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A Notable Climbdown It’s been a very bad week for two of the most prominent purveyors of Donald Trump’s webs of lies about the 2020 presidential election. Last Friday, Salem Media Group announced that it had removed the fabulist film 2,000 Mules from its platform and said it would no longer distribute either the movie or an accompanying book by the right-wing activist and Trump-pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza. It also issued an apology to Mark Andrews, a Georgia man whom the film had falsely depicted participating in a conspiracy to rig the 2020 election by using so-called mules to stuff ballot drop boxes. After being cleared of any wrongdoing by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Andrews filed a defamation lawsuit in 2022 against D’Souza, Salem, and two individuals associated with a group whose analysis heavily influenced the film.
While perhaps not as dramatic as Fox News’s $787 million settlement last year with Dominion Voting Systems for lying about the election, Salem’s climbdown is worth paying attention to. Salem is one of the most influential right-wing media companies in the United States, and in many ways, 2,000 Mules was the movie version of Trump’s election lies. The film was utterly bogus—a mixture of conjecture and falsehoods that were easily discredited by fact-checkers. But it played a major role in shaping Republican skepticism about the election.
Trump himself embraced 2,000 Mules, calling it “the greatest and most impactful documentary of our time.” When the movie debuted, Trump hosted a screening at Mar-a-Lago featuring such MAGA stars as Rudy Giuliani, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell. The film became a frequent talking point for Trump allies who alleged that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. And it found some level of mainstream appeal: Salem announced that more than 1 million people watched the movie in the first two weeks after it was released in May 2022, grossing more than $10 million. Now the producer’s public apology has made clear that the film was based on misleading data and false claims.
The second recent development involved The Epoch Times, a media outlet founded in 2000 by an Atlanta-based practitioner of the Chinese Falun Gong movement. You can be forgiven if you are only dimly aware of the publication, which is distributed free to households around the world (including mine). But like Salem Media, it plays an important role in the media ecosystem that boosts Trump and spreads conspiracy theories, including disinformation about the 2020 election.
In 2019, NBC reported that The Epoch Times had spent more money on pro-Trump Facebook advertisements than any group other than the Trump campaign itself. The publication also became a vector of disinformation, the NBC investigation found; its news sites and YouTube channels were used to popularize conspiracy theories including QAnon and anti-vaccination propaganda.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Simon van Zuylen-Wood reported in The Atlantic in 2021, The Epoch Times “used every opportunity to call Biden’s victory into doubt” and “eagerly publicized” Trump’s remarks preceding the January 6 insurrection. And all that time, the paper continued to grow. By 2023, The Epoch Times claimed that it had the fourth-largest subscriber base of any newspaper in the country—and it had apparently boosted its revenue by 685 percent from 2019 to 2021.
It sounded too good to be true, maybe because it was. Earlier this week, Weidong “Bill” Guan, the chief financial officer of the company, was arrested and charged with involvement in a multiyear, $67 million money-laundering scheme. Federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York charged that a team at The Epoch Times called “Make Money Online” used cryptocurrency to “knowingly purchase tens of millions of dollars in crime proceeds.” That allegedly included taking fraudulently obtained unemployment-insurance benefits and loading the money onto prepaid debit cards. Guan has pleaded not guilty, but has been suspended by The Epoch Times, which says that it is cooperating with the investigation.
The setbacks for Salem and The Epoch Times are just the latest glitches in the alternative-reality universe. Fox News still faces a lawsuit from Smartmatic over the network’s election lies; Rudy Giuliani was hit last year with a massive judgment for his lies about the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, and his radio show was canceled by WABC; the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre are asking a bankruptcy court to liquidate the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones’s media platform, Free Speech Systems, after winning $1.5 billion in damages for defamation; and Trump himself is facing an $83 million judgment for defaming E. Jean Carroll—whom he was found liable for sexually assaulting.
Far-right (and far-left) digital-media outlets are also seeing a massive decline in readership compared with 2020, as Paul Farhi noted in The Atlantic in April. But even if some of the largest MAGA-world platforms collapse, Farhi wrote, “there are now alternatives to the alternatives.” Since 2016, “the marketplace has expanded and fragmented … splintering the audience seeking conservative or even extremist perspectives among podcasts, YouTube videos, Substack newsletters, and boutique platforms.” Misinformation—and its wide, eager audience—is not going anywhere. It remains up to Americans to distinguish between truth and lies, and to decide whether to hold Trump to account for his own lies in November.
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More proof it has been warmer earlier and humans still exist. The bullshit about climate change being bad is just bullshit. Climate always changes, because of the sun, and humans will adapt.
A new West Greenland temperature reconstruction ( Strunk et al., 2024) finds the region was 1.5 to 2°C warmer than today from 560 to 1100 CE, encompassing the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). The LOI (vegetation abundance) record reflects a much wetter, greener landscape during the MWP.
climate panic is good business for media and insurance companies, but it is not based on fact or real data. It’s more a scam than science. The climate catastrophe is nothing more than a lucrative business model.
The rise in property damage often gets blamed on climate change, especially by click-baiting media and greedy insurance companies.
But Bojanowski says it’s misleading to blame climate change, noting: “Global economy has grown by more than 400 percent since 1990, and so there’s a correspondingly greater amount of property. Moreover, the global population has risen by 3 billion people since the 1980s, thus a weather event hits more people and residential areas than before and so more damage is caused.”
Other factors driving up the amount of damage is inflation. Bojanowski reports: “Studies have been showing for a long time that this not much increase in damage is left when increased property values and inflation get deducted from the weather damages.”
The Die Welt article also quotes Prof. Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, who said: “There’s no indication that economic damage is increasing due to weather and climate catastrophes.”
When all factors get correctly taken into account, there in fact appears to even be a decrease in economic damage.
Bojanowski’s article has been online for over a year, yet no one has come out to rebut this good news.
It turns out that climate panic is good business for media and insurance companies, but it is not based on fact or real data. It’s more a scam than science. The climate catastrophe is nothing more than a lucrative business model.
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CPC collaborator, Liberal MP Parm Bains, sits on six inter-parliamentary associations with some of Canada’s most important allies, the United States, Japan, European Union and the United Kingdom.
Bains also serves on two influential Parliamentary committees, including the Commons Ethics Committee, which has been examining allegations of China’s interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
Was this all approved during a dinner at the Trudeau Foundation between PM Trudeau and high level CPC party members? Does the influence of the CPC go all the way to the PMO?
Beijing supported Liberal candidate that echoed disinformation against Conservatives: Document Analysis thebureau.news
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Trudeau is PANICKING: “We have seen around the world a rise of populist right-wing forces in just about every democracy that we've seen. And it is of concern to see political parties choosing to instrumentalize anger, fear, division, anxiety.”
A bombshell report by Canadian lawmakers has unnerved Parliament Hill, alleging that unnamed politicians have been covertly working with foreign governments.
The all-party NSICOP said Monday that it has reviewed intelligence that suggests “semi-witting or witting” parliamentarians have worked with foreign missions to mobilize voters during a political campaign; have taken cash “knowingly or through willful blindness” from foreign missions or their proxies; and have shared privileged information with foreign diplomatic officials.
Its report said China remains the largest foreign interference threat to Canada with India the second.
The intelligence included a claim that unnamed parliamentarians are taking direction from unnamed diplomats to “improperly influence” their colleagues or parliamentary business to the benefit of a foreign state.
Last fall, Conservative MP Michael Chong appeared before the congressional-executive commission on China to testify about being targeted by Beijing because of his defense of Uyghur issues.
Chong discovered through media reports that a Chinese diplomat had been assigned to collect information on him and his family. Canada’s spy agency has warned other Canadian parliamentarians, including NDP MP Jenny Kwan, that they were also being surveilled by China.
Tom
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No warming in Antarctic east. Global warming is bullshit and irrelevant for most humans. Global warming is only a political issue to get one elected on bullshit.
A collection of 85-year-old photographs reveal “growth and stability” of the East Antarctic ice sheet.
Per a new study, more than 2200 historical aerial photos of a 2000 km stretch of ice in East Antarctica have been recently uncovered. The rare images reveal what the glaciers in this region looked like in 1937.
Interestingly, the photos show all these East Antarctic glaciers have remained stable, thickened, gained mass, and/or increased in elevation over the last 85 years, with much of the growth and mass gains occurring since 1985.
There has been no warming in this region since the 1950s. This suggests that “global warming” plays a minimal role in ice thickness changes.
“The terrestrial regions of the EAIS respond mainly to atmospheric forcing. Overall, there has been no significant trends in annual or seasonal mean air temperature in East Antarctica since the 1950s, and mean austral summer air temperature (December to February) from stations in all regions rarely exceeds 0 °C (Fig. 4C). This suggests that surface melting have played a minimal role in the documented ice thickness changes overtime.”
