Newsmax, OAN, Others When Faux Just Isn't Crazy Enough

[LFC]

BREAKING NEWS: The Luck Charms leprechaun is gay.

Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield had a homophobic Tuesday night freak out over kids' breakfast cereals.

After being strongly criticized two weeks ago for disgusting antisemitic remarks, Stinchfield is back to attack the LGBTQ community with a segment on "woke" cereal and "gayness."

Kellog's last month announced a special LGBTQ Pride month cereal called Together With Pride, a collaboration with the folks at GLAAD that Stinchfield says is "forcing our kids to be confused about their gender first thing in the morning."

"Come on man," the Newsmax host cried, blasting Together With Pride. "The cereal is Rainbow hearts, covered in edible glitter. How nice. Give me a break. Here's the worst part, the cereal slogan, 'too amazing to put into a box,' and then lists a space for kids to write in their own pronouns."

All that was too much for the Newsmax host, who decided it was time to also go after Lucky Charms for its "prancing" "gay leprechaun."

"Anyway, isn't Kellogg's a little late to this woke game by the way? General Mills has, I think General Mills has a gay leprechaun, right? Well, my producer Carly asked me, 'is that leprechaun really gay?' I said I don't know, maybe: he wears high heeled shoes, prances around in tights, leads me to believe, probably, that little Lucky Charm leprechaun might be gay."

Stinchfield then tried to claim his own version of wokeness,

"But here's the thing. For those of you that want to vilify me for those comments right, right there, aren't you just as offended by the flamboyant rainbow hearts and glitter as a symbol of gayness? See, there are two standards here. Nothing like forcing our kids to be confused about their gender first thing in the morning with their breakfast."

[goldenvalley]

May 26, 2021 20:11:05 GMT LFC said:

BREAKING NEWS: The Luck Charms leprechaun is gay.

Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield had a homophobic Tuesday night freak out over kids' breakfast cereals.

After being strongly criticized two weeks ago for disgusting antisemitic remarks, Stinchfield is back to attack the LGBTQ community with a segment on "woke" cereal and "gayness."

Kellog's last month announced a special LGBTQ Pride month cereal called Together With Pride, a collaboration with the folks at GLAAD that Stinchfield says is "forcing our kids to be confused about their gender first thing in the morning."

"Come on man," the Newsmax host cried, blasting Together With Pride. "The cereal is Rainbow hearts, covered in edible glitter. How nice. Give me a break. Here's the worst part, the cereal slogan, 'too amazing to put into a box,' and then lists a space for kids to write in their own pronouns."

All that was too much for the Newsmax host, who decided it was time to also go after Lucky Charms for its "prancing" "gay leprechaun."

"Anyway, isn't Kellogg's a little late to this woke game by the way? General Mills has, I think General Mills has a gay leprechaun, right? Well, my producer Carly asked me, 'is that leprechaun really gay?' I said I don't know, maybe: he wears high heeled shoes, prances around in tights, leads me to believe, probably, that little Lucky Charm leprechaun might be gay."

Stinchfield then tried to claim his own version of wokeness,

"But here's the thing. For those of you that want to vilify me for those comments right, right there, aren't you just as offended by the flamboyant rainbow hearts and glitter as a symbol of gayness? See, there are two standards here. Nothing like forcing our kids to be confused about their gender first thing in the morning with their breakfast."

Wait till he hears about Bert & Ernie on Sesame Street.  

[LFC]

May 26, 2021 20:35:49 GMT goldenvalley said:

May 26, 2021 20:11:05 GMT LFC said:

BREAKING NEWS: The Luck Charms leprechaun is gay.

Wait till he hears about Bert & Ernie on Sesame Street.  

And I've been suspicious about SpongeBob and Patrick right from the get-go. I think SpongeBob is using Sandy Squirrel as a front.

[LFC]

Well, DUH!

'Are you saying OAN is not credible?' Arizona GOP leader incredulous after CNN confronts her over Trump-backed 'audit'

Republican Arizona State Senate President Karen Fann this week grew incredulous with CNN reporter Kyung Lah after she confronted her about her state's Trump-backed "audit" of the 2020 presidential election.

Lah caught up with Fann in a parking lot this week to ask her about Arizona's widely criticized vote audit, which has infamously included efforts to inspect ballots for traces of bamboo to prove nefarious Chinese influence on the 2020 election.

During the interview, Fann asked Lah -- who was supposed to be the person asking questions -- if she could prove that no dead people voted for President Joe Biden in Arizona and that Biden supporters didn't fill out ballots on behalf of other people.

"I'm saying what the data shows us, there was no widespread fraud," Lah replied.

"I didn't say there was fraud!" Fann replied, despite the fact that she implied Biden fraudulently won in her state.

Lah then listed off all of the concerns Fann raised and informed her that "these things are all fraud."

"Well, I asked you a question," Fann said. "Can you tell me that, in all the states, no ballots from people that are already deceased were not filled out and sent in?"

"I can tell you that what the data has shown is, overwhelmingly, this was the most secure election," Lah replied.

Later in the interview, Fann tried to slap away complaints that the election audit was not transparent by noting it was being broadcast on the Trump-loving One America News network.

Lah pointed out that OAN controlled all the cameras inside the audit and could edit out footage that the auditors don't want people to see.

"Are you saying OAN is not a credible news source?!" Fann asked incredulously.

[LFC]

Looks like Newsmax is picking up some of the sludge from the Trump cesspool.

A pair of Donald Trump allies are joining Newsmax as contributors.

Hogan Gidley, who served as deputy White House press secretary and worked on Trump's re-election campaign, and Jenna Ellis, who served on the ex-president's legal team after he lost the November 2020 election, will join the conservative network as paid contributors.

[LFC]

Musing about the execution of Democrats who reject The Big Lie. Awwww. How "cute." Nothing like promoting the execution of what would amount to literally thousands if not tens of thousands of political foes to show how 'Murican you really are. OAN is clearly bucking to be the fascist mouthpiece of the Republican authoritarian government.

One America News Network host Pearson Sharp didn’t flinch as he delivered the somber news to camera: Radical Democrats had “overthrown” the election, and the punishment for traitors is death.

“What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them?” Sharp mused to camera, in a clip flagged by The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer.

“Well, in the past, America had a very good solution to dealing with such traitors: Execution.”

The monologue offers a chilling glimpse at what appears to be a growing comfort with violence from far-right platforms like OAN and their viewers. Sommer noted that members of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement had gleefully circulated the clip online, seeing it as “proof that the mass executions are right around the corner.”

At least one OAN viewer uploaded footage of themselves cheering on the call for killing their political opponents. “They get hung!” the viewer shouted after Sharp asked about the punishment for traitors.

The monologue only grew more explicit as Sharp went on.

“There have been numerous indications that foreign governments, including China and Pakistan, meddled in our election to install Joe Biden as president,” Sharp said. “Any American involved in these efforts, from those who ran the voting machines to the very highest government official, is guilty of treason under U.S. Code 2381, which carries with it a penalty of death.”

After listing several federal offenses — including sedition and insurrection — Sharp cut to clips of prominent Democratic lawmakers, implying they were to be next on the chopping block.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 24, 2021 19:03:48 GMT LFC said:

Musing about the execution of Democrats who reject The Big Lie. Awwww. How "cute." Nothing like promoting the execution of what would amount to literally thousands if not tens of thousands of political foes to show how 'Murican you really are. OAN is clearly bucking to be the fascist mouthpiece of the Republican authoritarian government.

One America News Network host Pearson Sharp didn’t flinch as he delivered the somber news to camera: Radical Democrats had “overthrown” the election, and the punishment for traitors is death.

“What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them?” Sharp mused to camera, in a clip flagged by The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer.

“Well, in the past, America had a very good solution to dealing with such traitors: Execution.”

The monologue offers a chilling glimpse at what appears to be a growing comfort with violence from far-right platforms like OAN and their viewers. Sommer noted that members of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement had gleefully circulated the clip online, seeing it as “proof that the mass executions are right around the corner.”

At least one OAN viewer uploaded footage of themselves cheering on the call for killing their political opponents. “They get hung!” the viewer shouted after Sharp asked about the punishment for traitors.

The monologue only grew more explicit as Sharp went on.

“There have been numerous indications that foreign governments, including China and Pakistan, meddled in our election to install Joe Biden as president,” Sharp said. “Any American involved in these efforts, from those who ran the voting machines to the very highest government official, is guilty of treason under U.S. Code 2381, which carries with it a penalty of death.”

After listing several federal offenses — including sedition and insurrection — Sharp cut to clips of prominent Democratic lawmakers, implying they were to be next on the chopping block.

Some of the 1/6 folks had that in mind...

[LFC]

Dick Morris is still alive? Now he's on Newsmax and spouting total nonsense. Nice way to cap off a less than stellar career, Dicky.

Newsmax host and disgraced political strategist Dick Morris bizarrely linked the teaching of critical race theory to Oedipal complexes on Wednesday night, warning that the presence of CRT could lead to kids killing their fathers and marrying their mothers.

In recent months, right-wing media has obsessively focused its attention on so-called critical race theory, an obscure legal academic concept that identifies systemic racism in institutions which conservatives have since turned into a catch-all phrase to include diversity training and anti-racist school curriculum. Newsmax, in keeping with its attempts to outflank Fox News on the right, has predictably gone all-in on the latest culture war flashpoint.

Appearing on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight to discuss Gen. Mark Milley blasting Republicans for complaining the military is too “woke,” Morris immediately argued that critical race theory is a “cancer” that is “infecting all of our institutions.” The Dick Morris Democracy host then went on to falsely insist that CRT is “based on the fundamental proposition that all white people are racist” and is akin to “original sin.”

From there, the conversation quickly veered into the land of the absurd.

And indeed it did!

[LFC]

OAN allowed one of its own to panhandle using The Big Lie.

One America News has allowed host and “reporter” Christina Bobb to actively appeal to the network’s viewers over 140 times on air to donate to her nonprofit group funding bogus right-wing election “audits,” according to a new review by liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America.

In recent months, OAN has led the charge in promoting and boosting the so-called “audit” of Arizona’s 2020 election results. The audit, however, is a nakedly transparent effort by pro-Trump Republicans and conservative activists to erode the credibility of President Joe Biden’s decisive electoral victory over Donald Trump.

And, naturally, Trump has repeatedly and excitedly touted the Arizona process, suggesting that it would result in a domino effect of additional state audits that would find Trump had actually won the election and get him reinstated as president.

Bobb, who served as an adviser to the Trump legal team’s efforts to overturn the election following Trump’s loss, has been the face of OAN’s coverage of the Arizona audit. With Arizona Republicans giving the fringe cable network “exclusive” access in covering the process—all while mainstream reporters have been restricted to a tiny spot far from the auditing tables—Bobb has delivered frequent reports from the floor of the arena, repeatedly informing OAN viewers that the audit will prove fraud and pave the way of “America’s audits.”

Besides providing sympathetic coverage to the “audit” and hosting GOP legislators who are pushing their states to replicate Arizona’s conspiracy-riddled effort, Bobb—who anchors OAN’s Weekly Briefing—is a major financial backer of the Arizona audit that she’s been reporting on and helped push the Arizona Senate to go forward with the process.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 24, 2021 21:12:27 GMT LFC said:

Dick Morris is still alive? Now he's on Newsmax and spouting total nonsense. Nice way to cap off a less than stellar career, Dicky.

 The Dick Morris Democracy host then went on to falsely insist that CRT is “based on the fundamental proposition that all white people are racist” and is akin to “original sin.”

From there, the conversation quickly veered into the land of the absurd.

And indeed it did!

What the host of the show said above is what most people assume about the CRT.  You don't have to know what CRT is, you just have to possess feelings about it. And besides, they never lynched anybody so CRT is completely wrong.

[LFC]

Can we assume this guy also refuses antibiotics and pain killers because they are "against nature?"

Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt cavalierly suggested on Friday night that vaccines are “against nature” because some diseases are just “supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people” since that’s just the “way evolution goes.”

In recent weeks, right-wing media has seamlessly shifted from casually pushing vaccine hesitancy on its viewers to outright advocating for vaccine resistance, culminating in a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas this weekend cheering at the fact that the federal government hasn’t met its vaccination goals.

As red-state counties and states with relatively low vaccination rates experience a surge in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, Schmitt welcomed on cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough—a frequent Fox News guest who has made inaccurate claims about the vaccines’ safety and recently said no one under the age of 30 should be vaccinated.

At the top of his Friday night interview with McCullough, Schmitt made sure Newsmax viewers knew he was “not an anti-vaxxer” but also was “not a pro-vaxxer,” instead insisting that he’s “looking at this thing and trying to figure it out.” From there, Schmitt really let loose while seemingly endorsing Social Darwinism.

“Obviously, I’m not a doctor but I’ve always thought about vaccines, and I always think about just nature, and the way everything works, and I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature,” the Newsmax anchor stated.

“Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there—maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes,” he added. “Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that.”

[goldenvalley]

“Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there—maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes,” he added. “Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that.”

What does he mean "supposed to"?   Is this some stand in for the religion talk "God has a plan for everything"?  

[AnBr]

I thought that reich-wingers were agin' evolution.

[Bact PhD]

Jul 14, 2021 13:04:27 GMT AnBr said:

I thought that reich-wingers were agin' evolution.

They're also agin' "playin' Gawd".

[goldenvalley]

The network says:

“Newsmax as a network strongly supports President Biden’s efforts to widely distribute the COVID vaccine. It is important for the safety of all and especially those at high risk, such as the elderly,” a spokesperson told The Washington Post on Tuesday.

The network then put some distance between its corporate position and Schmitt’s remarks, without criticizing him by name.

“Medical professionals who have appeared on Newsmax have strongly encouraged Americans to get the vaccine,” the spokesperson said. “From time to time, a guest or host may not be as supportive of these efforts. However, they do not reflect the position of Newsmax.” (A vaccine-skeptical Vietnam veteran in Idaho told The Post in April that he decided to get the shot after seeing a doctor appear on the network and confirm it was safe.)

[pnwguy]

Jul 14, 2021 15:32:57 GMT goldenvalley said:

The network says:

“Newsmax as a network strongly supports President Biden’s efforts"

There you go.  End the sentence there and distribute it widely.  Context doesn't matter to RW media, so let them have a taste of their own medicine.

[LFC]

Those who live by the Trump...

Former President Donald Trump gave a speech over the weekend, but you might not have known it even if you are a regular Fox News viewer. Instead, you would’ve had to turn to Newsmax, the right-wing cable news channel that’s sticking to its old-school strategy of being the Trumpiest channel on TV.

But with Trump now more than seven months removed from the White House, out-Trumping the competition isn’t proving to be the ratings hit these days that it was in December and January.

The wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s speech on Saturday at a Turning Point event in Phoenix was a snapshot of how Newsmax is trying to stay relevant. While Fox News continued with its regularly scheduled programming, Newsmax carried all of Trump’s nearly two-hour speech live. Not only that, but Newsmax led into the speech with a segment that pushed the former president’s big lies about the 2020 election.

“We’re beyond the ‘conspiracy theory’ nonsense. We all know, we’re not stupid, we know something happened,” said host Rob Carson, who went on to cite long-debunked claims of election fraud in Arizona to make a case that Trump was somehow cheated out of the presidency.

This approach was a hit for Newsmax in December and January, when Trump supporters felt burned by Fox News in the wake of its early (but ultimately accurate) call of Arizona for Joe Biden. Those anti-Fox grievances were promoted by Trump, who helped Newsmax by live-tweeting the channel instead of Fox News (before his Twitter banishment, of course), and even helping Newsmax best Fox News in the ratings in the key demographic.

But Newsmax’s effort to out-Trump the competition has been less successful since Trump left the White House for Mar-a-Lago. Newsmax’s viewership is down more than 50 percent from January (from an average of about 300,000 viewers then to about 114,000 on July 18), and following a significant slump in December and January, Fox News has reestablished itself as not just the most-watched right-wing cable news network but the most-watched cable news network, period.

Apparently Trump isn't selling like he used to. That doesn't mean he doesn't still hold great power in the Republican Party but I think it's clear that Trumpism in the GOP will go on long after he's gone.

[LFC]

Interesting piece on how Gateway Pundit, run by "The Dumbest Man on the Internet", played a role in feeding Trump many of the insane things he spouted off about the election.

According to contemporaneous Justice Department notes taken during the end of Donald Trump’s time in office, the then-president directly and repeatedly berated his top federal law enforcers to back his election-fraud lies. But when they wouldn’t support his anti-democratic crusade, Trump resorted to accusing his senior DOJ officials of not being as extremely online as he was.

For starters, he was chastising them for not reading enough of The Gateway Pundit.

“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” then-President Trump told acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue during a Dec. 27 phone conversation, according to the recently released DOJ documents.

During Trump and Republicans’ months-long, and at times deadly, blitz to nullify President Joe Biden’s decisive victory in the 2020 election, the 45th U.S. president and his allies consumed and regurgitated a lot of garbage information and unhinged conspiracy theories from “the internet.” And one of the websites Trump was specifically citing was the ultra-right-wing and habitually wrong Gateway Pundit; the president was known to sometimes brandish printed pages of the website around the West Wing after the 2020 election.

The Gateway Pundit’s small role in Trump’s endeavor to weaponize the DOJ against the American electoral process underscores just how easily a discredited far-right media site established a pipeline to the decision-making of the then most powerful person on Earth. It also shows how this one website—founded by a guy repeatedly dubbed the “dumbest man on the internet”—managed to play a part in fueling the efforts that brought the country to the brink of democratic rupture.

According to a former senior Trump White House official and another person with direct knowledge of the matter, during the final weeks of his presidency, administration officials saw Trump on multiple occasions holding printed-out pages of Gateway Pundit articles in the White House, sometimes in the Oval Office. The former senior official recalled one instance when Trump handed them a page printed from the website, which nonsensically alleged massive pro-Biden fraud, and told the official to find out more and to do something about it.

“I didn’t really do anything about it,” the ex-official told The Daily Beast. “I think I threw it out. Maybe I recycled it.”

[LFC]

So much for supporting and respecting our troops. That shit only flies on Newsmax if they parrot the party line. Once again the right-wing in America is ticking off every single box along the path to fascism. Every ... single ... one.

Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield became irate and cut the feed of a U.S. veteran after he offered mild criticism of former President Donald Trump.

The confrontation was flagged by Jason Campbell of Media Matters.

During a discussion about the war in Afghanistan on Wednesday, Army veteran Joe Saboe explained that "multiple" presidents made mistakes throughout the duration of the conflict.

"I can tell you this didn't happen under President Trump," Stinchfield advised. "And I know there's a lot of people on the left that want to try to blame President Trump. He wanted out of Afghanistan real bad. He was real frustrated not being able to get out. But he didn't pull out because he knew this would happen."

"With due respect," Saboe interrupted, "veterans -- I'm being one, right -- our friends are over there. We followed this closely for multiple administrations and we know the Trump administration's efforts here fairly weak, that they were trying to limit the number of people that would get out so there was coordination problems for a long time."

"Cut him off!" Stinchfield yelled at the control room. "Cut him off now! Cut him off now! You're not going to blame this on President Trump on my show! That's not happening!"

"God bless you for being a veteran. God bless you for trying to get Americans out," he continued. "But don't come on this program and take the talking points of the left and blame President Trump! That's not helping anybody! The Biden administration screwed this up from the very start! You know it! I know it! The country knows it!"

Stinchfield added: "I'm mad about that, man. I really am."

[goldenvalley]

Sept 16, 2021 22:07:06 GMT LFC said:

So much for supporting and respecting our troops. That shit only flies on Newsmax if they parrot the party line. Once again the right-wing in America is ticking off every single box along the path to fascism. Every ... single ... one.

Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield became irate and cut the feed of a U.S. veteran after he offered mild criticism of former President Donald Trump.

The confrontation was flagged by Jason Campbell of Media Matters.

During a discussion about the war in Afghanistan on Wednesday, Army veteran Joe Saboe explained that "multiple" presidents made mistakes throughout the duration of the conflict.

"I can tell you this didn't happen under President Trump," Stinchfield advised. "And I know there's a lot of people on the left that want to try to blame President Trump. He wanted out of Afghanistan real bad. He was real frustrated not being able to get out. But he didn't pull out because he knew this would happen."

"With due respect," Saboe interrupted, "veterans -- I'm being one, right -- our friends are over there. We followed this closely for multiple administrations and we know the Trump administration's efforts here fairly weak, that they were trying to limit the number of people that would get out so there was coordination problems for a long time."

"Cut him off!" Stinchfield yelled at the control room. "Cut him off now! Cut him off now! You're not going to blame this on President Trump on my show! That's not happening!"

"God bless you for being a veteran. God bless you for trying to get Americans out," he continued. "But don't come on this program and take the talking points of the left and blame President Trump! That's not helping anybody! The Biden administration screwed this up from the very start! You know it! I know it! The country knows it!"

Stinchfield added: "I'm mad about that, man. I really am."

See the bold. This is the equivalent of stuffing fingers in the ears and singing God Bless America really loudly to drown out anything that might upset his equilibrium. 

[LFC]

OoooohAN. You're such a propaganda tool.

Rudy Giuliani claimed in a recent deposition that the Trump campaign essentially had veto power over One America News reporter Christina Bobb’s stories while she volunteered for the Trump legal team following the 2020 presidential election.

In a defamation lawsuit filed by former Dominion executive Eric Coomer against former President Donald Trump and several of his election-denying allies, including Giuliani and OAN, the former New York City mayor discussed the “agreement” he reached with OAN president Charles Herring to have Bobb work on the campaign’s legal team.

“And my staff said she was terrific, she was very trustworthy and if we could work out an agreement with One America News, it would be very helpful,” Giuliani said in the deposition which was taken in August. “She was a very good investigator. So I didn't act on it right away. I wanted to see how she functioned and she was fabulous. She would get you information quickly, she turned out to be an excellent lawyer, she could write really well.”

As the Daily Beast reported back in November, Bobb—who hosts a weekly show on OAN—was added to Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the election and aid the so-called “elite strike force” team that was fronted by Giuliani and conspiracy-peddling pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Campaign staffers were initially confused by her presence, wondering amongst themselves if she was embedded as a journalist.

“I talked to Charles [Herring] myself and I said if she has to hold this confidential from you, that doesn't mean general assignment—they would take her off,” Giuliani added in the deposition.

The former Trump lawyer then claimed that the arrangement he had with Herring allowed the campaign to have the final say on any reporting she did during that time.

“Yes, the rules that we made with Charles were that he would defer to us to whatever our needs were, that he couldn't give it to us permanently but he could loosen up her assignments for the next couple of months,” Giuliani said. “Therefore she wouldn't be working all that much for OAN, so the conflict thing wouldn't come up all the time, that she would agree that any there won't be things that you can then if they are okay then the benefit to you is you'll have like an extra, you'll have an extra edge on everybody else that will benefit you, but you're going to have to agree to something that I know our news networks won't agree to, which is there may be things that you just can't do and she's got to separate her role as a lawyer and if she wants to share things with you, she will have to get my permission or one of my people.”

Later on in the deposition, Giuliani made that point even more abundantly clear.

“They said they would take her off communication she had, OAN would be treated for that purpose the way any other news organization is, and then if she did develop a discrete, good story, she would have to run it past us so it didn't violate any of our rules or whatever,” he declared.

“And I was pretty comfortable they would live by it because they had before. And I knew she had tremendous enthusiasm for doing this and I always like to hire people with enthusiasm because they work harder.”

[LFC]

The abomination known as OAN was brought to you by AT&T. They saw Faux News dollars rolling in and decided to go after a slice of that stinking, fascist pie.

One America News, the far-right network whose fortunes and viewership rose amid the triumph and tumult of the Trump administration, has flourished with support from a surprising source: AT&T Inc, the world's largest communications company.

A Reuters review of court records shows the role AT&T played in creating and funding OAN, a network that continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives.

“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.

Herring has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network’s value “would be zero.”

Dallas-based AT&T, a mobile-phone and Internet provider, also owns entertainment giant Warner Media, which includes CNN and HBO. AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 and in August spun off the satellite service, retaining a 70% share in the new, independently managed company. AT&T’s total U.S. television subscriber base, including satellite and streaming services, fell from 26 million in 2015 to 15.4 million as of August.

AT&T spokesman Jim Greer declined to comment on the testimony about OAN’s revenue streams, citing confidentiality agreements. He said that DirecTV broadcasts “many news channels that offer viewpoints across the political spectrum.”

“We have always sought to provide a wide variety of content and programming that would be of interest to customers, and do not dictate or control programming on channels we carry,” Greer said. “Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.”

[LFC]

I thought their crazy was mostly (not entirely) basic lies with no evidence or outright rejection of reality. Of course with their demographic I should have realized that religious crazy would sell well too.

Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson on Monday night tweeted out the utterly batshit claim that COVID-19 vaccines contain a “bioluminescent marker” named after Lucifer “so that you can be tracked.”

Twitter has since taken down Robinson’s post, replacing it with a note stating the tweet violated the social platform’s rules.

Robinson, who has a long history of making provocative and outrageous statements on social media, reacted to another Twitter user’s post that the “Moderna vaccine DOES contain Luciferase.” That user also attached a clip featuring a Wikipedia description of the enzyme, which notes that “the name is derived from the Latin word lucifer, meaning ‘lightbearer’” and the enzyme produces bioluminescence.

“Dear Christians: the vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,” Robinson blared in her Monday night tweet. “Read the last book of the New Testament to see how this ends.”

The Biblical reference cites the Book of Revelation, which describes a war in heaven between the Archangel Michael and “fallen angels” led by the devil, also known as Lucifer. The book also warns that “no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

Newmax, ginning up a religious civil war in America for fun and profit.

[goldenvalley]

Nov 2, 2021 17:33:13 GMT LFC said:

I thought their crazy was mostly (not entirely) basic lies with no evidence or outright rejection of reality. Of course with their demographic I should have realized that religious crazy would sell well too.

Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson on Monday night tweeted out the utterly batshit claim that COVID-19 vaccines contain a “bioluminescent marker” named after Lucifer “so that you can be tracked.”

Twitter has since taken down Robinson’s post, replacing it with a note stating the tweet violated the social platform’s rules.

Robinson, who has a long history of making provocative and outrageous statements on social media, reacted to another Twitter user’s post that the “Moderna vaccine DOES contain Luciferase.” That user also attached a clip featuring a Wikipedia description of the enzyme, which notes that “the name is derived from the Latin word lucifer, meaning ‘lightbearer’” and the enzyme produces bioluminescence.

“Dear Christians: the vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,” Robinson blared in her Monday night tweet. “Read the last book of the New Testament to see how this ends.”

The Biblical reference cites the Book of Revelation, which describes a war in heaven between the Archangel Michael and “fallen angels” led by the devil, also known as Lucifer. The book also warns that “no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

Newmax, ginning up a religious civil war in America for fun and profit.

As with the microchip rumor I must ask if these folks will stop carrying cell phones around with them.  

[LFC]

OAN is getting dumped by DirectTV, a major source of they’re revenue.
www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/oan-the-right-wing-conspiracy-channel-will-be-dropped-by-directv-later-this-year/ar-AASNyiA