Tag Archive for: media

Public Trust in Mainstream Media Falls to New Low

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Nine months into President Donald Trump’s second administration, the American public’s trust in mainstream media has cratered to an all-time record low. According to a Gallup poll published Thursday, a mere 28% of Americans say that they trust mainstream media a “great deal” or a “fair amount” to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly, down from 31% last year. Meanwhile, 36% of Americans say that they have little trust in the media and 34% say that they have no trust in the media at all, totaling 70% who simply do not trust mainstream media outlets.

Age and political affiliation play a role in predicting trust in mainstream media, according to Gallup. Only 8% of Republicans say that they trust mainstream media, the first time that Gallup has recorded single digits in it’s 53 years of studying the question, and 62% of Republicans say that they don’t trust mainstream media at all. Among Independent voters, 27% report trusting mainstream media, 38% say that they have very little trust, and 32% report no trust at all. Democrats are the only political group with a majority (51%) expressing trust in mainstream media. Only 9% of Democrats say that they don’t trust mainstream media at all.

When examined by age, those aged 65 or older have the highest rate of trust in mainstream media at 43%, while only 28% of those aged between 50 and 64 and those aged between 18 and 29 express trust in media. Those aged between 30 and 49 reported the lowest level of trust in media at only 23%. Republicans of all age groups have the lowest rate of trust in mainstream media: 12% among those aged 18 to 29, 6% among those aged 30 to 49, 8% among those aged 50 to 64, and 17% among those aged 65 or older.

Among Independent voters aged 18 to 29, trust in mainstream media stands at 29%, at 24% among Independent voters aged 30 to 49, at 23% among Independent voters aged 50 to 64, and at 42% among Independent voters aged 65 or older. Democrats aged 18 to 29 trust mainstream media at a rate of 38%, at a rate of 42% among Democrats aged 30 to 49, at a rate of 59% among Democrats aged 50 to 64, and at a rate of 69% among Democrats aged 65 or older.

“Confidence in the mass media is historically low, with fewer than three in 10 Americans now placing trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, fairly and accurately,” Gallup senior editor Megan Brenan wrote of the statistics. “With confidence fractured along partisan and generational lines, the challenge for news organizations is not only to deliver fair and accurate reporting but also to regain credibility across an increasingly polarized and skeptical public.”

Tim Graham, an executive editor with the Media Research Center’s (MRC’s) NewsBusters, said in comment to The Washington Stand, “Trust in the media has collapsed because everyone has figured out the media now exist to elect Democrats and destroy Donald Trump.” He continued, “They’ve sought not merely to defeat him politically — they’ve sought to bankrupt him and put him in jail for the rest of his life. Their toxic ardor against Trump has led most people to see them for the partisans they are.”

“Everyone knows the media play on the team of the Democrats, which is why Democrats trust them most. But even there, Democrat numbers are lower, because they’re apparently not pro-Democrat enough, just as many Democrats think their national leaders aren’t doing enough to destroy Trump,” Graham posited. “Part of the decline in trust isn’t just the bias. It’s that the press has undercut the credibility of all the other institutions in society, leading to an overarching cynicism that comes back to bite them,” he observed. “But their arrogance about how they are saving democracy daily clearly suggests cynicism is in order.”

According to a June 26 report from the MRC, mainstream media outlets CNN, MSNBC, and PBS used variations of the label “far right” over 1,200 times between Trump’s inauguration and June 21, compared to only 86 mentions of the “far left.” Additionally, despite days-long riots targeting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and multiple assassination attempts against Trump the previous year, mainstream media outlets were 5.5 times more likely to associate political violence with the “far right” than the “far left.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer 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.

2 Ways the Left Encourages and Legitimizes Political Violence

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Shortly after Charlie Kirk took his dying breath, now-former MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd uttered the words on live cable TV that cost him his job, while also providing Americans with a chilling illustration of one of the most common ways the Left legitimizes and thereby encourages political violence against its opponents.

“He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in,” Dowd declared in a conversation with MSNBC host Katy Tur (emphasis added).

Shortly after those comments were broadcast, MSNBC issued an apology, followed by Dowd’s termination.

Dowd began his career as a political strategist working for multiple Democrats, but he switched to the GOP to help President George W. Bush win re-election in 2004. More recently, Dowd returned to the Democratic Party and tangled with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) with remarks in 2019 for which he subsequently apologized.

Hate as a Label

To see how precisely Dowd captured one of the Left’s most terrifying convictions, re-read the italicized words in his statement. Note the progression: Hateful thoughts produce hateful words produce hateful actions. That progression has long been at the heart of the Left’s sabotage of the First Amendment’s guarantee of every American’s right to freedom of expression and opinion.

Here’s how they do it: Nobody questions that people can be prompted to act recklessly on what they hear. Crowds of Ku Klux Klansmen, for example, were indeed incited during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras by horrendously false accusations to lynch innocent black men.

What the Left does in this process is redefine what constitutes “hate speech” as anything espoused by those opposed to the Left. Thus, Matthew Dowd reframed Charlie Kirk’s message — about the love of Christ, the blessings of individual liberty, and the need for civil debate and tolerance of divergent views — as the worst hate speech that produces hateful, violent, actions. This is how Dowd comes to the position that Kirk’s speech brought on his own assassination. The assassin who pulled the trigger was merely responding to Kirk’s alleged provocation. Thus, the real perpetrator of political violence is actually the victim of hate speech by the Left’s opponents.

The Aggressor as Victim

The Matthew Dowds of the world can make such connections because they operate in the context of the Left’s mindless ideological obsession with identity politics, especially those rooted in critical theory. For example, Americans are constantly told by lawmakers on the Left, multicultural “experts” in academic and bureaucratic circles, and mainstream media talking heads that all American cultural, economic, legal, and political institutions are products of a deadly “white supremacy.”

Critical race theory (CRT) argues that America has been a racist society since before its inception; indeed, according to The New York Times and the 1619 Project, it is impossible to conceive of the present America without understanding that white supremacy and chattel slavery are the root of all the country’s major institutions and societal structures.

“The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which the United States of America is built, and by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as the nation’s birth year,” according to the Times.

Note the qualifier, “reframe American history.” Several generations of American college graduates were thus filled with the CRT version of American history, and typically with no serious examination — that is, fact-based rather than ideology-based — of alternative analyses of the nation’s colonial roots, the Constitution, and the historical development since.

The drive for race-based “reparations” to black Americans for the sufferings of their enslaved ancestors is a direct product of the CRT view that everything about this country has been the result of the abuses by the white majority of the black slave populations and their descendants down to the present day.

A number of states, including California, Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey, either presently have or are considering establishing official panels for exploring approaches to race-based reparations. Multiple cities have functioning reparations programs, including San Francisco, Palm Springs, Providence, Asheville, and Evanston. Benefits range from $25,000 for housing expenses and investments of tax funds to minority neighborhoods and businesses, to direct lump sum payments and targeted job opportunities.

But the vast majority of states and municipalities have no interest in establishing race-based reparations programs. How long before teams of screaming leftists point to the marked absence of reparations programs, condemn American society as irretrievably racist, and incite riots, insurrection, and mayhem in major cities across the country? When it happens, the Left will tell us all that it’s our fault, not that of the rioters.

Let us instead follow the example left by Charlie Kirk in his continuous civility and reasoned engagement with those who disagreed with him, as Scripture instructs us in 1 Peter 3:15: “But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.”

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst 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.

Sustaining the Consensus Against Violent Social Change

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A new article at NBC News completely flips reality about the recent bombing at a California fertility clinic, comparing the assault to attacks on abortion facilities.

Titled “Bombing at IVF clinic should be a security wake-up call for fertility centers, experts say,” the story by Elizabeth Chuck ignores the fact that the Palm Springs atrocity, in which the bomber died and four bystanders were injured, was perpetrated by a self-proclaimed anti-humanist who believed that bringing children into the world is wrong. The bomber, Guy Edward Bartkus, left behind a manifesto proclaiming his goal was to “sterilize this planet of the disease of life.” He was, in short, not a pro-lifer by any measurement, but the radical opposite.

Media reports like this one illustrate the now, near-ubiquitous challenge of what-aboutism, where what should be a sustainable consensus against violence from any quarter is converted into a tit-for-tat about one side or the other of public debates seeming to excuse such actions by its allies. The truth is that there is violence today on both sides of many hotly contested issues, and it is also true that most proponents of various causes reject such tactics as extreme. Maintaining this moral consistency has proven to be very difficult, but the facts about the prevalence of violence remind us of the urgent need for balance and self-restraint in what has become an aggravating blame game.

Take some of the most notorious criminal acts of the last several years. Besides the attack by Bartkus, as Wesley Smith notes in a must-read article at National Review, there has been a wave of antipathy to human existence in both the intellectual press and on the street. Smith cites an incident in 2010 where an assailant at the Discovery Channel demanded that the television service stop “encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants.”

Smith goes on to recap articles from the last few years in prestigious publications like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Medical Ethics that cast a relentlessly bleak picture of human existence and call for the end not only of policies that encourage childbearing but for any childbearing at all. In 2012, a planned mass shooting at Family Research Council was thwarted by the heroic action of building operations manager Leo Johnson, who sustained a serious wound when a man angered by FRC’s stances on sexual conduct invaded the FRC headquarters.

Far from isolated incidents, these kinds of crimes can become commonplace as a result of news events extremists label intolerable. Last month, a California man bent on killing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh pleaded guilty to attempted assassination, blaming his actions on the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion on abortion and other judicial actions he believed were responsible for the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. In the wake of the high court’s June 2022 ruling in the Dobbs case, attacks were launched against nonprofit pregnancy help centers across the United States. Varying in severity, and with fortunately no loss of life, an estimated total of more than 100 assaults occurred on centers and churches across the United States. Apprehensions and prosecution of individuals responsible were rare under the Biden administration but did occur under the federal FACE Act.

None of this is to say that opponents of abortion and objectors to other public policies have been immune from committing similar deeds. The individuals imprisoned for peacefully blocking access to abortion facilities may have been selectively prosecuted and disproportionately punished, but there is little question they violated the same federal law that protects pregnancy help centers and churches from illegal acts. Over the long history of the abortion debate, the killing of abortionists has occurred in Colorado, Kansas, Florida, Georgia, and several other states. Director-actor Clint Eastwood made the film “Richard Jewell” about a security cop who was wrongly prosecuted after he foiled a bomb attack on the Olympic Village in Atlanta. The actual perpetrator, one Eric Rudolph, was identified and convicted in 2005 for his role in the bombing of a gay nightclub and an abortion facility in Birmingham, Alabama, years earlier. He is serving multiple terms of life imprisonment for these actions.

Understanding why individuals resort to violence, and why more individuals now justify that resort, including when actions occur on the scale of the Black Lives Matter riots and the January 6, 2021 incursion into the U.S. Capitol, is a vital question of our time. It is a sad condition when one hears the first reports of a violent incident, a Tesla exploding outside a Las Vegas hotel or a car bomb outside an IVF facility, and immediately waits for news whether the perpetrator was “one of ours.” Because the truth is, people who abandon the law and resort to these actions, whatever their motive, are never one of ours, whether they are anti-natalists or militant pro-lifers or race partisans or election deniers. The temptation to which NBC News succumbed with trying to tie Bartkus to opponents of various IVF practices is another chapter of the continuing tragedy of what-aboutism.

It is vital that debates about ethical matters, especially those as potent as abortion and test tube babies, proceed without the injection of point-scoring masquerading as insight. On the eve of the release of expected policy recommendations on IVF from the Trump administration, the choice is not merely between massive public funding of this practice or endorsement of the Guy Bartkuses of the world. The choice is between rational, principled, public debate and a collapse into governing by fear, intimidation, or neglect.

It does little to defend democracy when smaller numbers than ever turn out to exercise it at the ballot box. The more passionate and portentous the issue, the more essential this commitment to peaceful change becomes. Add to the brew the fact, obvious from recent elections, that the United States is a sharply divided country on some of the most fundamental questions: what is a man or woman, who is a human being, are the disabled equally valuable, what is marriage? The side of these questions that not only makes the better argument but also appeals to our better nature, that eschews violence of action or rhetoric, that moves with compassion and clarity, is the side that can, and will deserve to, prevail.

Meanwhile, as Wesley Smith so persuasively demonstrates, the strain of nihilism running through today’s intellectual culture is far deeper than that of one madman who was bereft of fatherly presence or civil guidance. Today’s isolated and violent souls are increasingly fed by isolating ideologies for whom human doom is always just around the corner. Our most prominent journals would do well to do some couples therapy over their attraction to such thinking and stop publishing so much rancor, not because they do not have the right to do so but because it isn’t right to do so. The human future is only as bleak or bright as we are willing to make it.

AUTHOR

Chuck Donovan

Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy.

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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.

Tulsi Gabbard Gives the Deep State the Boot

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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard referred two intelligence officials to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution over their alleged leaks of classified information Wednesday.

The two officials reportedly leaked top-secret military information to The Washington Post and The New York Times, purportedly to hamper President Donald Trump’s foreign policy and stir up public opinion for their own partisan political gain.

“Politicization of our intelligence and leaking classified information puts our nation’s security at risk and must end,” Gabbard told Fox News, noting that a third criminal referral is on its way. “Those who leak classified information will be found and held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”

This isn’t the first time Gabbard has cracked down on intelligence community leakers. In March, she announced her department’s intention to aggressively pursue such activity and gave examples of how leakers recently shared classified info ranging from American intel on Israel and Iran to the U.S.’s relationship with Russia with left-wing media allies such as The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and NBC.

At the time, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton (R) praised Gabbard for working to end “the weaponization of the intelligence community.”

Yet the weaponization of the intelligence community against the Trump administration is far from over. Gabbard’s recent criminal referrals for two intelligence leakers come as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faces a slew of coordinated media attacks meant to slander his reputation and give him the boot at the Pentagon — all thanks to partisan intel officials leaking to their allies in the press. For example, The New York Times recently tried to resurrect “Signal-gate” by alleging Hegseth sent classified info via Signal to his wife and other personal contacts. NPR joined the psyop, by reporting that an unnamed “U.S. official” told the outlet the Trump administration is now looking for a new Defense secretary (the White House immediately repudiated the claim). Notably, both “scoops” rely entirely on anonymous sources for their articles (NPR’s “story” relies on only one anonymous source).

These anonymous sources are the partisan operatives within the intelligence community Gabbard hopes to root out. Because they are diametrically opposed to Hegseth and the threat he poses to both the military industrial complex and pointless foreign conflicts, as well as the PC-ification of the military, they regularly leak to their ideologically-aligned allies in the press and jeopardize the integrity and cohesion of Trump’s intelligence agencies.

“Leaking is always designed to damage a specific target and promote a narrative,” Chris Gacek, senior fellow for Regulatory Affairs at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “The Deep State cannot be given free shots on goal. It appears Gabbard realizes this, and she is taking action.”

The Trump administration has learned its lesson from its first term, where leaks abounded and intelligence officials and federal employees — both overwhelmingly Democratic Party-affiliated — tried thwarting President Trump’s agenda at every turn, many times through coordinated media attacks made possible by anonymous leakers.

But this time around, it’s different. “We are aggressively investigating other leaks and will pursue further criminal referrals as warranted,” a Gabbard official told Fox News. “Any intelligence community bureaucrat who is considering leaking to the media should take this as a warning.”

AUTHOR

Victoria Marshall

Victoria Marshall is a news reporter for FRC’s Washington Watch and is a contributor to The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washignton 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.

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.

‘What Are You Talking About?’: Harris Confuses, Shouts Down Host during Fox News Interview

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Vice President Kamala Harris tried to cram a stream of anti-Trump allegations into her Fox News interview with Bret Baier, frequently talking over him before concluding the interview in a litany of shouted claims about how former President Donald Trump presented an existential threat to democracy. Meanwhile, she dodged questions about taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prison inmates and illegal immigrants, amnesty for potentially tens of millions of illegal immigrants, how she would differ from Joe Biden, and whether her open borders policies contributed to the deaths of numerous young American women.

Harris attempted to brush off Baier’s efforts to receive an answer to his questions by implying that he secretly knew she was right, at one point leading the top-rated news anchor to reply, “What are you talking about?”

News consumers hoping to get a concrete idea of what a President Harris would do in office were sorely disappointed on issue after issue. “Are you still in support of using taxpayer dollars to help prison inmates or detained illegal aliens to transition to another gender?” asked Baier at one point.

“I will follow the law,” she replied — an answer she gave to numerous policy questions, ignoring the fact that presidents pass, interpret, and enforce the law.

She later claimed the controversial policy of inflicting transgender procedures on federal prisoners is “a law that Donald Trump actually followed.” The Trump administration actually watered down the Obama-Biden administration’s interpretation of federal law which called transgender “transitions” for prisoners “necessary.” The first transgender surgery carried out in federal prisons took place in 2022, during the Biden-Harris administration.

“Kamala Harris has forcefully advocated for transgender inmates to be able to get transition surgeries, President Trump never has,” clarified Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign.

In fact, candidate Harris bragged to a transgender pressure group that, as California attorney general, “I pushed for that policy” to assure inmates had “access to the medical care that they desired,” adding she may have been the “first in the country” to do so.

On Wednesday, the vice president brushed aside the Trump campaign’s attempts to distance itself from the prison procedures.

“Well, you know what? You got to take responsible [sic] for what happened in your administration,” declared Harris.

Observers predicted the line would come back to haunt the incumbent vice president, who has presided over 40-year-high inflation rates, long periods of wage deterioration, historically unprecedented numbers of illegal border crossings, the invasion of U.S. apartment buildings by transnational criminal gangs, and record-breaking numbers of American deaths from drug overdoses.

Harris’s eyes darted back-and-forth when asked, “When did you first notice Joe Biden’s mental faculties were diminished?”

“He has the judgment and the experience to do exactly what he has done,” Harris replied.

“Joe Biden is not on the ballot,” she added. At one point, Harris responded, “Let me be very clear: My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency.” But she failed to specify a single policy she would change or to list any mistake of the hyphenated Biden-Harris administration.

The two also clashed over the open border policies enacted during Harris’s tenure in office, which kicked off with more than 90 executive actions undoing Trump administration border security policies. An unprecedented wave of more than 10 million illegal border crossings followed, in addition to new amnesty and “parole” programs, such as the one that placed tens of thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.

“Looking back, do you regret the decision to terminate Remain in Mexico at the beginning of your administration?” asked Baier.

Harris referenced two pieces of legislation that bookend the Biden-Harris administration, without any mention of the years in between. In an answer that nearly mirrored a response she gave to Charlemagne Tha God earlier in the week, Harris noted that among her administration’s first actions was the introduction of a mass amnesty bill. The administration supported the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which would have granted amnesty to at least 11 million illegal immigrants over eight years. Despite Democratic control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, the bill never came up for a vote.

She also alleged that Donald Trump bears responsibility for the border situation for opposing a bill negotiated by Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.), which would have allowed 1.8 million illegal immigrants into the country each year, among other proposals that border hawks disliked.

Baier repeatedly attempted to turn the interview back to Harris, her record, and her policies. He noted that among the six million or more illegal immigrants released into the U.S. homeland by the Biden-Harris administration were those who assaulted and killed U.S. citizens Jocelyn Gary, Rachel Moran, and Laken Riley. When Baier asked if Harris owed their families an apology, she replied she felt “sorry for their loss.”

During a Fox News town hall with Harris Faulkner, Trump laid down a radically different immigration plan. “We’re going to end all sanctuary cities in the United States, and we’re going to go back to normalcy, and we’re going to have law and order,” he said, to massive cheers. The former president has also promised a mass deportation of illegal immigrants, a policy supported by the majority of Americans.

Baier kept up the pressure, citing a recent poll which found that 79% of Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track, and “that track follows three and a half years of you being vice president,” said Baier. “If you’re turning the page, you’ve been in office for three and a half years.”

“And Trump has been running for office,” replied Harris, echoing her response that she had “never been to Europe” during her disastrous interview with NBC News host Lester Holt.

When Baier pushed Harris over her responsibility for her actions, she replied, “You and I both know what I’m talking about. You and I both know what I’m talking about.”

“I actually don’t. What are you talking about?” replied an inquisitive Baier.

He later asked Harris about the eight out of 10 Americans who believe Biden-Harris administration policies have sapped American strength. “Are they misguided? Are they stupid?” asked Baier.

“No, God, I would never say that,” replied Harris, apparently taking the Lord’s Name in vain.

Harris then accused Donald Trump of “suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.” Harris Faulkner asked Trump about that allegation earlier in the day. “I’m not threatening anybody,” he replied, noting that he has “been investigated more than Alphonse Capone. It’s called weaponization of government.”

As the interview came to a conclusion, Harris began yelling, waving her hands, and screaming at Baier while insisting it is Donald Trump who is “misguided,” “unstable,” and “mentally not stable.” Harris filibustered Baier, refusing to yield as he tried to redirect her to the original topic. “I have a lot more to say” about Donald Trump, Harris complained.

Baier expressed his regret that the interview lacked substance, to which Harris replied “I invite everyone to go” to her campaign website.

“I tried to redirect numerous times without interrupting too much,” said Baier after the interview. He also noted the Harris campaign tried to shorten the interview significantly.

“We were supposed to start at 5 p.m. This was the time they gave us. Originally, we were going to do 25 or 30 minutes. They came in and said, ‘Well, maybe 20,’ so it was already getting whittled down. And then the vice president showed up about 5:15. We were pushing the envelope to be able to turn it around for the top of the 6 o’clock” hour. “I had a lot of other questions,” Baier added.

Baier also revealed that Harris’s campaign aides pushed him hard to “wrap,” or end the interview early. “I’m talking, like four people, waving their hands like, ‘It’s gotta stop!’” he said.

The interview went so poorly that shortly after its conclusion Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance advised his “Democratic friends: maybe you should consider swapping Kamala Harris for Joe Biden.” The Trump War Room retweeted the entire interview with the message, “Our newest ad just dropped.”

“Kamala’s not used to real interviews. It shows,” said Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah). “She is melting under the spotlight,” said Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump and founder of America First Legal.

Democrats and members of the liberal media tried to defend Harris’s performance. Harris campaign senior adviser and former adviser to Barack Obama David Plouffe called the exchange “an ambush.” MSNBC hostess Mika Brzezinski posted on X that “@KamalaHarris did a great job” during “a rude and misleading interview.” Brzezinski also accused Baier of “performing for an audience of one,” implying Baier tailored his questions to please Trump — although MSNBC hosts have reported receiving texts from Democratic White House officials live on the air.

CNN’s Brian Stelter predicted, “A lot of viewers are going to come away saying, ‘Wow, she’s willing to do that. That’s a sign of toughness and strength.’” The host of “The Situation Room,” Wolf Blitzer, agreed with Stelter that Harris’s performance was “impressive indeed.”

Media headlines repeatedly referred to the interview as “testy.”

“It was a little tense,” Baier told Sean Hannity, adding the video — which showed Harris pausing, stuttering, and looking around frantically at times — was unedited. “I think she had a mission,” said Baier. She wanted to have a viral moment … and I think she might have gotten that.”

Harris, who has attempted to pitch her candidacy to the relatively narrow slither of Never Trump Republicans who lined up behind former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in the primaries, has also discussed interviewing on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

“Maybe she’ll come back,” said Baier. “I don’t know whether she will or not, but I hope she does.”

“I think I understand why they don’t want tough interviews, and this will probably be the last one,” replied Hannity.

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.

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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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.

‘Witness Protection’: Media-Friendly Tim Walz Has Disappeared From Airwaves Since Joining Harris Ticket

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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz rose to prominence by making the rounds in mainstream media interviews, but since being named Kamala Harris’s running mate, the “folksy”, “midwestern dad” has been missing from the airwaves.

From July 22 to Aug. 6, about two weeks before he was added to the ticket, Walz appeared on MSNBC, PBS, CNN and Fox News a total of ten times, an analysis by Newsbusters’ Curtis Houck, shared with the Daily Caller, showed. Since Harris chose Walz as her running mate on Aug. 6, the governor has not appeared on the networks he flocked to during the vetting process, according to Houck’s analysis.

“It’s no surprise that Tim Walz has gone into the witness protection program first started by the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign after blanketing the liberal cable networks during the vetting process to show Kamala Harris his loyalty to her,” Houck told the Caller.

“Between July 23 and August 6, he appeared on CNN and MSNBC at least seven times, with an additional hit on taxpayer-funded PBS. Morning and evening, Walz made sure Harris and her team saw him at all hours of the day. Importantly, none came after July 30 as the vetting intensified and Harris conducted final round interviews,” he continued.

The shift is a jarring departure from Walz’s pre-nomination media blitz, which skyrocketed him into liberal stardom and separated him from the other contenders in the VP sweepstakes.

Walz has done one tv appearance since being named Harris’ running mate; his joint interview on CNN alongside the vice president. Over the first month of her presidential campaign, Harris faced scrutiny for a lack of unscripted moments. The pressure forced Harris to commit to setting up an interview by the end of August, though rather than doing a one-on-one sit-down, she brought Walz along.

Neither Harris nor Walz have held a press conference since beginning their run, only taking a few questions from reporters in gaggles when on the road.

While Harris and Walz have done one media appearance together, Senator J.D. Vance has done 94 interviews, press conferences and gaggles with the media since Trump named him his running mate on July 15, according to Axios. In the month of August, Vance did all five major Sunday shows, the outlet reported.

“Tim Walz is in hiding, just like Kamala Harris, because Harris is a San Francisco liberal desperately pretending not to be one, and no one trusts Walz to remember every part of the fictional record the campaign staff has created for both of them. They are both radical leftists, whose policies would only send the American economy into a deeper and faster spiral, and the last thing they want anyone to do is answer questions about anything,” Tim Murtaugh, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told the Caller.

“Walz has lied about so much that they have no idea what piece of his embellished life story he’ll roll out next. Next thing you know he’ll claim to have quarterbacked the Minnesota Vikings to the Super Bowl while simultaneously serving in Afghanistan,” he added.

Before Walz was shielded from mainstream media appearances, the governor was going viral for his line of attack on Republicans. During his July 23 hit with MSNBC, Walz deemed Vance, Trump and other Republicans “weird,” a message that would prove to be a bit troublesome for Vance as he started to hit the campaign trail.

“Walz sat with incredibly friendly liberal journalists who saw no problem in helping Walz advance his case, including his astroturfed insult against former President Trump, Senator Vance and the Republican ticket as being ‘weird.’ The moniker kept Walz in the minds of liberal journalists like star-crossed lovers being unable to think of anything else after laying eyes on each other. Why? He said exactly how they feel about conservatives,” Houck told the Caller.

Scott Jennings, a longtime GOP adviser in Kentucky and veteran of numerous campaigns, told the Caller that the Harris campaign must have judged Walz as a risk to the operation and chose to sideline him as a result.

“They’ve obviously judged him to be a huge risk. His limited engagement on the CNN sit-down was ridiculously bad,” Jennings told the Caller.

After Harris named Walz her running mate, the Minnesota governor has been caught in several lies, including some about his service record.

The Harris campaign unknowingly began the unraveling of Walz’s military story after unearthing a 2018 video of the governor pushing for gun control, saying that “those weapons of war, that I carried in war” should stay only in combat. Social media users were quick to point out despite Walz’s statement, he never saw war.

Veterans in Walz’s unit previously accused him during his run for office in 2018 of retiring from the National Guard to run for Congress once it was revealed that he would be deployed to Iraq. Vance has lobbed attacks at Walz on the campaign trail, questioning why Americans should trust a guy who lied about his military record.

Veteran who knew Walz unloads on him on the @MegynKellyShow: “He’s not brave, I call him a coward because he is” pic.twitter.com/efGKk1fHjm

The Minnesota Governor is also the subject of a congressional investigation relating to his ties to the Chinese government. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray to request all documents relating to any Chinese entities that the now-governor may have interacted with while on his dozens of trips to China.

Lies aside, Jennings told the Caller that another reason for sidelining Walz could be because he would be pressed about a policy platform Harris is yet to define. More than a month into her campaign, Harris has only unveiled her economic policy and has yet to put a platform on her website. The Trump campaign, by contrast, features the Republican National Committee’s platform as its own.

“In his defense, she has no idea what her positions are so how could he be expected to know anything?” Jennings said.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House reporter. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

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

‘The History of Kamala Harris’ by Geoffrey B. Higginbotham, Major General, USMC (Ret.)

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Many of our readers sent us a link to a column written by Geoffrey B. Higginbotham, Major General, USMC (Ret.) on the history of the Harris family and of Kamala and her husband Doug Emhoff.

It was published on March 13, 2021 in Government in Exile.

Here are Marine General Higginbotham’s words.

The History of Kamala Harris

For your knowledge and interest about the Biden VP.  Here is a timely editorial that exposes the hidden background of Kamala Harris from the Combat Veterans for Congress Political Action Committee that is posted here with permission of the author. CVFC PAC supports the election of US military combat veterans to the US Senate and House of Representatives. The editorial begins:

Kamala Harris’ father was an avowed Marxist professor in the Economics Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. Both of Harris’ parents were active in the Berkeley based Afro-American Association; Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were the heroes of the Afro-American Association.

The group’s leader, Donald Warden (aka Khalid al-Mansour), mentored two young Afro-American Association members, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale; they created the Maoist inspired Black Panther Party which gained strong support from Communist China; the Black Panther Party served as the model for creation of the Black Lives Matter Marxist organization Khalid al-Mansour subsequently went on to arrange financing and facilitated for Barack Hussein Obama to be accepted as a
student to matriculate at Harvard Law School.

Following her graduation from college, Harris returned to California and subsequently became the mistress of the 60-year-old married Speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown, Jr. Brown’s political campaigns were supported and funded by Dr. Carlton Goodlett, the owner of The Sun Reporter and several other pro-Communist newspapers.

Brown was elected as Mayor of San Francisco, and strongly endorsed Harris’ Marxist political philosophy; he guided Harris’ political rise in California politics, leading to her election as California’s Attorney General. Willie Brown, Jr. was a well-known long-time Communist sympathizer. Willie Brown, Jr. was initially elected to public office with the substantial help of the Communist Party USA.

Today, Willie Brown is widely regarded as one of the Chinese Communist Party’s best friends in the San Francisco Bay Area.

While serving as San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris mentored a young San Francisco Radical Maoist activist, Lateefah Simon, who was a member of the STORM Revolutionary Movement; Simon currently chairs the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Board. Simon has always been close friends with the founder of Black Lives Matter Marxist Domestic Terrorists, Alicia Garza, as well as STORM member and avowed Communist, Van Jones. Harris has been openly and aggressively supporting Black Lives Matter Marxists; Kamala Harris is still closely associated with Maoist Lateefah Simon and Marxist Alicia Garza.

Kamala Harris’s sister Maya Harris was a student activist at Stanford University. She was a closely associated with Steve Phillips, one of the leading Marxist-Leninists on campus and a long-time affiliate with the League of Revolutionary Struggle, a pro-Chinese Communist group.

Phillips came out of the Left, and in college he studied Marx, Mao, and Lenin, and maintained close associations with fellow Communists. Phillips married into the multi billion dollar Sandler family of the Golden West Savings and Loan fortune. He funded many leftist political campaigns, and the voter registration drives in the Southern and South Western states in order to help his friend, Barack Hussein Obama, defeat Hillary Clinton. Phillips has been a major financial sponsor for Kamala Harris’s political campaigns for various California elective offices.

Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff works for the law firm DLA Piper, which “boasts nearly 30 years of experience in Communist China with over 140 lawyers dedicated to its ‘Communist China  investment Services’ branch. He was just appointed to Professor at Yale to school future lawyers in the fine points of Communism. When she was elected to the US Senate, Kamala Harris appointed a Pro-Communist Senate Chief of Staff, Karine Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre was active with the New York-based Haiti Support Network. The organization worked closely with the pro-Communist China/Communist North Korea Workers World Party and supported Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the far-left Communist former president of Haiti and the radical Lavalas movement.

Fortunately for Harris, but potentially disastrous for the Republic, elected office holders are not subject to the security clearance process. If the FBI did a Background Investigation on Kamala Harris, she never would have passed, because of her 40-year close ties with Marxists, Communists, Maoists, and Communist China. Harris would never have been approved for acceptance to any of the 5 Military Service Academies, been appointed to a US Government Sub-Cabinet position, or would have been approved to fill a sensitive position for a high security defense contractor. Yet, since Joe Biden was elected, Harris could be a heartbeat away from being President.

The US constitutional Republic is being threatened by the People’s Republic of Communist China (PPC) externally, and by their very active espionage operations within the United States. The People’s Republic of Communist China (PPC), with 1.4 billion people, is governed by the 90 million member Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that has been working with Russia to destroy the US Constitutional Republic for over 70 years.

If the American voters read the background information (in Trevor Loudon’s article) on Kamala Harris, they would never support her election as Vice President of the United States. Joe Biden is suffering from the early onset of dementia and will continue to decline in cerebral awareness; he will never be able to fill out a four-year term of office. Since Biden was elected, the Socialists, Marxists, and Communist who control Kamala Harris, are planning to enact provisions of the 25th Amendment, in order to remove Joe Biden from office, so Harris can become the first Communist President of the United States.

Since Biden was elected, because Biden would not be up to it, Kamala Harris would lead the effort to appoint very dangerous anti-American Leftist, Communist, Socialists, and Marxists to fill highly sensitive positions in the Washington Deep State Bureaucracy. She would fill all appointive positions in the US Intelligence Agencies, in the Department of Homeland Security, in the Department of Defense, in The Justice Department, the Department of State, the FBI, the CIA, most cabinet positions, the National Security Council, and in the White House Staff.

American voters must alert their fellow Americans that Kamala Harris is a very serious National Security threat to the very survival of the US Constitutional Republic; she has been a fellow traveler of Marxists, Communists, Maoists, Socialists, Progressives, and Chinese Communists for over 35 years. President Trump had much more background information on Kamala Harris than we presented here, and he was correct, when he accused Kamala Harris of being a Communist subverter.

Geoffrey B. Higginbotham
Major General, USMC (Ret.)

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EDITORS NOTE: This Government in Exile column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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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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.

Three Top Tactics Used by Media to Distort Israeli Hostage Rescue, Serve Hamas Interests

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Effective tactics are used by media outlets employed to distort the narrative surrounding Israel’s recent hostage rescue. 

Media outlets went out of their way on Saturday (June 8) to make Israel’s heroic rescue of four Gaza hostages look tainted or even immoral, with a reframing that served Hamas’ strategy.

Instead of simply reporting the news — that Israeli hostages Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv had been rescued in a rare and complex operation in the heart of Gaza — media outlets chose to label it as one of the “bloodiest” raids of the war.

They used three tactics to achieve that goal, which effectively turned justice into injustice:

  • Minimizing the achievement by using the term “freed” instead of “rescued” to describe the hostages
  • Emphasizing the Palestinian death toll based on Hamas figures
  • Whitewashing the terrorists’ use of civilians as human shields

The Washington Post, for example, committed two of these journalistic crimes:

Its headline led with the number of Palestinian casualties (without questioning how many of them were terrorists), its sub-header called the operation “brazen” and the lead paragraph labeled the operation “one of the bloodiest raids of the war.”

The fact that the hostages were rescued alive is mentioned only in the second paragraph. And the word “Blitz” is casually thrown into the fifth paragraph, evoking comparisons to Nazi warfare.

But what’s hidden in plain sight is the complete whitewashing of Hamas’ strategy of using civilians as human shields. The article simply mentions that the hostages had been held in “buildings,” omitting the fact that they were kept in families’ homes in the crowded multi-story structures, amid the civilian population.

NPR‘s coverage has similar faults: The Palestinian death toll is used to frame the hostage rescue with descriptions like “the streets were…covered in blood,” and the sites of the hostage captivity are called “locations in Nuseirat in central Gaza” — which could mean anything from tunnels to military compounds.

Did the Washington Post or NPR journalists independently verify whether the blood in the streets belonged to terrorists or innocent civilians? Or is blood used here — as in ancient times — to demonize Jews?

Either way, their coverage whitewashes the terrorists.

Selective Terminology

Reuters, which also called the operation “one of the single bloodiest Israeli assaults of the eight-month-old war,” used another tactic while focusing on the Palestinian casualties.

One of its headlines used the vague term “freed,” which can be attributed to the goodwill of the terrorists, instead of the value-laden word “rescued” that may paint Hamas as bad:

BBC did the same, while obscuring the identity of Hamas terrorists and IDF rescuers:

Cognitive Dissonance

But some media outlets didn’t just change words. They descended into a total cognitive dissonance in their attempt to put the onus on Palestinian victimhood.

AP, for example, shamelessly quoted casualty data from the Palestinian health ministry whose reliability had been questioned by the wire service only a day earlier.

And a BBC anchorwoman expected the IDF to warn Gazans ahead of such a dangerous rescue operation:

Similarly, a Sky News anchorwoman gave a platform to Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti, and failed to correct him when he called Israeli hostages “prisoners.” She also didn’t remind him about starvation and sexual assault when he suggested that those released in the past had been well treated by Hamas:

And the same network’s Alex Crawford didn’t even bother waiting for more details of the operation to emerge before she labeled it “a massacre”:

The underlying premise of such biased coverage is that Israelis should not fight for their lives because it comes at a cost. They should just sit back and let terrorists slaughter and kidnap their brethren because they run and hide among innocent people.

But media should stop ignoring the increasing evidence of Gazan civilian complicity with Hamas, as well as the fact that Hamas bears responsibility for putting the entire Gazan population in danger since its October 7th attack on the Jewish state.

On Saturday, Israeli special forces undertook a mission in an area that became a legitimate target by virtue of the presence of hostages. As Noa, Almog, Andrey, and Shlomi were rescued after eight months in captivity, Hamas terrorists fired RPGs at them from within the Nuseirat market area. IDF troops responded to save their lives and bring them home.

Any other way to frame it serves the terrorists.

EDITORS NOTE: This Honest Reporting column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

A Week in and ‘Biden’s Border Move Has Already Failed’: Media

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So much for a Biden border crackdown. Already, people on the ground are calling the president’s “fix” a joke, pointing to the 10,000 migrants in custody from last Thursday — four times the phony limit set by the White House. “And the inflows keep coming,” The New York Post editorial board wrote in collective disgust. Barely a week in and “Biden’s BS border move has already failed,” they argue.

The supposed “crackdown” is “a total fake,” the editors insist — and the last few days seem to prove it. In the southwest, Border Patrol announced an apprehension rate of 2,600 in just three sectors (San Diego, Tucson, and Del Rio). Look, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) told reporters, we all know this order is a joke. “This executive order will do nothing but further an invasion into our country, inviting thousands of unvetted illegal immigrants to cross the border every single day — the exact opposite of shutting down the border.”

Worse, he points out, the policy “essentially legalizes the millions of illegal immigrants already in our country and allows thousands more to illegally cross our southern border daily.”

Even the president’s media cheerleaders are panning the administration’s insincere response. On ABC’s “This Week,” host Martha Raddatz was openly incredulous with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, insisting that it was “very hard” to call President Biden’s actions at the border a “success” when 6.5 million illegal immigrants have been caught on the southern border.

And if Democrats think this lawlessness is helping them with their base, they’re mistaken. A CBS/YouGov poll from this past week showed that 62% of voters support “a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally” — including a majority of Hispanics (53%) and almost 40% of the president’s party. Former President Donald Trump played to that strength during a campaign stop in Phoenix on Thursday. “Biden wants an invasion,” Trump said, “I want deportation.”

As far as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is concerned, this issue could very well be the president’s undoing. It was “interesting,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s edition of “This Week on the Hill,” that Biden had spent the last several months “assur[ing] the American people there was nothing he could do.” And yet, “On many occasions I met with the president,” the speaker explained. “I read him the legal authorities [he has]. I handed him a summary of all the executive action that he could take under the existing federal statutes to solve the crisis that he himself created. Remember,” he pointed out, “we documented 64 specific executive actions that Joe Biden and Secretary Mayorkas took … to open the border wide. They did it intentionally,” Johnson argued. “And for him to now feign as though he’s concerned about [it] … that he wants to fix it is just pure politics.”

How do we know that? Because, as Johnson and others point out, what Biden did won’t solve the problem. In fact, the speaker insists, “it might actually make it worse … because he’s now sent the signal that if you’re among the first 2,500 illegals every day, you get a free pass. … The whole policy is crazy.” It does not, as he highlighted, end the catch-and-release program or reinstate Trump’s hugely effective Remain in Mexico policy. “It has created a catastrophe for the country that we are going to be dealing with for decades. [And] now, just a few weeks before the first debate and on the eve of the election … he wants to be able to go out and tell people that, ‘Oh, gosh, I tried to do something.’” And yet, Johnson went on, “he won’t ever acknowledge that he is the one that created the catastrophe.”

Now his party is divided, the speaker warned, because they’ve effectively created an “open borders caucus.” Worse, his campaign is dealing with the political fallout of openly defying federal law. “He has a real problem,” Johnson said of Biden. “This past week I was in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin doing events. [The crowds] are not [just] normal Republican voters. They’re new people,” the Louisiana leader explained. It’s all part of the “demographic shift going on in the country” that’s pulling Hispanics, African-American voters, and the Jewish community into the GOP camp.

“[T]they see no alternative,” Johnson pointed out. “They understand that Joe Biden has wrecked the country and turned his back on their interest and their security and their ability to put groceries on the table. All these things are going to have a huge effect in November. And I think … the Republican Party is going to have a great election year.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and 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.

4 Biblical Ways to ‘Counter the Deception’ Rampant in Modern Media

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“Even the AP is acknowledging that there is deception” in modern media, said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, host of “Washington Watch,” on Wednesday. Perkins referenced an Associated Press headline published on January 31, which read, “Grave peril of digital conspiracy theories: ‘What happens when no one believes anything anymore?’” That’s “a very profound question,” said Perkins, but he added that the AP failed to “get to the real problem and the source or the solution.”

The nearly 3,000-word article “focused on bloggers and others using the internet” to spread or adopt conspiracy theories, said Perkins. With a predictable skew toward right-fringe conspiracy theories, the article featured everything from QAnon and 2020 election claims, to government complicity in the Maui wildfires and the Sandy Hook school shooting.

On one hand, technology is a tool that cuts both ways, Perkins acknowledged. “Today’s technology … has benefits such as allowing you to watch or listen to ‘Washington Watch’ on a device you carry in your pocket. It also allows the false prophets to amplify their message with what today we might call conspiracy theories or fake news,” he said. David Closson, director of FRC’s Center for Biblical Worldview concurred. “Someone can fire something off on social media and it can make it around the world … before there’s even a chance to do a fact check.”

On the other hand, “the legacy media is a part of this problem,” Perkins argued. “The reason [people are] susceptible” to conspiracy theories is “because [the legacy media] were the first ones that rejected truth and therefore set the stage for these conspiracy theories to prosper.” As the media becomes less trustworthy, they are shocked to find a corresponding decrease in people trusting the media.

“The media and journalists of all stripes really have had such a casual relationship with the truth,” agreed Closson, “or worse, … even suppressed legitimate news.” On some networks like CNN, he said he can’t even trust “the premise of some of their arguments when [in] the previous segment, you know, they’re using preferred pronouns.” At The New York Times, staffers complained internally that an article on detransitioners created “a hostile work environment for the queer people who work here.” Readers will surely recall their own encounters with mainstream media outlets choosing narrative over news.

People eschewing the legacy media for alternate sources of information represents an existential crisis to those outlets, and they have responded accordingly. Last month, a Washington Post analyst known for favoring false narratives over true ones concluded that ordinary Americans shouldn’t do their own research. Ironically, the study he relied upon actually demonstrated that the cottage industry of fact-checking has become so subjective that fact-checkers agree on what is disinformation less than half the time.

The AP article, which extended a multi-part series on the rising threat of conspiracy theories, noted with alarm that the increase in conspiracy theories corresponds to a decrease in authority, institutions, and the mainstream media. “And even when they fail to convince people,” they wrote, “the conspiracy theories embraced by these groups contribute to mounting distrust of authorities and democratic institutions, causing people to reject reliable sources of information while encouraging division and suspicion.”

“When you have a breakdown in authority … especially in media, … you sow the seeds on fertile ground for these conspiracy theories to thrive,” Closson warned. He pointed to a 2023 Gallup poll which, for 11 out of 16 public institutions they asked about, found “the lowest level of confidence that [the public has] had in 40 years.”

“We live in a time when people simply don’t trust institutions,” said Closson. “Nor should they, given where we are,” Perkins argued. “When you have people denying the revealed truth that is so fundamental — male and female, the institution of marriage … these people are not worthy to be trusted or followed.”

Closson pointed out that conspiracy theories and misinformation have been around for a long time, “really since the beginning of time,” beginning with the serpent in the garden. “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” the serpent said to Eve (Genesis 3:1). There, the serpent challenged the truth of God’s Word, “sowing doubt, sowing confusion,” said Closson, and Adam and Eve swallowed the lie. “Ever since then, we’ve lived in some sort of a post-truth world.”

However, Closson added, conspiracy theories seem to be gaining more traction now because of America’s culture-wide rejection of truth. “Even in our churches, we’re not immune from these things,” he lamented. He cited research FRC commissioned in 2023 that found “48% of regular church goers say that they don’t believe in absolute moral truth, … a basic tenet of a biblical worldview.”

“Deception comes when we depart from truth,” Perkins responded. He cited Paul’s warning to the Thessalonians about the age of lawlessness, which would bring “all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12). “We should take that as an indication that these latter days are going to be filled with deception,” said Perkins.

Perkins and Closson identified four ways that Christians should respond to the epidemic of deception poisoning America’s media, public discourse, and even the church. In a refreshing contrast to America’s prevailing buffet of lies, they served up courses of hearty, wholesome truth — all of which were grounded in God’s infallible Word.

1. Don’t Be Led Astray

The Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24-25) opened with Jesus’s disciples asking him to teach them about “the sign of your coming and of the end of the age” (Matthew 24:3). Jesus answered, “See that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray” (Matthew 24:4-5). Paul, having learned from Jesus, later issued similar instructions to the Thessalonians, “Let no one deceive you in any way” (2 Thessalonians 2:3). In other words, the latter times would feature many anti-Christ deceivers peddling counterfeit gospels, and Jesus wanted his followers to be on their guard.

These instructions from our Lord were the “first words out of his mouth,” Perkins noted, after quoting the passage. “You see, Jesus warns his followers to be on guard against deception and those who will peddle deception. … So, repeatedly he says, ‘Don’t be deceived.’”

Jesus had already warned his followers against deception. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves,” said Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:15). Closson quoted these words and added that Jesus gave “a litmus test” by which to recognize false teachers: “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). He endorsed applying this litmus test to “the people reporting the news. Let’s recognize them by their fruit.”

In a culture of confusion and lies, Christian, don’t be led astray by false teachers.

2. Don’t Be Alarmed

Jesus proceeded to instruct his disciples, “See that you are not alarmed” (Matthew 24:6). Jesus foretold wars, calamities, persecutions — intense trials that could throw Christians off-balance. Nevertheless, Jesus instructed his followers that these things must happen, preparing them beforehand to remember that God is sovereign over all things.

Paul repeated this instruction, too. “Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come” (2 Thessalonians 2:1-2).

“We should not be surprised,” said Perkins, who quoted from Matthew 24. “Jesus warned us over and over … that this was going to occur.”

3. Return to the Truth

Christians must also “go back to the truth,” as an antidote to the epidemic of deception, said Closson. “We need to stand on God’s word …, which is our ultimate source of truth” (see John 17:17). “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

“We should put our confidence in that which does not change,” Perkins agreed. He added, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever [Hebrews 13:8]. The Word of God does not change.” Jesus also said this on the Mount of Olives, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

Perkins applied this truth to the moments in which we’re tempted to believe a lie, especially one that questions God’s Word (“Did God really say?”). Our response, he said, should be, “‘Well, wait a minute. Let me check. Let me go back to the source.’ … You go back to the source. That’s how you counter the deception.”

Perkins argued that American Christians should use their access to the source of truth to counter the deception of the evil one in the public square. “We have the ability, here in the United States, to use the freedoms that we still have to advocate for others. We have the ability to expose these things that are occurring in the end times that Jesus warned about,” he said. “He said they were coming, I think, to prepare us so that we could stand against the evil.” Invoking Matthew 24:12, “Because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold,” Perkins urged, “We have to act on legitimate information we have, so that we can be the salt and light that allows the gospel to go forth.”

4. Use Discernment

Countering error with truth is not always simple, which is “why we need discernment,” said Closson, “today more than we have ever needed it.” When Jesus first sent his disciples out into the world, he told them to “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16), he quoted. Additionally, Jesus quoted the greatest commandment in the law, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37).

Using discernment is easier said than done, but Perkins and Closson discussed several helpful tips for evaluating the news:

A. Pause and Pray

“The first step that I would take when I see something on the social media or the news, is just take a pause,” said Closson. “There’s the impulse that we like to know everything at once. In a social media age, we’re used to getting our news instantaneously. And so I think we need to slow down. We need to pray.”

“You don’t have to be the first one to pass [a news article] on,” Perkins concurred. Because here’s what happens when you do that. Most of these [conspiracy theories] are exposed within time. If you’re associated with that, you lose credibility among your friends.”

So, counseled Perkins, “Resist this temptation to forward it on or to post it or embrace it. … Pray over it. Just have discernment.”

B. Read Critically

Second, “Don’t believe anything you see just because you see it in print,” said Closson. Perkins put the same concept in different words, “Be careful what you read online. Be careful about just forwarding something on” without considering first if it’s true.

As part of this step, Christians should compare what they read in the news to what the Bible says, Perkins advised.

In the same discourse, Jesus predicted, “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. … Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. … And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray” (Matthew 24:7, 9, 11).

“When you hear those things happening,” we know that “the Scripture says, ‘Yeah, those things are going to happen,’” said Perkins. “So, we can say, ‘Well, all right, this lines up with what Jesus said was going to be happening. Let’s go the next step and validate and verify the source.’”

C. Corroborate Information

“It’s always good to corroborate. If you see something on social media, don’t just assume it’s true,” Closson said. “Don’t forward the email to a friend. Don’t forward the post, but corroborate it. Go to some valid news organizations.”

Closson recommended Family Research Council’s own news organization, The Washington Stand, noting that it has “a whole team of reporters” dedicated to “coming at [the news] from a biblical worldview.” This means that they are “trying to connect it to Scripture, trying to connect it to facts, objective truth, things that are reportable, things that can be verified.”

Perkins suggested a “rule of thumb” that “anything you see that is detached from a specific, reliable news or organizational site like The Washington Stand, … don’t trust it if it’s not connected to a site that it can be verified.”

One way to find reliable news is to “get as close to the source as you can,” said Perkins. “That’s why we bring you the actual news makers. We go right to the source. We’re not, you know, reporting on what someone else said.” That’s one reason why social media is an unreliable place to peruse the news; it’s far removed from the source.

D. Be Honest

Everyone is liable to make mistakes. This is even easier in a rapidly changing news environment, where first reports often turn out to be wrong, misleading, or at least lacking critical information. The question is, how do we respond when we make mistakes?

Perkins exhorted “Washington Watch” listeners to be honest. “I do my very best to make sure that everything we say here is validated and it’s true,” he said. “And, if we do get something wrong, I’m going to take ownership of that, and I’m going to correct it when we find out.”

“So,” Closson summarized, “prayer, discernment, corroborating objectivity — all of these things, I think, ought to mark a Christian as they take in, read, understand, and share the news.” Christians should speak the truth in love, which means we should not be led astray or alarmed, but stand firm on the Word of God, the only infallible source of truth. To accurately handle the Word of truth amid a culture of deception, Christians must navigate with all discernment, never losing sight of him who is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

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.

‘Deplatforming Works’: Left Learns Wrong Lesson from Week of Media Firings

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Far-left Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) raised eyebrows — not to mention blood pressures — with her response to Tucker Carlson’s abrupt departure from Fox News. Her most offensive comment was not the mean-spirited joke, “couldn’t have happened to a better guy,” nor the possibly libelous claim that Carlson was “arguably responsible for driving some of the most amounts of death threats, violent threats, not just to my office but to plenty of people across the country,” but the political conclusion she drew, “deplatforming works, and it is important, and there you go.”

By “deplatforming,” Ocasio-Cortez means more than just someone losing a platform (in the abstract, modern sense of “platform” that includes all digital-age equivalents for mounting a literal platform to deliver a speech). For her and other leftists, “deplatforming” describes a particular form of censorship achieved by disallowing those who express undesirable views from using the media by which they reach their intended audience. She also seems to have in mind not only the act of removing someone from a platform, but the activism and pressure campaigns that lead to that result — in two words, cancel culture.

This is emphatically the wrong conclusion to draw.

For starters, Ocasio-Cortez completely overlooks the context of Carlson’s firing. Unless you’ve been reading the news about “the news” — which, let’s be honest, you probably shouldn’t — you’re probably unaware that Carlson’s departure from Fox is only one item in a string of high-profile firings across cable and network television. In just the past week, CNN booted left-wing gadfly Don Lemon, Comcast (which owns NBC) parted ways with NBC Universal CEO Jeff Shell, Disney-owned ABC (which owns election data site FiveThirtyEight) did not renew a contract with FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, and Fox fired commentator Dan Bongino in addition to Carlson. With all this sacking, it’s a wonder the price of burlap hasn’t gone through the roof.

Surprisingly, these clustered separations seem to be unrelated to one another. Lemon got the hammer after engaging in a racially charged tirade against Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, of Indian heritage. Shell was pushed out at NBC over an inappropriate sexual relationship. Silver got swept up by Disney-wide layoffs (apparently subsidizing the rainbow renders other colors unaffordable).

Meanwhile, Fox has given no public reason for the firings, but they might be related to the company’s legal problems. The pair of firings came days after settling a defamation lawsuit in which Carlson was mentioned frequently with voting machine manufacturer Dominion for a stunning $787 million; the company still faces a defamation lawsuit from another voting machine company, Smartmatic, and a hostile work environment lawsuit from a former booker for Carlson’s show, Abby Grossberg. Another possible reason for at least Lemon’s and Carlson’s ousters is that the CEO or owner disliked them and was actively looking for an opportunity to show them the door.

These details indicate that there are many possible reasons why a network might terminate a relationship with an anchor — reasons which might be totally unrelated to a cancellation campaign against them. Without knowing the reason why a host lost his show, it’s impossible to prove that “deplatforming works” in the strategic sense Ocasio-Cortez means.

Left-wingers tried to cancel Carlson on numerous occasions. In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League called for an advertising boycott, but that failed to drive audiences away. On former White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s MSNBC show, Ocasio-Cortez herself on Sunday endorsed government action to end his show, calling for “federal regulation, in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t. And when you look at [what] Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence. Very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that I think we have to be willing to contend with.” But what Ocasio-Cortez called for did not happen.

In fact, the coincidental cancellation campaign may have had no more effect on Carlson’s firing than a child attempting to use “the Force” on a supermarket’s automatic doors.

A separate issue from the factual accuracy of Ocasio-Cortez’s position — and a more important one — is whether the “deplatforming” she envisions is acceptable in a free society. Ocasio-Cortez explicitly called for government suppression of the distribution of opinions with which she disagrees. The policy outcome flies so obviously in the face of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and a free press that Ocasio-Cortez felt the need to justify herself by claiming the speech that offended her was “very clearly incitement of violence.” If that case could be proven in court, surely someone would have sued Fox News over that by now.

A giant chasm yawns between what actually happened to Tucker Carlson and what Ocasio-Cortez wanted to happen to him. Opinions will differ about whether Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox’s parent company News Corp) made the right decision or for the right reasons. But at root, Carlson’s employer no longer wanted to employ him, so he terminated his employment. One bedrock principle of a free market is that no one is forced to do business with anyone they don’t want to do business with. Ocasio-Cortez wants the government to dictate to broadcasters who they can put on air.

The Left seems not to recognize or understand this difference, as Ocasio-Cortez’s recent “deplatforming works” claim underscores. Left-wing cancellation efforts target not only Fox News, but virtually every right-wing news outlet you can think of. Ironically, the self-proclaimed opponents of fascism have ripped a page right out of the fascist playbook (and every other dictator in history) in agitating to shut down dissenting media outlets.

This trend has increased in recent years. Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Democrat or Democrat-leaning U.S. adults who agree that “the U.S. government should take steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information,” increased from 40% in 2018 to 65% in 2021. Even more (76% of Democrat or Democrat-leaning adults) believed in 2021 that “tech companies should take steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information.”

This notion is dangerous to America. But rather than censor it, proponents of free speech must defeat it through persuasion, which is far more challenging.

If Ocasio-Cortez and other leftists have taken the “wrong” — both incorrect and totalitarian — lesson from Carlson’s departure from Fox News, what is the right lesson? Combined with other recent media departures, it’s clear that the American news media — for all of its problems — remains capable of self-adjustment. Different outlets continue to represent different points of view, cycle between spokespersons, and remain accountable both to the public and to the legal system. The media landscape continues to remain open to independent new players, such as The Washington Stand or (possibly soon) the Tucker Carlson Network. No one has a monopoly on the facts, the right opinions, or the press. That’s how things are supposed to work in a rambunctious popular government.

There is, and will always be, a fundamental difference between government regulators taking a popular program off the air and that program’s broadcast cutting that program from its lineup. The difference is freedom.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 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.