I explained years ago how The conservative media entertainment complex is an ancillary to Russian ‘active measures’ propaganda; (Update) The Conservative Media Entertainment Complex Is An Ancillary To Russian ‘Active Measures’ Propaganda.
Now Russian state media is an ancillary to Fox News fascist propaganda. How Russian Media Uses Fox News to Make Its Case:
As Western leaders introduced sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, said seizing personal property from Russian oligarchs went too far.
“No American government had ever done anything like that before,” he said.
While the segment was aimed at Fox News’s conservative audience, it found another audience in Russia. The argument was parroted beat by beat by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, which wrote that “the average U.S. citizen is simply horrified by what is happening.”
The narratives advanced by the Kremlin and by parts of conservative American media have converged in recent months, reinforcing and feeding each other. Along the way, Russian media has increasingly seized on Fox News’s prime-time segments, its opinion pieces and even the network’s active online comments section — all of which often find fault with the Biden administration — to paint a critical portrait of the United States and depict America’s foreign policy as a threat to Russia’s interests. Mr. Carlson was a frequent reference for Russian media, but other Fox News personalities — and the occasional news update from the network — were also included.
Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who has made several false claims about the war — including that Russia never attacked Ukraine — singled out Fox News for praise last month.
Mentions of Fox News in Russian-language media grew 217 percent during the first quarter of this year compared with the final quarter of last year, as news coverage of Ukraine increased, according to an analysis by Zignal Labs, a media tracking company that reviewed social media posts, broadcast media and online websites. CNN, which has about three times the global viewership of Fox News, according to the tracking company Similarweb, was mentioned more often but grew less, by 71 percent.
What does Russia need with its RT propaganda network when it has Rupert Murdoch’s fascist media empire to do its propaganda for them? Russian state-run news outlet RT America is shutting down and laying off staff, report says. “The American branch of Russian state-run media outlet RT is shutting down and laying off most of its staff.”
Rupert Murdoch’s fascist media empire and Russian state media are seamlessly interwoven in a global fascist disinformation propaganda network seeking to undermine Western democracies. They are the enemies of democracy.
Update to The QAnon ‘Pedophile Panic’ Propaganda Is An Updated Version Of The Nazi ‘Blood Libel’ Propaganda.
Monday night, Rachel Maddow connected the dots between the false accusations of pedophilia which have become a common tactic by Vladimir Putin to eliminate politically problematic opponents – such “eliminationist rhetoric” being a hallmark of fascists – with the false accusations of pedophilia which have become a significant strand of U.S. Republican politics in the Trump era. Maddow followed up this report with an interview of Jane Mayer of the New Yorker about her new investigative report into the dark money Republican group behind the GQP/QAnon pedophilia smear machine.
Jane Mayer reports on the The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees (excerpts):
During the autos-da-fé that now pass for Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, it’s common for supporters of a nominee to dismiss attacks from the opposing party as mere partisanship. But, during the recent hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, Andrew C. McCarthy—a Republican former federal prosecutor and a prominent legal commentator at National Review—took the unusual step of denouncing an attack from his own side. When Republican senators, including Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn, began accusing Jackson of having been a dangerously lenient judge toward sex offenders, McCarthy wrote a column calling the charge “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” He didn’t like Jackson’s judicial philosophy, but “the implication that she has a soft spot for ‘sex offenders’ who ‘prey on children’ . . . is a smear.”
[T]he fierce campaign against [Judge Jackson] was concerning, in part because it was spearheaded by a new conservative dark-money group that was created in 2020: the American Accountability Foundation. An explicit purpose of the A.A.F.—a politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity that doesn’t disclose its backers—is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees. [Political sabotage which leaves the United States vulnerable.]
While the hearings were taking place, the A.A.F. publicly took credit for uncovering a note in the Harvard Law Review in which, they claimed, Jackson had “argued that America’s judicial system is too hard on sexual offenders.” The group also tweeted that she had a “soft-on-sex-offender” record during her eight years as a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. As the Washington Post and other outlets stated, Jackson’s sentencing history on such cases was well within the judicial mainstream, and in line with a half-dozen judges appointed by the Trump Administration. When Jackson defended 
herself on this point during the hearings, the A.A.F. [falsely claimed], on Twitter, that she was “lying.” The group’s allegation—reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy, which claims that liberal élites are abusing and trafficking children—rippled through conservative circles. Tucker Carlson repeated the accusation on his Fox News program while a chyron declared “jackson lenient in child sex cases.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist representative from Georgia, called Jackson “pro-pedophile.”
[T]he A.A.F.’s approach represents a new escalation in partisan warfare, and underscores the growing role that secret spending [dark money] has played in deepening the polarization in Washington.
Rather than attack a single candidate or nominee, the A.A.F. aims to thwart the entire Biden slate. The obstructionism, like the Republican blockade of Biden’s legislative agenda in Congress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web site, bidennoms.com, that displays the photographs of Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies. And the A.A.F. hasn’t just undermined nominees for Cabinet and Court seats—the kinds of prominent people whose records are usually well known and well defended. It’s also gone after relatively obscure, sub-Cabinet-level political appointees, whose public profiles can be easily distorted and who have little entrenched support. The A.A.F., which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focussed on blocking women and people of color. As of last month, more than a third of the twenty-nine candidates it had publicly attacked were people of color, and nearly sixty per cent were women.
* * *
Tom Jones [no, not that Tom Jones], the A.A.F.’s founder and executive director, is a longtime Beltway operative specializing in opposition research. Records show that over the years he has worked for several of the most conservative Republicans to have served in the Senate, including Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim DeMint, of South Carolina; and John Ensign, of Nevada, for whom Jones was briefly a legislative director. In 2016, Jones ran the opposition-research effort for Cruz’s failed Presidential campaign. When I asked Jones for an interview, through the A.A.F.’s online portal, he replied, “Ms. Meyers . . . Go pound sand.” Citing an article that I had written debunking attacks on Bloom Raskin from moneyed interests, including the A.A.F., he said, “You are a liberal hack masquerading as an investigative journalist—and not a very good one.” Jones subsequently posted this comment on his group’s Twitter account, along with my e-mail address and cell-phone number. [Doxxing so some unhinged right-winger might physically attack her.]
[In] interviews with right-wing media outlets, Jones hasn’t been shy about his intentions. Last April, he told Fox News, which called A.A.F.’s tactics “controversial,” that his group wants to “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden Administration,” making it “as difficult as possible” for the President and his allies on Capitol Hill “to implement their agenda.” [Political sabotage.] When asked why his group was bothering to attack sub-Cabinet-level appointees, he explained that people in “that second tier are really the folks who are going to do the day-to-day work implementing the agenda.”
* * *
The A.A.F. describes itself as a champion of transparency, but it declines to reveal the sources of its funding. Its official mailing address is a handsome historic building a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. But when I stopped by there recently, to ask for the group’s basic financial records—which all tax-exempt nonprofits are legally required to produce—a woman at the lobby’s front desk said there was no such group at that address. Instead, the building is occupied by a different nonprofit group: the Conservative Partnership Institute, which serves as a kind of Isle of Elba for Trump loyalists in exile. It has become the employer of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and of Trump’s former ad-hoc legal adviser Cleta Mitchell, both of whom are fighting subpoenas from the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cameron Seward, the general counsel of the Conservative Partnership Institute, appeared in the lobby and assured me that there was no relationship between his group and the A.A.F. Yet documents that the A.A.F. filed with the I.R.S. in 2021, to secure its tax-exempt status, describe the group as existing “in care of” C.P.I. Moreover, C.P.I.’s 2021 annual report notes that it launched the A.A.F. because “conservatives didn’t have a group performing research on Biden’s woke nominees—even though plenty of liberal groups were digging up (or manufacturing) dirt on our side.” The groups have several overlapping directors, including Jones, who sits on both boards. The A.A.F. told the I.R.S. that its mission is to conduct nonpartisan research, but it is curious that the largest contribution by far to its parent group, C.P.I., is a million-dollar “charitable contribution” from Save America—Trump’s political-action committee. Trump reportedly raised much of the pac’s money from supporters after his 2020 defeat, and his campaign has called the group an “election defense fund.”
Save America made its contribution to C.P.I. a few months after Meadows joined the group. Meadows’s son, Blake, an associate attorney at the Georgia law firm Foster, Foster, & Smith, appears to be involved with C.P.I., too: his name appears in a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of the A.A.F. against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Matthew Buckham, the A.A.F. co-founder, also has a Trump connection: he worked at the White House during his Administration, in the personnel office. (His father, Ed Buckham, is chief of staff to Marjorie Taylor Greene.)
[On] March 21st, Paul Teller, the executive director of an advocacy group that serves as former Vice-President Mike Pence’s political operation, gave a lecture to Christian pastors in which he said, of the A.A.F., “I’m just in love with these guys!” Teller enthused, “They are just taking it to every Biden-Harris nominee that comes across to Congress,” adding, “Some of the stuff that we’re fighting with the Supreme Court nominee Jackson came from our friends at the American Accountability Foundation.” He went on, “We’re partnering, we’re collaborating.” Teller’s group is widely seen as promoting a potential Pence campaign for President in 2024.
When the A.A.F. applied for its tax-exempt status, it portrayed itself, under penalty of perjury, as a nonpartisan charity that would neither participate in political campaigns nor try to influence legislation. As a tax-exempt nonprofit dark-money organization, Jones’s group isn’t required to publicly disclose its donors, so it’s impossible to know all the sources of its funding. Clearly, though, it has big ambitions. In its I.R.S. filing, the A.A.F. submitted revenue projections that predict its budget as six hundred thousand dollars in 2021, a million dollars in 2022, and one and a half million dollars in 2023.
Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and Trump critic at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, believes that the A.A.F. is doing “frightening, sleazy stuff” with serious implications. Not only is the group creating needless vacancies in important Administration positions; it is intimidating well-qualified people from wanting to undergo the nomination process. “It’s tough enough to get top-flight people in government,” Ornstein said. “But, if you also have to go through a well-funded, well-oiled slime machine, it’s really an attack on government.”
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