Tag: rachel maddow

Is Rachel Maddow Trying to Get Trump Killed? It Sure Looks That Way

On Monday of this week, the only night that Rachel Maddow hosts her MSNBC show, she looked depressed and dejected as she delivered her opening monologue.

In her screed, Maddow spent the better part of ten-plus minutes describing the Trump presidency as a dictatorship and saying that the country “has an authoritarian leader.”

What is Maddow doing here? There have already been two attempts on Trump’s life. Is Maddow pushing for a third? It sure looks that way.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

RACHEL MADDOW: Life has not stopped and none of our personal lives have stopped. But also at the same time, life in the United States is profoundly changing. It’s profoundly different than it was even six months ago, because we do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge. We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country. And it sounds melodramatic to say it, I know, but just go with that for a minute, right?

Think– think in melodramatic terms. Think in cinematic terms. Imagine the cartoon level caricature of what you think a dictatorship looks like. I mean, it’s secret police, right? A massive anonymous unbadged, literally masked, totally unaccountable internal police force that apparently has infinite funding but no identifiable leadership. And they act in ways designed to instill maximum fear and use maximum force.

I mean, when you imagine an authoritarian country, right, what you imagine is masked secret police breaking people’s car windows and snatching people off the streets and out of church parking lots and courtroom hallways and taking them away with no charges, no notice, no paperwork, no explanation, not letting them see lawyers, and then moving them secretly to what are effectively black site prisons where they won’t tell you who’s there and where no one is allowed in to see what’s going on. Right?

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Watch Rachel Maddow LIE to Her Audience About the Florida Sheriff Who Warned Would-Be Rioters Ahead of ‘No Kings’ Protests

Ahead of the ‘No Kings’ protests by the left last weekend, a sheriff in Brevard County in Florida issued a stern warning to potential rioters that if they threw explosives at a law enforcement officer or pointed a gun at one of them, that they would be killed.

It was a harsh, but very fair and direct warning, and it worked. There were no riots in Florida during the protests.

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow flat-out LIED to her audience this week, while talking about the sheriff. She said that he would kill people for protesting and then acted like she and the left were rubbing it in his face by protesting anyway.

It was a complete misrepresentation of the sheriff’s warning and Rachel knows this.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

RACHEL MADDOW: You might have seen headlines last week about the Brevard County, Florida, sheriff last week who called a press conference to threaten that he would sic dogs on people and his officers would not just put people in jail, they would put people in the hospital.

He literally got up at a press conference and said, “We will kill you”, talking about violence he expected at any anti-Trump protests in Brevard county, Florida. After that bizarre show of intimidation from that sheriff in Brevard County, Florida, turns out people in Brevard County, Florida were not at all intimidated by what he said.

As you can see from local headlines like this one, quote: “‘ No Kings’ anti-Trump protests draw thousands”, in Brevard County and Cocoa and Palm Bay. I mean, the sheriff gets out there and says, we will kill you and Brevard County, Florida is like, “You know what? We’ve got a right to protest. We have a right to make protest signs of any kind, including ones that show Donald Trump in a big wig made up like Marie Antoinette, saying, let them eat cake and you are not going to stop us from doing it. We are Americans, we have the right to do this, we will protest.”

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MSNBC anchors Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid triggered by Trump inauguration: ‘How is this happening in America?’

Left-wing cable news channel MSNBC is back to foaming at the mouth about Donald Trump.

Anchors Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid went off the deep end while covering Inauguration Day, both aghast at the prospect of a democratically elected president making good on his policy promises that decisively swept him into office.

“How is this happening in America?” Maddow asked incredulously at the sight of Department of Homeland Security nominee Kristi Noem seated beside Apple CEO Tim Cook at the inauguration ceremony, Mediaite reported.

“How is this happening? Why are people with tons of money up on the dais with cabinet nominees and family members?” she asked, apparently forgetting that billionaires supported former Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.

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MSNBC’s Maddow Calls On Military, Media & Millions Of Americans To Defy Trump Administration

Fearmongering to MSNBC viewers following Donald Trump’s presidential election landslide win, far-left talking head Rachel Maddow urged citizens, U.S. military leaders and media personalities to resist the incoming administration so that America doesn’t become “authoritarian.”

Speaking to Democrats feeling dismayed at the outcome of this week’s election, Maddow said, “History doesn’t end. Time doesn’t stop. Now we have the benefit of knowing how this has gone in every other country that has been through a democracy to authoritarian transition. And sadly, there are a lot of them. We have the benefit of seeing what’s happened in those other countries, though, and what we know is that the more ground the authoritarian takes, the harder it is to ever get that ground back.”

“And so the first order of business is to stop them from taking any uncontested ground right from the outset. When it comes to what our system of government is and what our democracy is, right, we know from other countries experiences that quickly– I mean now in the next few weeks if not the next few days –they are going to start pushing to see how far the country is going to let them go, without pushback, without protest.”

Next, the mainstream media anchor tried to mobilize Harris supporters, saying, “They’re counting on all those tens of millions of Americans to be despondent, to feel powerless, to check out, which, of course, would mean letting them do what they want, letting them run the table. What they really don’t want is for the half the country that voted against them– the half the country that wants to keep our democracy –what they really don’t want is for those tens of millions of Americans to wake up tomorrow feeling scrappy as hell.”

“Now we can work full time on being freaking pirates. On being a thorn in the side to anyone who now intends to try to turn this country into some pin pot tyranny. What they want, least of all, is to realize that half the country went to bed sad tonight, but then woke up tomorrow fired up with a new sense of purpose, knowing that, apparently, this is what we are on this earth to do with American citizens in this generation,” she added.

Maddow claimed protest “has to be done now” and “has to happen in sort of every aspect, every corner of our society.”

“The U.S. military needs to give the American people binding assurances that they will not deploy U.S. military force against the civilian population in this country. They can give those assurances, and now they should,” she stated.

“The free press needs to give the people of this country assurances that they will not become state TV,” the Democrat newswoman continued.

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Rachel Maddow and Her Co-Stars Made ‘Verifiably False’ Statements About a Doctor They Called the ‘Uterus Collector.’ Now His $30 Million Lawsuit Is Headed For Trial.

NBCUniversal is headed for trial after a judge ruled in favor of a Georgia doctor who MSNBC’s biggest stars accused of performing “mass hysterectomies” on women at a Trump-era immigration facility in Georgia. The judge ruled that Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, and Chris Hayes made “verifiably false” statements about the doctor, who is suing NBC for $30 million.

The discovery process in the lawsuit, which has received little attention, has drawn back the curtain on the inner workings of MSNBC, revealing how the liberal cable network works hand in hand with NBC News, which seeks to portray itself as nonpartisan. NBCUniversal’s standards department reviewed and approved the reporting on the Georgia doctor, before it was published on NBCNews.com and then broadcast on MSNBC programs. The NBC News correspondents, Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley, worked closely with a standards executive during their reporting. Soboroff is also an MSNBC correspondent.

Furthermore, Maddow—who was deposed for the lawsuit—and Hayes were personally involved in the off-camera vetting and editorial conversations around the segment to an extent that can be unusual for on-camera hosts.

Maddow is reportedly paid about $30 million a year by NBCUniversal to host her show one evening a week and work on longer-range projects. 

In her ruling last month, the judge, Lisa Godbey Wood of the Southern District of Georgia,  found that Maddow, Hayes, and Wallace made 39 “verifiably false” allegations about Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist who treated detainees at a Georgia Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. 

A nurse at the facility had made a whistleblower complaint alleging that Amin was performing “mass hysterectomies,” many of which were medically unnecessary, and that he was known as “the uterus collector.” The nurse’s claims, which she admitted were based on hearsay, were later found to be false.

“In the end, we are left with this: NBC investigated the whistleblower letter’s accusations; that investigation did not corroborate the accusations and even undermined some; NBC republished the letter’s accusations anyway,” Wood wrote in a scathing 108-page ruling on June 26. She ordered a jury trial to determine if MSNBC engaged in “actual malice,” the standard to determine defamation. 

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MSNBC Cuts Off Trump Victory Speech; Claims It’s “Irresponsible” To Broadcast

MSNBC’s salty anchor Rachel Maddow once again cut away from Donald Trump giving a victory speech after winning 15 of the Super Tuesday states, reasoning that it is “irresponsible to allow” Trump to “knowingly lie.”

As Trump was speaking, Maddow interjected “Yeeeaaaah okay,” while one of the other clowns laughed in the background.

The anchor then stated, “I will say it is a decision that we revisit constantly in terms of the balance between allowing somebody to knowingly lie on your air about things they have lied about before and you can predict they are going to lie about, so therefore, it is irresponsible to allow them to do that.”

Maddow continued, “It is a balance between knowing that that is irresponsible to broadcast and also knowing that as the de facto soon to be de facto nominee of the Republican party, this is not only the man who is likely to be the Republican candidate for president, but this is the way he is running.”

MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle chimed in “Well here is how to balance it. We fact check the hell out of him.”

“Yes, and we do that after the fact,” Maddow responded, adding “That is the best remedy that we’ve got. It does not fix the fact we broadcast it.”

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Rachel Maddow’s Prequel Is a Deceptively Framed History of the Radical Right

“American democracy itself was under attack from enemies within and without,” Rachel Maddow writes in Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. If you’re not sure whether she is speaking of the past or the present, that’s because she wants to conflate the two.

Prequel is a deeply flawed and deceptively framed history of right-wing radicalism in the United States on the eve of American entry into World War II. Maddow’s treatment of this well-worn topic draws principally from primary sources generated from the protagonists of her story, a collection of private spies and anti-fascist activists, as well as contemporary press reporting, sundry government documents, and a narrow base of secondary sources, one that noticeably omits prominent works in the field. Deficiencies in her sources, methods, and analyses make for a book that recapitulates past passions at the expense of sober reflection and reality.

Maddow opens with her strongest case study, covering the German-born Nazi agent George Sylvester Viereck, who tried to push Americans toward neutrality by using personal connections with Congress to spread noninterventionist literature. She then switches focus to her weakest case study, that of populist Democratic governor and senator Huey “Kingfish” Long and his influence on the Nazi sympathizers Philip Johnson and Gerald L.K. Smith. Maddow does not clarify why Long, who died in 1935, is discussed here. But her tone and source selection imply that she agrees with the Kingfish’s contemporary critics that his populism and demagoguery made him a proto-fascist and a political gateway drug for more radical figures, like Johnson and Smith.

Maddow then abruptly changes focus to the dark history of American segregation and its influence on Nazi racial science, following the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger’s travels through the American South. Then she circles back to more-prominent characters, such as the American fascist Lawrence Dennis, the antisemitic preacher Charles Coughlin, and the abstruse spiritualist (and leader of the fascist Silver Shirts) William Dudley Pelley, among others.

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A Court Ruled Rachel Maddow’s Viewers Know She Offers Exaggeration and Opinion, Not Facts

MSNBC’s top-rated host Rachel Maddow devoted a segment in 2019 to accusing the right-wing cable outlet One America News (OAN) of being a paid propaganda outlet for the Kremlin. Discussing a Daily Beast article which noted that one OAN reporter was a “Russian national” who was simultaneously writing copy for the Russian-owned outlet Sputnik on a freelance contract, Maddow escalated the allegation greatly into a broad claim about OAN’s real identity and purpose: “in this case,” she announced, “the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda.”

In response, OAN sued Maddow, MSNBC, and its parent corporation Comcast, Inc. for defamation, alleging that it was demonstrably false that the network, in Maddow’s words, “literally is paid Russian propaganda.” In an oddly overlooked ruling, an Obama-appointed federal judge, Cynthia Bashant, dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that even Maddow’s own audience understands that her show consists of exaggeration, hyperbole, and pure opinion, and therefore would not assume that such outlandish accusations are factually true even when she uses the language of certainty and truth when presenting them (“literally is paid Russian propaganda”).

In concluding that Maddow’s statement would be understood even by her own viewers as non-factual, the judge emphasized that what Maddow does in general is not present news but rather hyperbole and exploitation of actual news to serve her liberal activism:

On one hand, a viewer who watches news channels tunes in for facts and the goings-on of the world. MSNBC indeed produces news, but this point must be juxtaposed with the fact that Maddow made the allegedly defamatory statement on her own talk show news segment where she is invited and encouraged to share her opinions with her viewers. Maddow does not keep her political views a secret, and therefore, audiences could expect her to use subjective language that comports with her political opinions.

Thus, Maddow’s show is different than a typical news segment where anchors inform viewers about the daily news. The point of Maddow’s show is for her to provide the news but also to offer her opinions as to that news. Therefore, the Court finds that the medium of the alleged defamatory statement makes it more likely that a reasonable viewer would not conclude that the contested statement implies an assertion of objective fact.

The judge’s observations about the specific segment at issue — in which Maddow accused a competitor of being “literally paid Russian propaganda” — was even more damning. Maddow’s own viewers, ruled the court, not only expect but desire that she will not provide the news in factual form but will exaggerate and even distort reality in order to shape her opinion-driven analysis (emphasis added):

Viewers expect her to do so, as it is indeed her show, and viewers watch the segment with the understanding that it will contain Maddow’s “personal and subjective views” about the news. See id. Thus, the Court finds that as a part of the totality of the circumstances, the broad context weighs in favor of a finding that the alleged defamatory statement is Maddow’s opinion and exaggeration of the Daily Beast article, and that reasonable viewers would not take the statement as factual. . . .

Here, Maddow had inserted her own colorful commentary into and throughout the segment, laughing, expressing her dismay (i.e., saying “I mean, what?”) and calling the segment a “sparkly story” and one we must “take in stride.” For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context. The context of Maddow’s statement shows reasonable viewers would consider the contested statement to be her opinion. A reasonable viewer would not actually think OAN is paid Russian propaganda, instead, he or she would follow the facts of the Daily Beast article; that OAN and Sputnik share a reporter and both pay this reporter to write articles. Anything beyond this is Maddow’s opinion or her exaggeration of the facts.

In sum, ruled the court, Rachel Maddow is among those “speakers whose statements cannot reasonably be interpreted as allegations of fact.” Despite Maddow’s use of the word “literally” to accuse OAN of being a “paid Russian propaganda” outlet, the court dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that, given Maddow’s conduct and her audience’s awareness of who she is and what she does, “the Court finds that the contested statement is an opinion that cannot serve as the basis for a defamation claim.”

What makes this particularly notable and ironic is that a similar argument was made a year later by lawyers for Fox News when defending a segment that appeared on the program of its highest-rated program, Tucker Carlson Tonight. That was part of a lawsuit brought by the former model Karen McDougal, who claimed Carlson slandered her by saying she “extorted” former President Trump by demanding payments in exchange for her silence about an extramarital affair she claimed to have with him.

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Rachel Maddow Says She Will Have to “Rewire” Her Brain to Not View Maskless as a “Threat”

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reacted to the CDC’s announcement on face coverings by saying she would have to “rewire” her brain in order to not perceive those who don’t wear masks as a “threat.”

The CDC said yesterday that those who had been vaccinated could remove their masks in indoor settings (aside from a bunch of exemptions, including airports, public transport, hospitals and care homes).

This prompted Maddow’s brain to short circuit as she expressed the difficulty she would have in dispensing with the idea of treating those who don’t wear masks as dangerous lepers.

“I’m going to have to rewire my self so that when I see somebody out in the world who’s not wearing a mask, I don’t instantly think ‘you are a threat’ or you are selfish or you are a COVID denier and you definitely haven’t been vaccinated,” said Maddow.

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