Not all people fall under one of two categories for sex or gender, according to leading medical organizations, so avoid references to both, either, or opposite sexes or genders as a way to encompass all people.” That same year, the AP approved the pronoun “they” for singular usage. The AP has also long championed the use of preferred pronouns in place of pronouns that correspond to biology.

Put up against that background, the AP’s bucking against the Gulf of America seems awfully arbitrary. As veteran journalist Mark Hemingway aptly pointed out on X, “News organizations will call a man a woman no questions asked, but ‘Gulf of America’ is a bridge too far?” Hemingway wasn’t alone in noticing the double standard. Georgia Congressman Mike Collins (R) quipped, “Stop deadnaming the Gulf of America.”

But it may be difficult for the Associated Press and its fellow Gulf of Mexico protestors to hold the line. Remember Rand McNally, who published all those paper maps and atlases we used to carry around? They’re playing a wait-and-see game:

“Rand McNally will await final legal and public review through the Secretary of the Interior’s office, as required in President Trump’s Executive Order, before making any adjustments to our Atlases and maps regarding the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m betting they fall in line with the change. Big Tech has a bigger footprint than the AP or paper map companies, and following the federal government, both Google Maps and Apple Maps have both incorporated the gulf’s name change.

While Mexico (the country, not the gulf) is now threatening to sue Google for updating its map, much of the opposition has gotten lost in the flooded zone of Trump’s flurry of executive actions. After all, who has time for the Gulf of America when paper straws are under assault?

The Gulf of America’s abrupt name change is symbolic of Trump’s larger sweeping out of America’s cupboard. It’s a political chess move that has no easy escape except to just go with it. Will a future administration restore it to the Gulf of Mexico? Perhaps, but not without having to own the fact that they’d be giving away America.

Name changes are tough, but conquerors aren’t strangers to new names. As Scripture tells us in Revelation 2:17, those who persist in Christ will also get new names:

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.” (ESV)

The Gulf of America is only a body of water, and a name change won’t bridge the gulf between Americans. But it may wake America up to the fact that the tide has indeed changed, and we as a nation will have to change along with it. Only names written in stone don’t get changed. Now that we’ve changed the name of the gulf, let’s strive toward the stone.

AUTHOR

Jared Bridges

Jared Bridges is editor-in-chief of The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Public Trust in Government, Media, and the Church Has Fallen. Is There Hope for Change in 2025?

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With President-elect Donald Trump’s landslide victory and a Republican majority in both the Senate and the House, 2024 seems to be ending on a high note for conservatives. And yet, polls show that there is a significant lack of public trust in government. Not only that, but Americans are increasingly losing confidence in the media. What kind of obstacles or difficulties could this bring going into 2025?

Americans are navigating “through a rapidly evolving cultural and political landscape,” guest host Jody Hice said on Thursday’s episode of “Washington Watch.” Already, “there are certain … trends that reveal that we have both challenges as well as opportunities facing us.” As Hice explained, Americans seem to be going through a bit of a mental and spiritual crisis, with “Gen Z … bucking the downward trend of Bible engagement … [and] a troubling rise in things like anxiety and depression and suicide rates.”

Hice continued, “I look at 2025 right now on the horizon, [and there’s] no doubt there are many changes that are coming.” Most notably is the Republican control of the White House during “a time when overall confidence in government is probably at historic lows.” He asked, “Is there any way that we might see an increase in trust among the American people with the government?” George Barna, senior research fellow for the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, joined the conversation.

“Well,” he said, “there are a couple of ways of looking at that.” In one sense, it “could easily get higher because it’s so low right now. There’s not too much lower that it can drop.” However, Barna admitted that any increase in the trust Americans have in their government likely won’t come easily. “[C]an it get higher?” he asked. “Yes, it can. But it’s going to take some significant steps forward. One of those would be casting a compelling vision of the future for our nation, and describing ways in which everyone in government is going to work together to see that happen.”

“People are tired of the standstill in government, of all the obstacles that they’re seeing … the outrageous amounts of money being spent, [and] the debt that’s being piled up,” Barna noted. Many Americans “also have this perception that a huge proportion of public officials are corrupt. And so, if we want to change people’s sense of trust in their government, they’re going to have to address those issues full on. They’re going to have to see actual leadership skills demonstrated.” Hice agreed, stating how “that’s a big hill to climb in the current environment.” But beyond Congress, he added, trust in the media has dwindled as well.

In fact, Hice explained how this year saw a significant increase in people who relied on social media platforms for gathering information. With this in mind, he asked, “Is that likely to change or not change in the coming year?” According to Barna, it is unlikely to change. Rather, as he put it, “I think what we’re going to see is a continued movement away from traditional sources of media … toward independent media.” Barna argued that this is because mainstream media now comes across as more subjective and biased than before. So, Americans are “going to look elsewhere,” he argued, further asserting that this also explains why podcasts, for instance, have “skyrocketed in terms of their popularity.”

Barna added, “Is traditional media going to be able to win back their popularity and the sense of trust of Americans? I don’t really see that happening in the next three or four years at least, because people now have set their minds to the point where they’re saying, ‘I can’t trust them. There’s no reason for me to even listen to them.’”

There’s one more notable area where people seem to be losing trust, Hice observed. “I hate to even bring this up, but there’s also seemingly … an increasing distrust for churches, a lack of trust. What do you think this next year holds for the church? Is there anything that they can do to become a greater influence in our culture?”

“[I]t’s interesting,” Barna replied, “because when you look at what’s going on with churches, in some ways it’s very similar to what’s happening with government, where people have less and less trust in the leadership of their churches.” Additionally, he explained how many Christians “feel like they’re not getting real value from their churches. And as we’ve been evaluating that, one of the things that’s become clear is that, often, that’s because they feel they’re not being given practical advice, practical guidance — real, tangible value for their life. … [This] come[s] from preaching God’s word on a consistent basis and breaking it down for people so that they know how to apply God’s truth principles in their personal life.”

But if churchgoers feel that church is not serving them, the question becomes why is that the case? Barna contended that a lot of it boils down to how churches “evaluate their success in ministry … based on how many people show up, how many programs they offer, how many … people they’ve hired, how much money they’re raising, [and] how much square footage they’ve built out.” This is problematic, Barna argued, because “if you think about those five objectives that most churches in America consistently measure to evaluate their ministry effectiveness, one conclusion we can come to is … [that they’re] bound to fail as a set of measures.”

“Why?” he asked. “Because Jesus didn’t die for any of those. That’s not what His life, His ministry, [or] His teaching is all about.” At the heart of the matter, Barna contended, is that “we’ve gotten away from the Bible not only in what we’re teaching, but even in how we’re measuring success and impact in ministry. … [I]n the last five years … half of all adults in America attending a church at least once a month on average [has gone] down to roughly one third of Americans. That’s a huge drop in a short period of time. And … the reason is they’re not getting biblical value from churches.”

“Wow,” Hice sighed. “[T]his is an extremely important issue because the well-being of our whole culture ultimately comes down to the spiritual health of the culture, which ultimately obviously rests upon the health of the church.” Considering this, he asked, “What does the church need to do to get people to come back to church? What kind of changes need to be taking place within a church body to fulfill the mission that God has given them to do?”

According to Barna, it “comes back to the whole issue of worldview. Why is it that young people in particular would say that they often are struggling with fear, depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts? … [I]t comes back to their perspectives about how life works. When you’ve got a young adult who doesn’t believe that there’s a God who’s all knowing, all powerful … merciful … just … involved and engaged in their lives, [and] when you’ve got generations of people who say that they don’t believe that there’s anything that happens after they die,” he urged that “it’s imperative that if … churches or families want to be uplifting [and] … a source of strength and hope and optimism, particularly for younger adults, well, then they’ve got to get back to God’s word.”

“[O]ur entire culture [is moving] in the wrong direction,” Barna warned, “and it’s up to churches and parents to raise their children up, to understand the truths of Scripture … to trust the Bible, to know God, to trust Jesus personally, [and] to understand that we’re sinners.” People must understand that “success in life isn’t by your material goods. … It’s not by your fame. It’s not by your popularity. It’s not even by feeling good. It’s about consistent obedience to God.” Another part of this issue is due to a lack of discipleship, he argued, and disciples who aren’t properly equipping themselves.

For anyone grappling with fear, anxiety, or depression, Barna concluded that “Jesus is the antidote. … The Bible shows us an alternative way of living,” and “the more that we can address worldview issues, the more that we can not only rebuild the church, but we can bring back a sense of life and hope and optimism to all Americans.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Mainstream Pollsters Are ‘Mouthpieces for the Government’ and Corporate Oligarchy: Pollster

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A series of inaccurate polls that consistently favored Kamala Harris and liberal issues in the 2024 election shows that mainstream pollsters are “mouthpieces for the government” and for the corporate behemoths who own their networks, a pollster who accurately predicted the election’s outcome has said.

Polls from the legacy media consistently presented the Harris-Walz campaign as surging and possibly poised to win the White House on Tuesday. In reality, Donald Trump won 31 states and bested Harris in the popular vote — a first for a Republican presidential candidate in two decades. Yet NBC News and ABC News reported a three-point lead for Kamala Harris going into election day, 49% to 46%. CBS News polls showed the 2024 presidential race tied. On the other hand, Rasmussen Reports forecast a 2.4% lead for Donald Trump. What explains such disparate poll results?

“Polling is content. And when your pollsters all report up to organizations that are owned by massive corporations that have vested interests in making sure that the corporate oligarchy status quo in D.C. maintains its control, that’s what happens. They are literally mouthpieces for the government, and I’ve proven that they shill for Democrats,” Mark Mitchell, chief pollster of Rasmussen Reports, told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Wednesday. “We caught them. They absolutely cooked the internals of the polls, because the exit polling is showing that who turned out to vote is nothing like what was in ABC polls, NBC polls, Reuters, Ipsos — not at all.”

ABC News reported that the most important issue to voters in 2024 was protecting democracy from incipient fascism. That was followed by the economy, keeping abortion legal, and granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, the network stated.

“The state of democracy narrowly prevailed as the most important issue to voters out of five tested in the exit polls,” claimed ABC News, citing its own exit polls on election night. “Thirty-five percent of voters ranked it as their top issue, followed by 31% who said the economy, 14% who said abortion, 11% who said immigration and 4% who said foreign policy.”

“Legal abortion wins majority backing in all seven swing states from 60% to 69%,” ABC News asserted. It also claimed 57% of 2024 voters said illegal immigrants should not be deported but instead “should be offered a chance to apply for legal status,” despite polls showing nearly that exact number (54%) of Americans support mass deportations.

That did not ring true with Mitchell. “I’ve never seen that” constellation of issues rise to the top of the 2024 election, Mitchell told Perkins. “The number one issue has always been the economy in our polling, and the exit polling is confirming that. And then number two is the border — but it doesn’t really capture the pain that people are feeling just talking about the border.”

Voters feel that “America is in a much, much worse place after the Biden administration,” said Mitchell. “Only 37% of voters said they’re better off than they were four years ago. Only 27% of voters in the swing states say they’re safer than there were four years ago.” And only about one in five voters said that “today’s children will be better off than their parents.”

“That’s absolutely horrible,” said Mitchell. “So, when they talk about the border and the economy, they’re telling you: Stop the invasion; bring back the middle class. Because the Democrats, in my opinion, killed it.”

ABC News buried news of the voters’ economic anguish. “The economy remains a key irritant. Voters say it’s in bad shape by 67%-32%. And 45% say their own financial situation is worse now than four years ago, versus 30% the same, with just 24% doing better. The ‘worse off’ number exceeds its 2008 level, then 42%, and far outpaces its shares in 2020 (20%) and 2016 (28%),” said its exit polling.

“With a different hand of cards, [Harris] might actually have won this thing,” said Mitchell. “But she is the status quo candidate, and people hate the status quo.”

Yet pollster Ann Seltzer had a last-minute poll supposedly showing Kamala Harris winning the reliably Republican state of Iowa.

That was “probably the most ridiculous thing that ever happened in the industry,” said Mitchell. Selzer “can definitely poll Iowa, because she’s been doing it cycle after cycle. And she even polled it in July and had Trump up 18. Trump finished at 14, but she put up a Harris plus-three result right on the weekend before election day, just to satiate the Democrat need for some kind of good news.”

“She burned her credibility,” said Mitchell.

“The legacy media and their pollsters should not have a shred of credibility,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.

Mitchell touted the work of Rasmussen pollsters, with one exception. His firm “underestimated the massive Republican turnout” in Texas. “If you take that one out, our error goes down to 0.2% in the states. Eleven out of the 14 states we hit within the margin of error.”

In all, he agreed the political landscape had realigned in 2024, with a multiracial working-class supporting Trump and suburban social liberals shifting to the Democratic Party.

The 2024 election showed middle-class “people fleeing the Democrat Party,” he noted. “There are some offsets. There are the upper-class suburban women and the Boomer men who watch MSNBC. Those people are breaking more towards Harris.”

Meanwhile, “the Republicans, the Donald Trump movement, are really starting to become the core of the counterculture.”

But the realignment of the United States is “all predicated on the Republican Party reforming around the MAGA agenda. Because voters overwhelmingly think the Republican Party is the party of Trump and the MAGA movement.”

“The MAGA tenets are very popular,” said Mitchell. But since “Trump can’t run again,” the persistence of an America First agenda in the GOP “has yet to be seen.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Truth Breeds Trust, Deceit Breeds Destruction

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Americans’ trust in mass media has stumbled to 31%, the lowest measurement since Gallup first asked the question in 1972, while those with absolutely no trust in the media has climbed to 36%. Trust in the media is higher among Democrats (54%) than Republicans (12%) and among senior citizens (43%) than those aged 18-29 (26%), but the media is now the least trusted of all civic and political institutions included in the survey.

How could this happen? If you’re reading The Washington Stand, you likely already know. Mass media, as an institution, lost Americans’ trust by behaving less like the neutral arbiters of objective information they claimed to be and more like partisan organs dedicated to getting candidates who shared their ideology elected.

In other words, they lied — or at least significantly misrepresented themselves. If the media were open about their biases and allowed consumers to reach they own conclusions, they might enjoy greater public trust than they do today.

In fact, the media’s problem with accurate reporting was “highlighted this week,” noted Family Research Council Action President Jody Hice on “Washington Watch,” in a “CBS news interview with [Vice President] Kamala Harris and … an interview with [House] Speaker [Mike] Johnson.” On one hand, CBS News faced accusations of selectively editing Harris’ answers, as well as giving her multiple chances to respond to the same question when her first attempt was unsatisfactory. On the other hand, Johnson accused CBS News of selectively cutting out the most persuasive parts of his interview.

While the media may be the worst offender, Americans’ distrust of institutions is not confined to the evening paper. “Trust in our institutions is eroding” more broadly, warned David Closson, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview, “whether it’s the courts, whether it’s our school system, even the military.”

“Why is that?” Closson asked. “It’s because of decisions that our leaders have made.”

“Thinking of the military,” he continued, “why are recruitment levels so low? Well, think of the woke ideology that’s been introduced into our service branches.” The military is not supposed to be a partisan or ideological entity. Yet servicemembers were subjected to critical race theory trainings, celebration of transgenderism, and DEI performance objectives. Not only was the military drifting away from its critical mission, it was also becoming unmoored from objective reality and truth.

Or, “think about the thousands of service members that were discharged because they didn’t want to get the COVID-19 shot,” Closson added. In fact, public officials in many arenas squandered trust profligately during the COVID pandemic. “Think of all of us that were told to wear masks, and how none of that was actually based on science,” recalled Closson.

Indeed, the brazen lies and arbitrary orders issuing from public institutions during COVID created a “run” on public trust that went beyond just the issues at hand. Backed by the media and powerful government agencies, public health officials demanded that citizens comply with draconian mandates, including stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, vaccine passports, and social distancing farces. These officials traded on their scientific reputation as public health experts, when in fact few to none of the recommendations they issued were based on science.

As a result, Americans jaded by their COVID-era interactions with government are more willing to question the government on unrelated points. If public health officials were willing to lie about the efficacy of the COVID jabs, for example, then why should they be trusted on the rest of the recommended vaccine regimen? This, combined with a wide-open southern border — another example of gaslighting — has led to the resurgence of diseases once on the verge of eradication. Drug companies are now paying for advertisements that aren’t selling new products, but which are simply begging Americans not to turn their backs on longstanding vaccine recommendations. Building trust takes much longer than destroying it.

The collapse of public trust in America holds lessons for Christians to take to heart. “As Christians, we believe in an objective order, right and wrong,” concluded Closson. “And we believe in speaking the truth in love. And, too often, people in positions of power are abusing their authority, and that is eroding trust we have. And that’s not sustainable for any society in the long term.”

Three thousand years ago, David lamented that “Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak” (Psalms 12:2). But, rather than giving in to despair, David placed his trust in the Lord. “The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times” (Psalm 12:6).

Because God speaks the truth, his children should also be known for their truthfulness. Paul describes how God has given the church pastors and teachers to “equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,” so that we may not be misled “by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:12, 14-15).

The goal is unity and mutual edification (Ephesians 4:16), but the means are truth and love. Truth fosters trust, but deceit leads to destruction. This holds as true for the church as it does for the society at large. So, rather than be discouraged and disillusioned by the maelstrom of brazen lies swirling through our public discourse, Christians should consider in what ways they are walking in the truth, and how that can contribute to building up the body of Christ.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Americans’ Trust in Media Reaches New Record Low

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A newly released Gallup poll has found that the level of trust that Americans place in mainstream media has reached yet another new low.

The survey revealed that just 31% of respondents say they have a “‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in the mass media [defined as “newspapers, TV and radio”] to report the news ‘fully, accurately and fairly.’” The number fell slightly from last year’s number of 32%, which was a historic low at that point. Gallup further noted that for the third year in a row, “more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount.”

According to Gallup’s polling, Americans’ trust in the media has been steadily falling since the mid-1970s, taking a particularly precipitous fall in 2016 when it dipped below 40% for the first time, bottoming out at 32%. The number rose slightly over the next two years but has steadily dropped over the past six years, reaching an all-time low this year.

Recent events suggest that Americans’ confidence in the media is unlikely to recover anytime soon. Following the airing of CBS News’s “Face the Nation” interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Sunday, Johnson posted on X side-by-side clips of what CBS aired versus the speaker’s full answers, which showed that CBS had selectively edited key parts of Johnson’s answers on FEMA’s lack of funding for hurricane survivors and efforts that states are making to clean up voter rolls to prevent non-citizens from being allowed to vote.

“CBS has been under fire for selectively editing their interviews to PROMOTE Democrats and UNDERMINE Republicans,” Johnson noted. “Yesterday, they chose to cut FIVE important minutes out of my nearly 15 minute interview.”

The controversy comes amidst the continued fallout over CBS News’s “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris this month, which observers say appeared to be heavily edited. As reported by The Daily Wire, the original interview was 45 minutes long, but only 15 minutes of the interview was publicly aired.

Controversy arose when a response from Harris appeared to have been completely excised from the original interview. A promotional clip posted online by CBS showed Harris responding in vague terms to host Bill Whitaker’s question about U.S. financial support for Israel’s war against Islamist terror groups. “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” Harris said.

But when the full interview was posted on YouTube, Harris’s answer did not appear in it, nor did it appear in the “Overtime” segment. Instead, a different response to Whitaker’s question appeared, with Harris saying, “We are not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”

Public outrage over the apparent deception seems to have reached a head, as a new Harvard Caps Harris poll found that a full 85% of voters — including 88% of Republicans and 87% of Democrats — say that CBS News should release the full, unedited transcript of the interview.

Jared Bridges, editor-in-chief of The Washington Stand, observed that adherence to political ideology within legacy media outlets seems to have surpassed concerns about objectivity.

“I’m sure there’s variance, but I suspect most mainstream media still think that they care about trustworthiness, but many of them have either lost their mooring or they are anchored to an ideology that doesn’t care as much about truth,” he told TWS. “That adherence to worldviews which value outcomes above truth certainly affects how one writes, edits, and presents newsworthy events.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: META Censorship Practices: ‘Pro-Trump’ posts ‘go to a team to take it down”

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Vance Delivers a Master Class in How to Deal With Biased Moderators

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The traditional TV networks continue to offer obvious home-field advantages to Democrats in this year’s election debates, as they have for as long as I’ve observed politics.

But Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, delivered a master class in how to deal with biased moderators in his vice-presidential showdown Tuesday night with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat.

Not only did Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, handle obviously skewed questions. He also refused to allow the moderators—“CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and “Face the Nation” chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan—to live “fact-check” him without calling them out on it.

More on that in a bit.

There’s no doubt that the CBS News moderators of Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate were nearly as biased as the ABC News moderators in the Sept. 10 presidential debate. Their questions were mostly cherry-picked to be of more interest to a left-leaning audience, and they clearly steered the discussion toward topics that benefit Democrats.

Climate change is a bottom-tier issue in poll after poll for the American people, but it’s super important to a narrow band of highly engaged liberals. So, we get a climate question in every single debate, while somehow issues like the threat of Communist China seemingly never come up.

This kind of bias has been a problem for a very long time, though the media is far more shameless than they used to be. In 2012, CNN host Candy Crowley actually apologized for live fact-checking Republican nominee Mitt Romney in his debate with incumbent Democrat Barack Obama. A lot has changed since then.

They don’t just ask biased questions these days; they now actively participate in the debate to help whatever Democrat is on stage.

There was a funny moment, at least to me, when Vance pushed Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, on a Minnesota law that allows babies to be killed after a botched abortion. It was a law that Walz signed.

But Walz didn’t and seemingly couldn’t answer the question.

Instead, Walz just pointed to the moderators and said they “fact-checked” it last time. He clearly wanted the “moderators” to step in and help him.

They didn’t deliver the life preserver this time, but it’s understandable why Walz thought they would.

Presidential and vice presidential debates shouldn’t be like this. The media should be letting politicians speak for themselves. But it appears that the networks can’t help themselves.

To a certain extent, Republicans are in a tough spot. It’s clear that Democrats are simply unwilling to participate in a debate that isn’t on their home field. And having no presidential and vice presidential debates at all—especially given that Walz and Harris so rarely have to answer tough questions—would be bad for the country.

Given this challenging environment, Vance did a remarkable job of staying on message, answering questions seriously—but on his terms—and delivering clear, logical answers to every question.

And when the two moderators became obnoxious about interjecting and live fact-checking (even though CBS News said they wouldn’t), Vance didn’t just let it go.

Trump said after the ABC News debate that he regretted not going after the biased moderators, and Vance seemed to have learned from that.

When Brennen tried to interject with a comment on Haitian illegal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, before moving on to the next question, Vance stopped her. She tried to cut him off with a “we just don’t have time with all these questions to allow you to respond,” but Vance wasn’t having it.

“Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check, and since you are fact-checking me I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on,” Vance said.

The Ohio Republican went on to explain how illegal aliens can use a government app, CPB One, to apply for legal status, which he said was a part of the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policies.

The moderators continued trying to stop Vance, but he kept speaking. They even cut off his microphone. But Vance didn’t look reckless or like a boor. He looked like a guy who took the discussion—and the intelligence of the American people—seriously.

This is how it should be done. The only people who looked bad in the exchange were the CBS moderators.

Vance is clearly quite good at this, but one way or another he provided the model for how to walk into a biased debate and come out looking better at the end of it.

It will certainly be difficult to convince the American people that Vance is “weird” after that.

This article has been corrected to reflect which networks hosted the debates.

AUTHOR

Jarrett Stepman

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Send an email to Jarrett Jarrett on X: .

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Trump Eyeing Prosecuting Google over ‘Illegal’ Election Interference

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Tech giant Google’s days of election interference may be drawing to a close, pending the outcome of November’s presidential election. Former President Donald Trump pledged on Friday to prosecute Google for manipulating search results to benefit Democratic political candidates, should he retake the White House.

“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump shared in a post on Truth Social. He continued, “This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections.” The 45th president vowed, “If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!”

A report published last week by Media Research Center (MRC) Free Speech America revealed that Google has been manipulating and “padding” search results to promote Vice President Kamala Harris and disparage Trump. Researchers used Google to search for both “Donald Trump Presidential Race 2024” and “Kamala Harris Presidential Race 2024” and found that Google listed Harris’s campaign website higher in search results than Trump’s campaign website. Google also promoted news websites — such as CNN, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and The Economist — which have a left-wing bias and provided negative coverage of Trump’s campaign and policies and favorable coverage of Harris’s campaign and policies.

“This is not neutral, there are snotty headlines and opinion pieces,” MRC NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham commented. He continued, “Writers highlight negatives for both campaigns but suggest Harris is not an ideologue, and that Trump is very divisive. Apparently, Democrats can say the worst things about Trump and his supporters and it’s never viewed as divisive. It’s merely implied that it’s accurate.”

A previous MRC report found that Google has “interfered in elections” over 40 times since 2008. Over the past almost-two-decades, Google has consistently worked to promote news, opinion, and analysis from sources with a left-wing bias; buried stories damaging to Democratic politicians; buried Republican candidates’ campaign websites; and used search result suggestions to liken Republicans to Nazis. Google worked hard to promote then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and, in 2012, his reelection efforts. In 2016, Google hid search suggestions related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s criminal indictment and her involvement in the deaths of American citizens and soldiers in Benghazi, Libya.

Google also overrepresented media sources with a left-wing bias. When searching for results related to “abortion,” “campaign finance reform,” “global warming,” “Iraq war,” and others, Google users were 40% more likely to be fed sources with a left-wing bias. In the 2018 midterms, the overrepresentation of left-wing news sources increased, with Google burying Republican candidates’ campaign websites, listing “Nazism” as a “related search” to Republican organizations, and listing the Republican Party under search results for “Nazism.”

In 2020, Google continued its election interference efforts in an attempt to “prevent … the next Trump situation,” as a senior Google official put it. In addition to overrepresenting news sources with a left-wing bias, Google also blocked and blacklisted news sources it deemed too conservative, including MRC’s NewsBusters, the Daily Caller, The Christian Post, and Catholic News Agency. These websites would not appear in search results conducted using Google mobile apps.

Other websites — including Breitbart News and The Federalist — were blocked from appearing in Google search results regardless of the app or platform used to access Google. The tech giant blocked emails from Republican campaigns and organizations — including the Republican National Committee — from being delivered to Gmail accounts. Google also rewrote its campaign ads policies in order to suppress campaigns that executives considered threatening to former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

In the past several months, Google has worked with the Harris campaign to attach campaign ads to news results, altering headlines to make it appear that major news outlets like the Associated Press, USA Today, The Guardian, The Independent, Time Magazine, NPR, PBS, CNN, CBS News, and others are endorsing or promoting Harris’s presidential campaign. One of the news outlets targeted by the Harris campaign — the family-owned, North Dakota-based WDAY Radio — is considering taking legal action against both Google and the Harris campaign.

In the weeks following the first assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, Google censored search suggestion results related to the event. The Washington Stand reported that a Google search for “assassination attempt” yielded autocomplete results such as “on hitler” and “on ronald reagan,” but no mention was made of Trump. Likewise, a search for “assassination attempt on” returned autocomplete results for such figures as Adolf Hitler, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Lenin, Bob Marley, Harry Truman, Prince Charles, Gerald Ford, and Pope John Paul II, but not Trump. Searches that did not include the word “assassination” were also censored. A search for “Trump butler,” referring to the site of the attempted assassination, returned no autocomplete results and a search for “Trump shot” was corrected to “Trump Soho,” “Trump shoe,” “Trump shuttle,” or “Trump show.”

In early August, a federal court determined that Google was operating as an illegal monopoly and was controlling the search engine and search engine advertising markets. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote. Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow at Family Research Council and election integrity adviser at FRC Action, said at the time, “This is a victory for Americans who want free and fair elections.” He continued, “When Google allegedly manipulates search results to suppress results on issues like the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, including the iconic photo of him after the shooting raising his fist in the air with the American flag in the background, that is election interference, and should not be tolerated.”

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is reportedly considering breaking up Google’s illegal monopoly and forcing the tech giant to divest several of its assets, including the Android operating system.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Leftist Institutional Machine behind the Trump Assassination Attempts

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Former President Donald Trump plays a lot of golf, and by all accounts is skilled at it. But the game of golf has a long history among U.S. presidents. William McKinley is believed to have been the first to play, starting in 1897, but the 350-pound William Howard Taft was the first president to take the game seriously, having taken up golf in 1894 with his brother Henry. Woodrow Wilson played over 1,000 rounds of golf while in office and even painted his golf balls black during the winter so that he could play in the snow.

Warren G. Harding trained his dog to go and fetch his golf balls. Calvin Coolidge was not particularly skilled at golf and eventually left his golf bag behind in the White House when his presidency ended. Before contracting polio, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a golf club champion. Dwight D. Eisenhower installed the first presidential putting green on the White House grounds and often played with his friend Arnold Palmer. John F. Kennedy played on the Harvard golf team and managed a single-digit handicap, although he shied away from the game as president, believing it to be an indication of a privileged lifestyle. Not one of the game’s greats, Lyndon B. Johnson found that inviting senators to join him for a game of golf would give him three or four hours to argue for legislation he favored. Richard Nixon was a fairly gifted golfer but removed the White House putting green and refused to play while in office, focusing his time and energy on his political ambitions. After Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, the first thing he did was play golf.

Ronald Reagan was recognized as a decent player, but not an avid one. George H.W. Bush holds the presidential record for fastest game ever played, clocking in at just under two hours for a full 18 holes. Bill Clinton was known for re-taking shots he wasn’t pleased with but loved the game so much that he would even play alone in the rain. Like his father, George W. Bush was a golf lover, but gave up playing in office after the September 11 attacks of 2001. Barack Obama had custom golf balls made, and his frequent tee times even made national headlines during his White House tenure.

Until Sunday, the golf course was a sort of safe escape, a sportsman’s retreat, for presidents — both in office and afterward. At least 17 U.S. presidents have been golfers, to varying degrees, and some of them played golf during the most fraught, contentious times in modern history, including World War I. But never before, as far as history recollects, had anyone attempted to assassinate a U.S. president on the golf course — not until Ryan Routh poked the muzzle of an automatic rifle through the chain link fence surrounding a West Palm Beach golf course and tried to find Donald Trump in his sights.

This is not to say, of course, that the golf course is some sacred, inviolate place; it is not. Nor are Sunday’s events merely indicative of the volatile lows that political discourse has reached in the Western world in the 21st century — after all, conservatives firmly believe that the political Left is a threat to essential rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and its machinations are responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions of unborn innocents on the horrifying altar of abortion. Yet Vice President Kamala Harris has not been shot in the side of the head, nobody has poked a rifle through the fence to take aim at President Joe Biden while he golfs — or, what is more likely, while he naps on the beach.

Some have said that Thomas Crooks and Ryan Routh — the two men who have, thus far, attempted to assassinate Donald Trump — have been “radicalized.” This is most certainly true, but it is a far deeper, more complicated, and more sinister affair than political pundits and keyboard commentators may suggest. A 20-year-old student and a 58-year-old construction worker are not convinced to attempt murder because they read or hear or watch a few frightening news reports centered on a politician over a period of weeks, months, or even a few years. Were that the case, everyone who watches Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson would be hunting Washington’s elite, believing them to be brainwashed by demons. No, the foundation was laid years — even generations — prior to motivate everyday civilians to take a shot at the president.

There are three chief institutions which come into play in this ploy, and one which plays a supporting role: the education system, the media, the family, and the government. Over the past 60 years or more, the education system has been responsible for drilling into every child’s head the conclusion that Adolf Hitler was the most evil and inhuman creature to ever roam the face of the planet. Of course, Hitler was evil, and he wreaked war and atrocities upon the world, but he may not even be the most vile, despotic genocidal maniac of his day.

His one-time ally Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, is crediting with tens of millions of deaths. Whether in gulags or from famine or in unceremonious mass executions or even massacres in the streets during his many purges, Stalin racked up a body count roughly quadruple that of Adolf Hitler’s. Communist China’s Chairman Mao Zedong topped both Hitler and Stalin, the latter by almost 20 million deaths. Yet generation after generation has been taught, by an institution that they are practically forced to respect, that Adolf Hitler was the most evil man to ever walk the face of the earth.

The media’s role, which is rightly noted as incessantly labeling Donald Trump as “Adolf Hitler” and his allies and supporters as “Nazis,” cannot be fulfilled unless the education system first fulfills its own role. In his apocalyptic novel “That Hideous Strength,” C.S. Lewis made the following observation regarding those who read newspapers:

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

Thus, the education system not only teaches children which historical figure to consider the most depraved, the most evil, and the least human. The education system is also tasked with doing away with the “common man.” The sort of man who believes almost nothing written in the newspapers or reported on cable or network news programs, who “takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda,” must be “reconditioned.” His critical thinking skills, instead of being honed and sharpened, are dulled and allowed to atrophy. Subjects are taught to him by rote, his academic and intellectual value is judged on the basis of what he can remember and how closely it resembles the words of his textbook, not by his capacity for innovation or ingenuity. He is not taught to analyze subjects but to identify which analyses (conducted by others) are acceptable for him to read and regurgitate. He is taught the theory of “accreditation,” and learns to fear and abhor sources which are deemed un-credible.

Now, this process should be prevented and remedied by the third institution in our ensemble: the family. It ought to be the mother and father who, upon realizing that their child is especially dull and seemingly incapable of critical thinking, pull that child from the local school and either find a private, classical-based alternative or else just homeschool the child, seeing to his intellectual development and cultivation themselves. Thus, the family must be fractured. Feminism, pornography, and economic strife join forces to achieve this outcome, breaking up marriages and both encouraging and pressuring both mother and father to go out into the workforce, leaving them little time to recognize that their child is languishing intellectually and even less time to devote to rectifying that ill.

Christianity, which offers the antidote to the enemies of marriage, is shunned, mocked, and ridiculed in the public square, leaving fewer and fewer couples with any awareness that there even is an antidote to their marital struggles, much less what that antidote might be or where to find it.

Enter the media: Donald Trump is painted with a Hitler mustache on magazine covers, he is repeatedly compared to the German autocrat over a period of four, now eight, now 12 years, and every rhetorical stretch is employed, every argumentative gymnastic move put to use, to liken his policies and agenda to those of the Third Reich. Never mind that Donald Trump never rounded people up, tossed them in camps, and killed them. Never mind that Donald Trump has ended wars and conflicts, instead of beginning them. Never mind that Donald Trump’s political career did not begin with a failed and violent coup attempt. Never mind that Donald Trump never wrote a book detailing his racial ideology. Never mind that Donald Trump didn’t dissolve Congress upon taking office and declare himself the supreme leader of the country.

Donald Trump is further labeled a “threat to democracy,” a phrase repeated online by Routh, just a few months prior to pointing an AK-47 at the 45th president. This claim has been amplified and repeated ad infinitum by the left-wing political establishment in government and media. Again, never mind that Donald Trump left office in January 2021, even amidst credible claims of election fraud. Never mind that his policies in office included upholding and respecting the separation of powers, instead of packing or discrediting constitutional courts. Never mind that he was democratically elected in 2016 and not only ran for office again but earned even more votes in 2020. No, he’s literally Hitler, you have to believe us.

And the media is believed, because the media is “accredited,” it’s an acceptable source, and there are no critical thinking skills left to refute the overwhelming weight of that “accreditation.” This is only bolstered when those in the government, in the sitting presidential administration, condemn Donald Trump as Hitler and those who appreciate his policies and his patriotism as Nazis. These politicians are seen, by the likes of Thomas Crooks and Ryan Routh, as Winston Churchill, boldly facing down the madman threatening the world, when in fact, ironically, they are more like Joseph Goebbels, pushing dehumanizing propaganda at every turn.

Ultimately, that’s what is behind the assassination attempts against Donald Trump: dehumanization. This machine consisting of the education system, the media, and the government operates on the principle that those who oppose its agenda — even those who simply do not accept it — are unfit to be called human. Again, ironically, this is alarmingly similar to Hitler’s own ideology, to his mythological Aryan ideal: all those who do not fit in are simply declared sub-human and eliminated. The radicalization of would-be assassins — not to mention the unprecedented lawfare campaign targeting Donald Trump — would also seem to fall under the purview of threatening democracy.

Donald Trump not only opposes the ideology of the diabolical elites — unlimited immigration from the third world, the destruction of America’s heritage and history, the economic oppression of every American family working hard to make a home — but is an existential threat to it. He must, therefore, be eliminated. After all, the elites will argue, he’s less than human. He’s a threat to democracy, he’s literally Hitler.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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Assassination Update

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Poll: Over 70% of Dems and Independents Unaware of Harris’s Controversial Policy Positions

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A new poll has revealed that almost three-quarters of registered Democrats and Independents are not aware of numerous intensely controversial policy positions that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has taken. The news comes as the founder of a Harris super PAC admitted that internal polling is showing a much tighter race between the vice president and Donald Trump than what recent public poll results suggest.

The poll, conducted by the Media Research Center (MRC), surveyed 800 Democrats and 400 Independents who said they voted for Joe Biden in 2020. It found that at least 70% or more were not aware of positions the vice president has taken that are widely considered to be extremely left-wing, including supporting the elimination of private health insurance, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and decriminalizing crossing the border illegally. In addition, 75% said they did not know Harris was named the most liberal U.S. senator in 2019, and 72% did not know she had “never visited a conflict zone on the border as Border Czar.”

Curtis Houck, managing editor of MRC’s NewsBusters, called the results of the poll “stunning” during Wednesday’s “Washington Watch.” “Of the 10 things that we polled, they were no lower than 71% unaware,” he explained. “Seventy-one percent of her voters are unaware that she has flirted with defunding the police, and thought we should talk about reparations. Seventy-three percent did not know that she’s in favor of the Green New Deal.”

Houck continued, “In 2020, she encouraged supporters to donate to the Minneapolis Bail Fund to release violent criminals who rioted and destroyed those city streets after what happened with George Floyd [78% were unaware of this]. [It] goes all the way up to 86% of her voters did not know that at a CNN town hall, [she stated that] we should have a conversation about death row inmates being allowed to vote. So no matter how you slice it, no matter what issue, whether it’s the economy, the environment, crime, the border, her voters do not know what she believes in, and the fact that they’re still willing to vote for her anyway is a really dangerous commentary on the state of our politics.”

Houck went on to point to another MRC study showing a massive imbalance in the type of coverage the legacy media is giving Harris and Trump in the four weeks since President Joe Biden exited the race.

“[T]he media have given Kamala Harris 84% positive coverage [versus 89% negative coverage of Trump] on ABC, CBS, and NBC, and on the evening shows only twice mentioned her party ideology, mentioned her as a progressive,” he observed. “… There’s always some sort of label affixed to [Republicans], but they haven’t even done that for Kamala Harris. So if they’re not willing to talk about the party label, they’re not going to talk about her policies.”

Meanwhile, Reuters reported on Monday that Harris’s campaign backers are worried over the results of internal polls that do not reflect recent public poll numbers showing Harris opening up a lead over Trump. During an event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, Chauncey McLean, president of the Harris super political action committee (PAC) Future Forward, remarked, “Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public.”

McLean, whose Future Forward PAC has “at least $250 million left to spend” on “a wave of advertising from digital to television,” stated that his group’s analysis has identified Pennsylvania as the most important state for Harris to win, which he anticipated will be a “coin flip.” He also cautioned that the vice president “has yet to fully rebuild the Biden coalition of Blacks, Hispanics and young voters that brought him the White House in 2020.” The race is going to be as “tight as a tick, and pretty much across the board,” he predicted.

Matt Carpenter, director of Family Research Council Action, further underscored that mainstream polling results, particularly within swing states, should be taken with a grain of salt.

“It’s not just McClean who is quietly raising concerns about the state of the Harris-Walz ticket,” he told The Washington Stand. “Former Obama campaign chief strategist David Axelrod also recently said he’s aware of polling which shows the battleground state matchups are far less favorable to the Democratic nominee than many of the big public polling operations are showing, and even suggested if the election were held today that Trump would win. So much of politics is about managing expectations, and if the Harris-Walz campaign is all polling hype, then they aren’t doing themselves any favors in hiding the true state of the race.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Media Helps Reinvent Kamala in Truth-Optional Campaign

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While Kamala Harris lets the mystery of her VP pick hang in the air, we don’t need to wonder who’s already on her ticket: the mainstream media. Just when Americans thought they couldn’t be surprised by the press’s bias, Harris’s candidacy has turned them into outright liars, whose in-kind donation is a blanket cover-up for every unpopular policy she’s ever endorsed. And Republicans, who are used to running against the media, have to wonder: will voters see through the scam?

From defunding the police to banning fracking — even Kamala’s assignment as border czar — the Left’s revisionist history has saturated news casts, network interviews, even fact-checkers. As National Review’s Noah Rothman bleakly put it, “The sense of euphoric inevitability that prevailed when Republicans gathered in Milwaukee for the party’s nominating convention is gone. … The Trump campaign has struggled to break into the Kamala Harris–dominated news cycle in a positive way. Republicans are resigned not just to a race against a tougher opponent but to an array of cultural and journalistic institutions acting with reckless disregard for their reputations to shield Harris from scrutiny. It’s all rather depressing.”

Harris’s dubious record is being scrubbed clean by an army of media water-carriers, who insist that GovTrack’s most liberal senator in 2019 didn’t actually mean those things she said about Medicare for All, voting rights for felons, bans on offshore drilling, and gun control. In one of the more embarrassing displays, CNN’s Daniel Dale even claimed that “Harris was never made Biden’s ‘border czar,’” adding, “In reality, Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment.”

“I know it’s a lie. You know it’s a lie. They know it’s a lie,” Becket Adams writes. “That they never bothered to correct this three-year-old ‘misconception’ until she became the presumptive Democratic nominee gives the game away. But the all-too-obvious timing of the thing is not stopping them from trying to revise her record anyway.”

One of Joe Biden’s most feckless Cabinet officials, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, tried to deny the same reality, insisting, “Let’s be very clear about this because there has been a lot of mischaracterization. She was not in charge of the border.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on MSNBC, was even more disingenuous, telling MSNBC, “She wasn’t the border czar, but, boy oh boy, did she do a great job at the border.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) could only shake his head. They’re all “trying to rewrite history,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on the Hill.” “And you see all the left[ist] media doing this too. President Biden tapped Kamala Harris to be the border czar. She doesn’t have many jobs as vice president, and that’s one of the few things he gave her. The border is a mess. [She was told to] go figure it out. And she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t even go down to the border for so long. She ignored this problem.”

The Left is hoping everyone forgets is that “she is for open borders,” Scalise insisted. “She’s been very vocal about wanting to legalize people who just roam into the country and giv[e] them free stuff. And by the way, it’s angering most people in America.” The media is “going to try to change history. Sorry,” the House leader said. “They’re not going to be able to get away with it.”

And yet, as Rothman pointed out, “There is no pressure on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to sit for interviews, hold press conferences, or even merely speak extemporaneously for more than a few sentences. Even what may be Harris’s foremost vulnerability — her inauthenticity — is presented as an asset.” His colleague, Rich Lowry, thinks this is the natural outgrowth of the press “elevat[ing] her from also-ran vice president to savior of the republic in the space of about 12 hours a couple of weekends ago.” Now, trusting that the press won’t challenge her on anything she says, Harris has the audacity to claim she’s the tough one on immigration.

At an Atlanta rally, Biden’s vice president actually said, “I will proudly put my record against his any day of the week. Any day of the week, including, for example, on the issue of immigration. … Donald Trump,” she continued, “has been talking a big game about securing our border. But he does not walk the walk.”

As Lowry bemoans, Harris’s “sociopathic dishonesty” on the border “has not been met with a flurry of fact checks, nor have editors been zealously adding the word ‘falsely’ in front of her claims. No, she’s flipping the script, and going on offense, and punching back.” So why not “try to get it to swallow an even more outlandishly implausible notion?” he wondered.

But how long can Kamala outrun the facts as troves of videos, soundbites, and speeches burn down the straw woman the press has built? “As we get closer to November,” Scalise warned, there are three issues that are “crystallizing everywhere you go. And number one — far and away — is the border. People want to get this border secured. It’s madness what’s going on at the border, and that comes up no matter what part of the country you’re in.”

And as the stock market freefalls, images like Harris in 2023 saying she’s “very proud of Bidenomics” will be hard even for the magicians of the media to erase. As Scalise says, the second biggest issue on voters’ minds is “inflation, the cost of things.” “And whatever part of the country you go into, they’re complaining about grocery prices. They’re complaining about gas prices and energy prices, [and] just cooling their home in the summer. I mean, these are problems that were created by the Biden-Harris administration. Everybody knows that. … [T]his is where Kamala Harris is going to have a real problem. She was with Joe Biden helping be the architect [of these policies]. Look, she was the deciding vote for the Inflation Reduction Act. She can’t run away from these things — the policies that created the inflation, that when you go to the grocery store, you’re paying 30% more than when Biden took office.”

Add that to the explosive situation in the Middle East, and frankly, the House’s second-in-command warned, “I don’t remember a time when America’s projected so much weakness to so many of our friends around the world. …You see what Russia did with Ukraine. You see what Iran, through their proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis — have done to Israel. And then, of course, you see what China is doing to allies like Taiwan. So all of our enemies are taking advantage of the weakness being projected.”

How does this affect the Democrats’ replacement candidate? Well, as Scalise reminded people, “Kamala has really no record on the world stage, except for the Biden agenda. And the Biden-Harris agenda in foreign policy has been walking away from Israel, projecting weakness, allowing our military to be more focused on wokeness, which is not the preparedness we need to deal with the threat that China and other countries pose. So it’s a dangerous place right now, and we’re in a much more dangerous position because of the weakness projected by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. And I think that’s going to be a big factor knowing how strong President Trump was. [There were] no new wars when Donald Trump was president. Our friends knew that we had their back. And we did, by the way, have their back because we weren’t letting the bad guys run roughshod around the world.”

So the Left’s strategy is simple: change the subject. “They really are going to be focused on how they can divide the American people between now and November 5th, because they don’t want the American people talking about the issues people care about. … And the reason that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden don’t want to talk about it is because those problems were created by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. The inflation, high energy prices, open border, all of those are self-created problems by the Biden-Harris ticket. And again, you go back four years ago, we did not have those problems.”

When it comes to Harris’s campaign, “They’re going to want to talk about abortion every day. They’re going to want to talk about mandating [electric vehicles], and January 6th. And the American people are saying, ‘Look, I’ve got real problems that you helped create. And I want to talk about those problems.’”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Media Rewrites Kamala’s Record

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Which senator had the most liberal voting record in 2019? According to GovTrack.us in January 2020, it was then-Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). Today, that same webpage can no longer be found, nor can the page for Harris’s 2019 report card. The internet Wayback Machine first noticed the pages missing on Monday. Coinciding with this disappearance was only one relevant change: last weekend President Joe Biden announced via X that he would not seek reelection and endorsed Harris as his replacement.

Is the media scrubbing the web of Harris’s past liberal record?

According to GovTrack.us in July 2024, there was a perfectly innocent-sounding explanation for the sudden scrubbing of a five-year-old webpage. That page “was based on a single calendar year. Several years ago we discontinued creating new single-calendar-year ‘report cards’ because a single year of data is “not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators.”

It is true that more years of data provide a fuller picture. However, having only served in the Senate for four years, Harris didn’t develop a large legislative record there. In 2017 (also archived), GovTrack.us ranked Harris as the 8th-most liberal senator by voting record. In 2018 (live), she ranked as the 4th-most liberal. Harris was the most liberal in 2019, and in 2020 (also live) she ranked as the 2nd-most liberal senator. In 2021, she became vice president.

But arguing that “a reliable portrait” of a legislator’s activity required information from multiple years is not an explanation for deleting pages from certain years and not others. Indeed, deleting any record of voting scores seems beneath an organization described as a non-partisan “government transparency site.”

Their poor excuse for deleting the 2019 report card (and a 2019 page ranking all senators ideologically), combined with the suggestive timing of the move, only stoked suspicions that GovTrack.us deleted the pages to obscure Harris’s voting record, which was the most liberal of the year. What made GovTrack’s coverup even more embarrassing is that their patchwork deletions did not even effectively obscure Harris’s consistently liberal voting record.

When CBS news anchor Norah O’Donnell asked Harris about the “most-liberal” ranking in an interview for “60 Minutes,” Harris first deflected, then characteristically laughed it off. “You supported the Green New Deal, you supported Medicare for all, you’ve supported legalizing marijuana. Joe Biden doesn’t support those things,” O’Donnell pressed.

Harris did not deny that statement. Instead, she responded, “What I will do — and I promise you this, and this is what Joe wants me to do, this was part of our deal — I will always share with him my lived experience as it relates to any issue that we confront. And I promised Joe that I will give him that perspective and always be honest with him.”

Two things seem to be true at the same time. On one hand, Kamala Harris is on the far-left flank of the American political spectrum, or at least she wants the support of that constituency. On the other hand, Harris also has national political ambitions and enough political instincts to recognize that being “the most liberal senator” doesn’t play well in most places outside of California.

The best explanation to be offered so far for GovTrack.us deleting Harris’s record from their site is that they, too, recognize the political liability of being “the most liberal senator,” and they removed the page as an intangible contribution to Harris’s campaign for president. If they wish to dispute this, let them offer a better explanation to convince us. The American people know when we are being gaslighted.

Border Czar?

GovTrack.us is not the only organization to be exposed for polishing up Harris’s record by, well, denying what they had previously said about it. “In the past few days,” Axios claimed Wednesday, “the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title — which she never actually had.”

Again, the urge to exonerate Harris of any responsibility for the border serves the short-term, political goal of separating her from the unpopular border policies of the Biden-Harris administration.

Yet this critique would surprise Axios writers from five years ago, when they unironically called Harris the “border czar.” The very same writer who is now denouncing Republicans’ use of the label “border czar,” Stef Kight, wrote an article on March 24, 2021 titled, “Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis.” As with all American applications of the word “czar,” the “border czar” refers colloquially to the person in charge of an issue, not to that person’s technical title.

Even worse, this shifts the focus of history revisionism from Harris’s Senate career to her record as vice president. In other words, it memory-holes Harris’s actions not from a role she held five years ago, but from a role she holds right now. In other words, to identify Axios’s infinitesimal distinction, their readers would not only have to rewrite their memory of their recent past but also override their current political knowledge about the present.

Axios knows better, and their readers do too. But they went ahead and published this ridiculous argument for cheap political points, hoping no one would notice that they had drawn a distinction without a difference. After getting called out in a community note on X, Axios doubled-down on their recent resolve to split hairs. At the bottom of their most recent article, an editor’s note now declares that “Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.”

“There’s some kind of oligarchy there that’s running the country,” declared Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) on “Washington Watch” Thursday. “You’ve got the massive cover up and cleaning up of the image of Kamala Harris, who has bungled everything that she’s been put in charge of, like the border.”

“She was the border czar,” Biggs added. “Everybody calls her that. And if you don’t like border czar, she was appointed to lead the border effort. She was the manager. She was the director, whatever you want to call it. The bottom line is still the same. She failed, and Joe Biden, stuck with her.”

Rioter Bailouts

Yet another attempt to rehabilitate Kamala Harris’s political image came Thursday, when CBS News claimed, “Trump falsely accuses Harris of donating to Minnesota Freedom Fund, bailing out ‘dangerous criminals.’”

The Minnesota Freedom Fund was a Democrat-organized fundraiser to bail out violent activists who were arrested for attacking police, torching businesses, and terrorizing neighborhoods during the height of the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020. Again, it’s obvious why Harris and her supporters would want to distance themselves from such a politically unpopular policy.

CBS News got tagged by a community note informing their readers that Harris publicly promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund in a June 1, 2020 tweet that is still live, “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”

CBS has since updated its headline to read, “Despite Trump claim and 2020 tweet showing support, Harris never donated to Minnesota Freedom Fund.” In other words, to salvage the “news” story, CBS twisted it into a story about something a politician didn’t do four years ago. Do these people ever listen to themselves?

Even if they hadn’t descended into absurdity, it’s hard to see that Harris appears in a better light after CBS’s amended story. Perhaps she didn’t personally donate to the rioter bail fund. But she promoted it and encouraged others to donate to it. If the point was to distance the presumptive Democratic nominee from a radical, unpopular stance she took four years ago, the mission was most definitely not accomplished.

In late 2023, The New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy profile of Harris that described how she “is still struggling to make the case for herself — and feels she shouldn’t have to.” The bottom line is that many Americans have never been very enamored with the radical, leftward-pressing fringe of the Democratic Party that Harris so often represents. Until recently, it was okay for the media to say so. But, with Biden bowing out of the race, and no other Democrat stepping forward to challenge Trump, refurbishing Harris’s rusty image has become the prime objective.

In unburdening Harris from what has been, it seems the media is not above rewriting the past.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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