BUZZKILL! Krugman Claimed 'Wave of Inflation' Seems to 'Have Broken’ Day Before Hot BLS Report

The New York Times economics parody writer Paul Krugman — because that’s all he’s been reduced to now — can’t seem to avoid sleepwalking his way into major, unforced errors. In another Apr. 9 column praising President Joe Biden’s alleged “Goldilocks” economy, Krugman was adamant that “while there was a wave of inflation, it seems to have broken.” Yes, Krugman wrote this just a day before the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its Apr. 10 report showing that consumer prices spiked hotter than expected at 3.5 percent year-over-year and 0.4 percent month-over-month. CNBC analyzed that core consumer prices (excluding food and energy) “also accelerated 0.4% on a monthly basis while rising 3.8% from a year ago, compared with respective estimates for 0.3% and 3.7%.” French newspaper Le Monde concluded, “The numbers are bad and getting worse.” In other words, Krugman: You done messed up A-Aron.      Krugman’s column, in retrospect, gets even more painful as one reads on: Basically, America rapidly restored full employment while experiencing a one-time jump in the level of prices without a sustained rise in inflation, the rate at which prices are rising. Not bad, especially considering all the dire predictions made along the way.” [emphasis added]. Ouch.  The other hole in Krugman’s argument here is that he doesn’t mention the workers missing from the labor force. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated that number to be around 1.7 million on Feb. 13, 2024, compared to February 2020. The chamber stated, “If every unemployed person in the country found a job, we would still have nearly 2.4 million open jobs. Other estimates put the number of jobs missing from the labor market compared to its pre-pandemic trend at 4.8 million. Krugman’s new shtick for spinning the U.S. economic situation is suggesting that Americans should forget the CPI index by the BLS altogether. The so-called breaking of the “wave of inflation,” as Krugman put it, is “especially clear if you measure inflation the way other countries do.” By his distorted metrics, Krugman claimed irresponsibly that “inflation has already been cut to roughly 2 percent, the [Federal Reserve’s] inflation target.” Ah, so all Americans have to do is use other countries’ metrics to hoodwink themselves into believing that the inflation situation is better than it is, right? Brilliant!  It’s too bad for Krugman the liberal media writ large are now projecting the new inflation numbers are signaling that the Fed isn’t anywhere near its target to be comfortably cutting interest rates anytime soon. Even liberal CNN anchor Kate Bolduan admitted that the hot BLS numbers meant “[i]nflation is headed in the wrong direction right now.” Subsequently, the Atlanta Federal Reserve revised down its nowcast model for first quarter GDP growth to 2.4 percent from its April 5, 2.5 percent estimate. Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni summarized what the series of unfortunate events for Krugman’s narrative meant for the future in an X post: “BLS releases hot CPI and now ATL Fed revises down GDP nowcast...Inflation: faster[.] Growth: slower [.] Say it w/ me: stagflation.”  BLS releases hot CPI and now ATL Fed revises down GDP nowcast... Inflation: faster Growth: slower Say it w/ me: stagflation pic.twitter.com/UoptaylTDe — E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) April 10, 2024 But that’s not all. Queens College, Cambridge President Mohamed A. El-Erian even conceded that the hot inflation report signaled “continued price pressure on consumers, which hits the poor hardest, and a sharp market reaction.” Liberal Harvard Professor of Practice Jason Furman also admitted, “Over the last twelve months core CPI has risen 3.5%. That is faster than any twelve month period from February 1993 to 2020.”   Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 800-698-4637 and demand it distance itself from Krugman’s awful takes on Bidenomics.

HA! NewsGuard FINALLY Downgrades NYT After MRC Repeatedly Called It Out

NewsGuard discovered that The New York Times was never worth its flawless 100/100 score, but apparently only after MRC Free Speech America repeatedly called it out.  NewsGuard finally downgraded The Times’ perfect score Feb.1 to a lukewarm 87.5/100. NewsGuard’s beef with the legacy leftist publication was that it “no longer meets NewsGuard standards for handling the difference between news and opinion responsibly.” Wow, what a revelation! Has the dystopian website traffic cop been living under a rock?  The head-turning move by the media ratings firm came after MRC released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three consecutive years consistently showing NewsGuard heavily favoring left-leaning publications like The Times over right-leaning media. MRC has repeatedly called NewsGuard out for attempting to legitimize The Times as an effectively flawless, balanced outlet, despite mountains of evidence showing otherwise. MRC even released a mini-documentary in February 2023 on the firm’s bias. “The New York Times has been the same left-wing rag for decades,” said MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider in a statement. But suddenly, said Schneider, after MRC research led Congress to get serious about “preventing the Department of Defense from funding the NewsGuard censorship regime, the folks at NewsGuard finally found some religion and are starting to better reflect what The Times has always been: An extreme, left-wing biased outlet.” MRC specifically called out NewsGuard on October 20, 2023 for continuing to dole out perfect 100s to The Times and other media entities for wantonly taking the word of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry to falsely blame an Israeli airstrike for the infamous al-Ahli hospital bombing, which sparked international furor and mass protests. NewsGuard, in its update of The Times Nutrition Label under the “Credibility” section, finally mentioned the scandal. NewsGuard conceded that “American and other international officials, as well as subsequent forensic analyses by media organizations, concluded that evidence suggested the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions.” But even NewsGuard’s critical update, published over three months after MRC’s criticism, sugarcoated the full severity of the scandal. Not only did The Times run a glaringly false headline — “Israeli Airstrike Hits Gaza Hospital, Killing 500, Palestinian Health Ministry Says” — the outlet used a photo of the wreckage of a completely different structure, not al-Ahli hospital. The Dispatch’s Jeryl Bier excoriated the leftist newspaper for the blatant deception: “[T]he accompanying photo was not even of the hospital, but rather of a building in a city some 15 miles to the south.” Bier also concluded that The Times’s framing, bolstered by its misleading imagery, would “likely” lead Times readers to believe that the depicted carnage was of the “hospital in question.” The original, false story was plastered on the front page of the newspaper’s website with the misleading photo prominently displayed. None of this context was mentioned in NewsGuard’s update. But NewsGuard, in its recent update, did manage to depart from its leftist bent enough to highlight “conservative” impressions of The Times’ inherent leftist bias, despite the publication’s downplaying to the contrary. Exhibit “A” for NewsGuard was none other than The Times magazine’s racially charged and discredited 1619 Project spearheaded by insufferable activist Nikole Hannah-Jones.  Yes, you read that right. NewsGuard actually used one of the newspaper’s most notorious, anti-American projects as an example of how the paper doesn’t properly distinguish between news and opinion:   Nonetheless, an impression of partisanship lingers, especially among conservatives. There may be no better example than when the magazine’s ‘1619 Project,’ which was not labeled as opinion, sought, as it told readers, ‘to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.’ The view was derided by prominent historians, including Gordon Wood, professor emeritus at Brown University, and James McPherson, professor emeritus at Princeton University, initially in interviews with the World Socialist Web Site and, later, in a request for corrections sent to the magazine and joined by three other academics. Talk about a cold day in hell. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.    

MEMECLIPSE: TIME Mag Ludicrously Calls Trump Meme Video ‘Bizarre Campaign Ad’

Have you ever heard of the old expression, “The left can’t meme?” Well, apparently TIME magazine is so broken with Trump Derangement Syndrome it can’t even figure out what a meme is.  TIME railed against former President Donald Trump for posting on Truth Social what the leftist magazine described as a “new and bizarre campaign ad” of his “head tak[ing] the place of the moon and block[ing] out the sun in a nod to Monday’s solar eclipse.” Making it seem like the video was an actual campaign ad, the magazine continued: “It shows an image of the glowing sun as astonished crowds gather to watch the solar eclipse with protective eyewear on.” Here’s the problem: The so-called “campaign ad” was just a meme, and the magazine clearly didn’t get it and spent nearly 400 words of column space writing it up. The joke video even had a watermark by the pro-Trump meme account il Donaldo Trumpo, but even that flew over the magazine editors’ heads. This is how il Donaldo Trumpo describes his work on his Patreon website, making TIME look even more ridiculous in hindsight: Welcome to a place full of Love, Decency and Goodnesso. If you´re tired of all the negativity en social media, this is a place to relax and have a laugh, share your thoughts, BE YOURSELFO!!! Every single one of mis Patriotos en our Patreon Familia is soooo awesome you will know you´re finally Home.  il Presidento will keep doing everything and then some to make your day a little brighter with some laughs and a whole lotta Love!!! But TIME still attempted to loop “Sunday’s video campaign” as “the latest in a string of unusual statements the former President has made recently.” The cringe is strong with this one. H/t @PapiTrumpo for completely breaking the @TIME editors' brains. https://t.co/D9tSx7n7vO pic.twitter.com/Cv4UHonSWq — Joseph Vazquez (@JV3MRC) April 8, 2024 The magazine doubled down on letting everyone know the joke went clearly over its head when it decided to post its fake news on X with the following caption: “Trump posts bizarre solar eclipse campaign ad, with his head blocking out the sun.” Podcast host Benny Johnson trolled the magazine for not catching how badly it played itself: “🚨BREAKING: @Time does not know what a meme is.”  Talk about taking a massive “L.” Sheesh. Conservatives are under attack. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency and an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.  

LISTEN: Mark Levin Rips CNN ‘Hack’ Dana Bash for Whitewashing Biden's Censorship Regime

Syndicated radio host Mark Levin tore into prominent CNN Biden flack Dana Bash for trying to gaslight viewers on the dangers of the White House censorship regime. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told CNN anchor Erin Burnett April 1 — to her dismay — that it was in fact President Joe Biden’s censorship regime, not former President Donald Trump, that presented the bigger “threat” to America. Kennedy pointed out the Biden administration’s history of jawboning Big Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook to go after the president’s political opponents. Bash, clearly triggered, pathetically tried to “fact-check” Kennedy the next day on CNN’s Inside Politics. Her argument pretty much amounted to excusing Biden because he supposedly wasn’t personally involved in directing his agencies to pressure social media companies and the censorship collusion was only engineered towards fighting so-called "false information" about COVID-19. Yes, you read that right. Levin wasn’t having it during the April 2 edition of his radio show: “[Bash is] a hack mouthpiece who burps up the usual left-wing, Democrat Party talking points.”  Nothing to see here, claimed Bash during her segment repudiating Kennedy: “Joe Biden wasn’t setting out to censor Kennedy’s speech or his political critics.” Rather, Bash brazenly whitewashed, “His administration was encouraging social media sites to monitor and take down [censor] false information about the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s no evidence that Biden himself was involved,” as if agencies censoring on Biden’s behalf by proxy is somehow any better and absolves the president’s culpability. Levin took Bash to school. “What kind of a stupid comment is that,” he rebuked. “Did you [Bash] sit in on all the meetings? Is Biden going to say, ‘Yeah I told them to do that’? What kind of a stupid comment is that?”  Listen to Mark Levin ripping apart CNN's gaslighting on Biden's censorship regime below! Levin flipped Bash’s argument on its head. “If Biden didn’t want [the government censorship] to happen — and he has newspapers and briefers and press people all around him — he could have stopped it. But he didn’t,” the radio host said. Despite Bash’s assertions to the contrary, Biden did go after Kennedy’s speech, as Levin pointed out. “What [Bash] is not saying is that when you censor the entire discussion [on COVID-19] you certainly are censoring Robert Kennedy Jr. and others,” he said. But there’s more. Bash must have memory-holed the spectacle of former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki going on camera during a 2021 press briefing to regurgitate the findings from a report by the dystopian fanatics at the leftist Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which explicitly named Kennedy as one of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” on COVID-19. “There’s about twelve people who were producing 65 percent of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," said Psaki parroting CCDH’s targeting of Kennedy and others. "There's about 12 people who are producing 65% of vaccine misinformation on social media platforms." After our research was used by the @WhiteHouse @PressSec, we joined @CBS @CBSThisMorning with @GayleKing to explain how social media is a misinformation super spreader 👇 pic.twitter.com/GcKLtLy9y7 — Center for Countering Digital Hate (@CCDHate) July 16, 2021 Bash’s own colleague, Senior Media Reporter Oliver Darcy, released a story in 2021 with a headline that completely upended her gaslighting: “Facebook takes action against ‘disinformation dozen’ after White House pressure.” Oops. But Biden didn't target Kennedy’s speech, right Bash? [Emphasis added.] Levin continued to rip apart Bash’s so-called “fact-check,” which he dismissed as “pretty funny:” “So Dana Bash, I’m going to fact-check you. Number one: Joe Biden was in fact trying to censor people. Why else would he set up that [Disinformation Governance] Board at DHS,” Levin pointed out. “Number two: Yes, [Biden’s] departments and agencies were working with Twitter, Facebook, Google and others to try and prevent political speech —political speech — and that includes the [Hunter Biden] laptop issue.”  Levin also noted Bash’s apparent ignorance to the court preliminary opinions from Louisiana District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the ongoing Murthy v. Missouri controversy outlining the terrifying political censorship regime in the Biden administration that the CNN anchor pretended wasn’t a threat. Doughty, in his opinion, wrote that the “evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” adding that during the COVID-19 pandemic the U.S. government “seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” “You make it sound so harmless Dana,” Levin remarked. No kidding. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency and an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

WATCH: Glenn Beck Wields MRC Study to Smack Leftist NewsGuard Around

Blaze Media host Glenn Beck emphasized the utter ridiculousness of leftist website traffic cops like NewsGuard masquerading as unbiased truth gatekeepers, and relied on original MRC Free Speech America research to do it. Beck ripped into the discredited NewsGuard that has been outed as a leftist operation targeting the advertising dollars of right-leaning media sources during the March 27 edition of Glenn TV. In his X post promoting the segment, Beck referred to NewsGuard as “propaganda” for continuing to behave like an Orwellian arbiter of truth, despite the glaring evidence of its so-called ratings system consistently being shown to favor left-leaning media while punishing the right.  “An analysis by the Media Research Center found that NewsGuard rates left and left-leaning news outlets an average of 27 points higher than conservative news outlets,” said Beck citing MRC's first NewsGuard analysis conducted in 2021. “But never mind that. I’m sure NewsGuard’s ratings are perfectly fair and balanced,” Beck mocked. What’s more terrifying about NewsGuard’s reach in light of MRC’s research, as Beck noted, was that it was being used by more than 800 libraries across the globe and the radical American Federation of Teachers union to indoctrinate children on the newspeak concept of so-called “media literacy” in order to inoculate the next generation against certain news sources, which in NewsGuard’s world typically indicates sources generating from the right. The study Beck referenced was the first of three MRC investigations into NewsGuard's extreme bias conducted over three consecutive years.  MRC’s analyses utilized a media bias list compiled by AllSides that classifies publications based on their “right” to “left” bias in order to determine how NewsGuard rated the outlets listed. The results found over three years of analysis have been nothing short of damning. In 2021, As Beck stated, the average NewsGuard score for the “left” and “lean left” outlets — which included leftist outlets like The New York Times, Politico and Washington Post — was 93/100. While the average rating for “right” and “lean right” outlets — which included Fox News, The Washington Times and New York Post — was a low 66/100, reflecting a 27-point disparity.  Have you heard about Microsoft’s partnership with “misinformation” watchdog NewsGuard on a “media literacy” program? It includes a browser extension (used by over 800 libraries) that warns your child if they visit a "bad" news outlet. That’s not media literacy. That’s propaganda. pic.twitter.com/6QziMvy2tr — Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) March 28, 2024 NewsGuard's acute level of bias remained consistent over the next two years. In the second study, released Jan. 6, 2023, the bias has barely budged. The average score for “left” and “lean left” outlets was a 91 while the average for “right” and “lean right” outlets was still a low 66/100, a 25-point disparity. Then, in the third study released Dec. 12, 2023, MRC found that NewsGuard’s treatment of right-leaning media got even worse. “Left” and “lean left” outlets maintained their stellar average of 91/100, while the average for “right” and “lean right” outlets dipped to an outrageously abysmal 65/100, indicating a 26-point disparity.  EDITOR’S NOTE: Readers should be aware that MRC’s NewsGuard studies only use the AllSides media bias list to analyze NewsGuard ratings of outlets considered by AllSides to be “left” and “lean left” or “right” and “lean right.” It does not necessarily reflect MRC’s characterizations of these outlets. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that the State Department be held to account to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and that Big Tech mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.      

EXCLUSIVE: China Expert Gordon Chang Rips WashPost for Defending Gov’t-Big Tech Collusion

The Washington Post Editorial Board went to bat for the federal government colluding with Big Tech to police so-called disinformation online. Gatestone Institute Senior Fellow Gordon Chang was having none of it. “Don’t defund the fight against Russia and China’s disinformation,” decried the Board in the editorial. In the editorial, the Board defended the State Department-tied Global Engagement Center’s financing of the now-infamous Global Disinformation Index (initially based in the U.K.), which has since been panned for blacklisting right-leaning American media. The Post propagandized how the GEC “deploys a $61 million budget and a staff of 125 to counter disinformation from Russia, China, Iran and terrorist organizations.” The only problem, as Chang pointed out in an exclusive interview with MRC Free Speech America, is that these pretexts are smokescreens the federal government has consistently deployed to violate the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens. Chang rebuked The Post for parroting the government’s excuse of fighting “disinformation” to police online speech: “You have a clear attack on the First Amendment, and you have mainstream media supporting it. I mean, these guys [The Post] — aren’t they going to find out that at some point the government can use it against them?” Chang doubled down: “The First Amendment is absolutely essential for the preservation of democracy. And we should not have, especially newspapers, advocating unconstitutional restrictions on the First Amendment. It’s just as simple as that.”  In Chang’s view, “The most important thing is [that] we must delegitimize the concept of disinformation” in order to de-fang the government from using the evergreen newspeak concept as license to infringe on free speech. Rather, Chang argued that the marketplace of ideas is the best arena where false information can be filtered out, not through the police state tactics of coercive government oversight.  Despite the glaring evidence The Post, true to form, dismissed members of Congress and other entities who “have complained that the [GEC] is part of an effort to muffle conservative speech and ideas in the United States.” The leftist newspaper attempted to distinguish between what the GEC specifically financed GDI for — a disinformation tool in Asia — and the latter’s blacklisting of U.S.-based “conservative” media outlets. In its ludicrous justification, The Post wrote that GDI's targeting of “conservative” media and what the government specifically funded were “separate projects,” completely dismissing the reality that money is fungible.  Similarly, The Post also slapped down The Daily Wire and The Federalist’s lawsuit against the GEC for allegedly infringing on their First Amendment rights as “misguided” because The Global Engagement Center supposedly “does not look at what goes on inside the United States — all its programs are for fighting disinformation abroad. The GEC also instructs its grantees not to work in the United States.” President Joe Biden’s press team couldn’t have generated a better public relations campaign on behalf of the GEC. But as the House Judiciary Committee summarized in a Nov. 6, 2023 report, “The GEC and GEC-funded entities have, on multiple occasions, flagged content to social media platforms that included Americans engaged in constitutionally protected speech.” Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi directly illustrated GEC’s targeting of domestic actors, rendering The Post’s gaslighting to the contrary a total crock.  GDI was also just named in another House Judiciary report for co-authoring a “hate groups” blacklist featuring “conservative” and faith-based organizations. The report documented how the Department of Treasury used such a blacklisty to pressure banks to surrender customer data. These allegations further illustrate how the federal government doesn’t have any issues using GDI, including the GEC by extension, to target U.S. citizens. GEC is even on record defending its GDI funding, even after the uncovering of the latter’s dystopian vendetta to target the advertisers of “conservative” American media. To be clear, said Chang, the communist Chinese regime (and the Russian government by extension) doesn’t have a First Amendment right in their malicious info operations, “and we can deal with that in other ways that are constitutional, but that’s not what is really at stake here.” He further warned, “What we’re talking about is the U.S. government funding an attack on the First Amendment.” Chang rebutted the GEC and The Post’s attempts to make it seem like the GEC is predominantly focused on speech happening abroad in light of numerous instances of anecdotal evidence showing the Biden administration targeting domestic speech: “These are purely domestic actors in a purely domestic context, and the First Amendment clearly protects speech and clearly — in my mind — prohibits what the Biden administration is doing.”  Chang argued that the obsession with so-called disinformation — especially amongst the younger generation of Americans — stems from what he called a “fundamental misunderstanding of the marketplace of ideas.” Chang argued that the First Amendment “protects disinformation” and  “what people call ‘hate speech’ because we believe the best ideas will work out.”  What the Biden administration is doing in fomenting government oversight of online speech (e.g. The Disinformation Governance Board) is “starting a slippery slope” towards even more draconian measures down the road. In essence, this is “clearly prohibited conduct. It’s just unconstitutional,” Chang continued.  But The Post, which is the epitome of a First Amendment beneficiary, still found justification for some kinds of government infringements to root out the so-called “purveyors of lies,” and even used chilling, counterinsurgency language to make its case: The House Republicans who are taking down the GEC could, more constructively, reauthorize the program with legislative language that would ban any operations in the United States. By eliminating the program altogether, they would deny the United States a vital tool in a contest for hearts and minds around the world — while rewarding the purveyors of lies, [emphasis added.]  Chang retorted by pointing out that “the First Amendment protects almost all speech” and that it has “very few restrictions on it.” There’s just “very few things that the First Amendment actually allows the government to prohibit, and that’s the way it should stay,” he continued. The China expert pointed to instances where social media companies censored that turned out to be accurate — such as the notion that the COVID-19 virus had originated from a lab in Wuhan, China and the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell story — as evidence illustrating the underlying truth that “nobody gets to determine what is a falsehood,” especially the federal government. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that the State Department be held to account to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and that Big Tech mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

What Border Crisis? Tone-Deaf Paul Krugman Suggests Immigration Surge ‘Secret’ to US ‘Success’

Somehow, New York Times economics propagandist Paul Krugman managed to one-up himself on his really bonkers Bidenomics hot takes. Millions of illegal border crossings? Humanitarian crisis? No problem, suggested Krugman in his March 19 piece, “Are Immigrants the Secret to America’s Economic Success?” In his wild logic (if you even want to call it that), Krugman blathered how supposedly “the very surge in immigration that has nativists so upset has played a big role in increasing the economy’s potential.” Yes, he actually wrote that. Never mind the fact that foreign born employment is up at least 3.3 million above its pre-pandemic levels while native-born employment is 1 million beneath its pre-pandemic level. That’s apparently a win in Krugman’s view. Not once does the word “border” appear anywhere in his half-cocked column.   Krugman downplayed the epidemic of crimes being committed by illegal immigrants crossing the border, and tried to spin one of President Joe Biden’s most damning indictments on his national security policies into a positive. “I’d still say that even if the migrant crime wave Trump and his allies harp on were real, and not a figment of their imagination (violent crime has in fact been plummeting in many cities) [sic].” Ah, but Krugman bypassed key context. The Council on Criminal Justice released a study in January 2024 showing that “Most violent offenses remained elevated in 2023 compared to 2019, the year prior to the outbreak of COVID and the widespread social unrest of 2020. There were 18% more homicides in the study cities in 2023 than in 2019, and carjacking has spiked by 93% during that period.” If that wasn’t telling enough, The Center Square also reported that “Hundreds of thousands of the migrants caught entering the U.S. have criminal records often including violent offenses.”  But Krugman, staying true to form, spewed that “even if there weren’t growing evidence that immigration is helping the U.S. economy — indeed, that it may be a major reason for our surprising economic success.” To say his argument is utterly ridiculous would be an understatement. The Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni wrote in a Feb. 22 analysis, “With millions of such illegal aliens pouring across the southern border due to Biden administration policies, it makes sense that this would augment the workforce of foreign-born people here legally and boost employment numbers.” However, said Antoni, “That native-born Americans have made no progress in terms of job numbers in four years is a key reason why they view the economy so poorly, but it isn’t the only one.” Inflation-adjusted weekly earnings have plummeted at least 4.2 percent under Biden’s term in office, Antoni noted.  What Krugman’s argument amounts to is essentially as follows, as Antoni described: “The benefits of ‘Bidenomics’ go to a few, and Americans as a whole come last.” But Krugman attempted to get ahead of this fact too by cherry-picking a Goldman Sachs chart allegedly showing no rise in native-born unemployment during the "immigration surge" to claim “that there is no good evidence that immigrants are taking away jobs from workers born in America.” He must have missed the fact millions of workers are still missing from the labor force. Krugman even mischaracterized former President Donald Trump’s recent Ohio comments: “When we accuse a politician of dehumanizing some ethnic group, we’re usually being metaphorical. The other day, however, Donald Trump said it straight out: Some migrants are ‘not people, in my opinion. Well, in my opinion, they are people.’” Fact-check: Trump was specifically referring to MS-13 gang members, but Krugman’s not exactly known for including mitigating context when the ensuing narrative doesn’t fit his agenda. That held true even for the data Krugman plastered in his piece to — ONCE AGAIN — gaslight readers into believing that Biden’s economy is a wonderland filled with heavenly-scented marigolds and daffodils. Krugman argued that post-pandemic, “real G.D.P. has risen by about a percentage point more than expected, while employment exceeds its projected level by 2.9 million workers.” But Krugman didn’t disclose that much of the so-called growth in GDP is being buoyed by the federal government taking on trillions of dollars in new debt (at least $6.6. trillion). Additionally, as Antoni told MRC Business, “There are a variety of ways to measure how” far the labor market is below its pre-pandemic trend, “but each of them shows that we’re missing at least 4.8 million jobs.” In fact, Antoni argued that “it seems more accurate to say Biden is short jobs than he has added them.” But Krugman wasn’t finished. He proceeded to praise the Biden administration for its absurd policy stance of going “big on spending, probably contributing to a temporary burst of inflation but also helping to ensure rapid recovery — and at this point the inflation has largely faded away while the recovery remains.”  Yes, Krugman is still blue-pilling himself with his long-since debunked “transitory” inflation argument despite admitting he got inflation wrong nearly two years ago. Add to the mindless drivel the fact that inflation-driven prices are over 17.6 percent higher than they were since Biden took office, and Krugman’s assertion that “inflation largely faded away” also blows up. A recent MarketWatch headline also undercuts Krugman’s position: “Inflation here to stay? U.S. could face unstable inflation for next decade, top investment pro says.”  Hang it up, Krugman. No amount of gaslighting on America’s immigration crisis will get citizens to treat Biden’s economy like anything other than the decrepit monstrosity that it is.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 800-698-4637 and demand it distance itself from Krugman’s awful takes on Bidenomics in the midst of America’s immigration crisis.  

‘CONFUSION’: Google Gemini Apologizes for Its Falsehoods about Trump, Biden

Google’s no-whites-allowed artificial intelligence chatbot went to great lengths to cover for President Biden’s mismanagement of the U.S. economy.  In response to questions from MRC Business researchers about former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden’s economies, Gemini twice led with incorrect information in bold that served to denigrate the former while bolstering the latter. Americans' average personal savings rate rose from 5.6 percent to 12.8 percent from Feb. 1, 2017 to Feb. 1, 2021, but suffered a bruising fall from 12.8 percent on Feb. 1, 2021 to 3.8 percent on Jan. 1, 2024. As these numbers don’t reflect well on Biden, who was inaugurated in late Jan. 2021, Gemini worked hard to avoid embarrassing the president by twisting the numbers. Ultimately, Gemini apologized twice for providing incorrect information.  Why does Gemini go out of its way to defend the president? The person overseeing it could provide some insight. Jack Krawczyk, Google's Senior Director of Product over Gemini, is on the record in 2020 fawning over then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and later praising the president for acknowledging America’s supposed “systemic racism” during his inauguration speech. As the old saying goes: Garbage in, garbage out. MRC Business asked the following question for both presidents: “How did Americans' average personal savings rate change between” February 1, 2017 – February 1, 2021 under Trump’s policies and February 1, 2021 – February 1, 2024 under Biden’s policies. For both Biden and Trump, Gemini offered astoundingly inaccurate responses. For Biden, Gemini claimed, “The average personal savings rate in the United States went through a significant increase between February 1, 2021, and January 1, 2024 .” But the evidence that it cited actually reflected a significant decrease in personal savings; the complete opposite of what Gemini argued. “So, the rate went from around 7.38% to 3.8%, representing a substantial decrease,” Gemini wrote. [No emphasis added.] But the ridiculousness didn’t end there. The Google chatbot committed the same error in reverse when asked about Americans’ personal savings under Trump: “How did Americans' average personal savings rate change between February 1, 2017 and February 1, 2021,” MRC Business researchers asked.  Gemini responded, “The average personal savings rate in the United States actually went through a slight downward trend between February 1, 2017, and February 1, 2021,” before once again disclosing data indicating that its argument was an outright falsehood. [No emphasis added.] This time, Gemini provided statistics showing Americans’ savings actually grew but begged readers not to give former President Trump much credit. Gemini wrote, “While there was a slight increase [5.76 percent to 7.38 percent], it's important to consider: The overall increase was modest compared to significant jumps seen in other periods.” So, in other words, no “downward trend.” Yes, you read the contradictory responses right. When MRC Business probed Gemini on the glaring contradictions, the AI chatbot admitted its so-called “mistake[s].” For Biden, Gemini conceded, “You are correct. The text in the image says that the personal savings rate went from 7.38% to 3.8%, and this represents a substantial decrease. I apologize for the mistake. I am still under development and learning to perform many kinds of tasks, including interpreting data and images.”  Gemini also admitted that the trajectory of Americans’ savings under Biden “represents a substantial decrease,” while the trajectory of Americans’ savings under Trump showed a slight increase. For the Trump contradiction, Gemini apologized: “You're absolutely right, my response regarding the personal savings rate contained contradictory information and used bold text for emphasis in a misleading way. Let me apologize for the confusion.” “Confusion, or baked in bias? I think we all know the answer to that question,” said MRC Business Director Michael Morris. “Time and time again Google has shown its unwillingness to maintain political neutrality, instead favoring leftist ideology over all else. There’s little reason to suggest that Google — with the numerous examples from Google Search bias in election contests to Gemini’s no whites allowed DEI pandering — is doing anything different here.” In its responses and even in its corrections, Gemini significantly understated the heights that Americans’ savings reached under former President Trump and consequently obscured the percentage drop under President Biden. In both cases, Gemini reported that Americans’ average personal savings rate on Feb. 1, 2021 was 7.38 percent, when in fact it was 12.8 percent. Even when Gemini tried to tell the truth after admitting its initial contradictions, the Google product used minimizing language that looked even more absurd in light of the real percentages. Gemini referenced an alleged rise from 5.76 percent to 7.38 percent under former President Trump in order to claim a “slight increase.” But this is incorrect. The percentage increase was actually much more significant. Americans’ personal savings increased from 5.6 percent to a sizable 12.8 percent (not just 7.38 percent) during Trump’s term in office, reflecting a 129 percent spike. Gemini’s numbers for Biden were just as bad. Despite later conceding that personal savings actually decreased during Biden’s administration after MRC Business called it out, the data it disclosed downplayed the impact. Gemini later conceded that personal savings decreased under Biden from 7.38 percent to 3.8 percent. However, the actual drop was more drastic than what Gemini suggested. Personal savings dropped from 12.8 percent to 3.8 percent, reflecting a whopping 70 percent decrease. Gemini has demonstrated obscene bias in the past, casting doubt on atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on and after the Oct. 7th genocidal attack on Israel. In response to prompts by MRC Staff, Gemini also demonstrated racism against white men. The chatbot willingly generated prompts of black, Hispanic and Asian people in various fields, but refused to generate images of white men in those same fields.  Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

A COLD DAY IN HELL: Snopes Actually Fact Checks Biden Admin’s ‘15 Million’ Jobs Added Claim

It was always asinine for President Joe Biden’s administration to claim that they “nearly” added 15 million jobs since the pandemic, and it apparently stank so much that even leftist fact-checker Snopes didn’t let it pass the smell test. In a shocking twist, Snopes analyzed that the Biden administration’s propagandized claim on how star-spangled awesome its job creation numbers were was “misleading” in a March 21 fact check.  According to Snopes, “About 9 million of those jobs were lost during the pandemic, so the net jobs gain from pre-pandemic levels was 5.5 million.” In other words, the “15 million” claim was bunk. But even the 5.5 million number is way too generous, but more on that later. The author of the fact check, Anna Rascouët-Paz, addressed the Biden propaganda on her personal Twitter account: “Did the US economy really add 15 million jobs under Biden? *squinty face* mmmm let's not push it.” No kidding. However, Rascouët-Paz stopped short of outright calling the Biden administration liars by still dubbing their claim a true/false “mixture” because the U.S. economy technically “gained 14.9 million jobs in total” from the pandemic recovery. Yes, the very claim that Rascouët-Paz deemed “false” was spun to seem like it still contained a modicum of honesty.  But for an outlet that routinely goes to bat for Biden, protecting him from most any scrutiny, “Mixture” is about as close as we can hope Snopes will get to red-flagging a leftist president’s economic falsehoods. The Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni told MRC Business in an exclusive interview that “[t]he word ‘added’ implies an increase over the preexisting trend, but we’ve had precisely the opposite.” Did the US economy really add 15 million jobs under Biden? *squinty face* mmmm let's not push it. https://t.co/JVjYWz8DWR — Anna Rascouët-Paz (@rascouet) March 21, 2024 Rascouët-Paz attempted to throw Biden a bone by drawing readers’ attention to the supposed “Signs of a Strong Economy,” claiming that the “data shows [sic] that the U.S. economy has been strong overall under Biden.”. She waved around the February jobs report showing that the economy allegedly added 275,000 jobs, the 3.9 percent unemployment rate and 3.1 percent 2023 GDP growth as data points, but conveniently left out important context that blew up her pro-Biden spin.  Rascouët-Paz failed to mention the inconvenient little factoid that the February jobs report was drastically undercut by the simultaneous news that the previously robust January jobs numbers had been downwardly revised by more than a whopping 35 percent, from 353,000 to 229,000. If that wasn’t bad enough, the February jobs report also reduced the December 2023 jobs numbers from 333,000 to 290,000, totaling a 167,000-job overestimate for December and January combined. In addition, new data from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve showed that the U.S. economy added two-thirds fewer jobs in the third quarter of 2023 than previously reported by the BLS report, according to The Daily Caller. Antoni told MRC Business that any attempt to sugarcoat the decrepit state of the jobs market under Biden as Rascouët-Paz did is downright ludicrous. “There are a variety of ways to measure how” far the labor market is below its pre-pandemic trend, he said, “but each of them shows that we’re missing at least 4.8 million jobs.” In fact, argued Antoni that “it seems more accurate to say Biden is short jobs than he has added them.” But that isn’t the only area where Rascouët-Paz dropped the ball. A chunk of the so-called “growth” in 2023 that she praised as a win for Biden happened because the federal government debt exploded by over $6.6 trillion against a nominal GDP increase of $5.6 trillion, as Antoni pointed out in a February X post. Antoni argued that the government was effectively “borrowing to create the illusion of ‘growth,’ and getting only 89 cents on the dollar… .” Reiterating this point to MRC Business, Antoni concluded, “[T]he only thing keeping both consumer and government spending levels afloat is debt. The government basically borrowed over $800 billion last quarter to ‘buy’ $300 billion of GDP ‘growth.’”  And the argument that the U.S. is experiencing healthy growth gets even worse when one tears off the false veneer, as Antoni revealed: Likewise, consumer debt is through the roof as people attempt to maintain their standard of living amid the sharp drop in real earnings over the last 3 years. Furthermore, many people, especially the young, have turned to doom spending. This is where they give up on ever being able to own a home or other big ticket items, so they stop saving for a down payment and other investments, and spend that money instead. That’s increasing consumer spending today, but also killing savings and long-run growth. Indeed, the savings rate today is less than half the pre-pandemic level, and that’s after the government handed out thousands of dollars to everybody. Conservatives are under attack. Contact Snopes and tell it to stop trying to save the Biden administration from the political fallout of the falsehoods it peddles on the state of the economy.

Soros-Funded Brennan Center’s Dystopian Take on Free Speech Case Bastardized Its Namesake

Imagine a radical law organization financed by George Soros lurching so far to the left on the free speech issue that it ends up bastardizing the very philosophy of the liberal U.S. Supreme Court associate justice it's named after. Enter the Brennan Center for Justice. The Brennan Center — which has espoused insane ideas like abolishing the Electoral College because of its so-called “racist origins” and defunding the police — published a nutty take on the ongoing case Murthy v. Missouri, currently before the Supreme Court. The case involves the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana suing the Biden administration for colluding with Big Tech companies to censor free speech. “Supreme Court Case Could Be Disastrous for Detecting Election Misinformation,” read the Brennan Center’s headline, shilling for the government forces seeking to erect a dystopian speech control cabal with Silicon Valley. Tellingly, Soros funneled at least $4,800,000 into the Brennan Center’s coffers between 2016 and 2021 alone. The Brennan Center panned the lawsuit seeking to halt the back-channel collusion between federal entities and Big Tech platforms as part of a “larger legal and political effort to silence those working to detect or counter election rumors and falsehoods.” [Emphasis added.] Yes, the Soros-funded organization attempted to make it seem like the federal government — not the American public — was the victim of censorship in this case; never mind how the Biden administration has already been repeatedly exposed for targeting Christians and conservatives who don’t toe the line on approved left-wing talking points.  The organization ended up saying the quiet part out loud by specifically advocating for the federal government to focus its efforts on “domestic” speech on elections — meaning by American citizens — in addition to foreign “interference operations,” because voters could potentially be too stupid to tell fact from fiction on their own: The United States needs to be on alert and ready to protect the 2024 election against foreign interference and domestic election falsehoods — both of which can confuse voters or contribute to threats and harassment of election officials,” [emphasis added]. The Brennan Center bemoaned how the initial lawsuit has effectively “stood in the way” of the Orwellian goals of the leftist speech police. Uh, good? “[F]ederal agencies and others with expert knowledge should be sharing relevant information with social media companies for them to use as they apply and update their policies on how to handle falsehoods,” the Soros-funded group continued.  The so-called “wrong” ruling in Murthy, at least according to the Brennan Center’s view, “could deal a crippling blow to the ability of the government to identify election disinformation campaigns for social media companies, or even provide them with accurate election information.” How terrible that government officials with a political axe to grind could potentially not have the ability to pressure Big Tech platforms to suppress speech.  On the contrary, the Brennan Center claimed the federal government was just being benevolent in grooming tech platforms to nix information that it despised: None of the communications related to voting, election processes, or election security cited by the lower courts were coercive communications that should have converted the platforms into state actors under the law. They were almost entirely informative and did not include attempts to dictate decisions about how to handle users’ posts. Naivete or straight-up propaganda? Take your pick. The Brennan Center’s argument is the very kind of justification that the late Justice William J. Brennan Jr. himself repudiated when he wrote the Court’s opinion for the landmark case Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan (1963). That case wrestled with the question of whether government entities could strongly urge — not directly ban — bookstores from housing certain titles due to their objectionable content. Whether through jawboning — which is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “the use of public appeals (as by a president) to influence the actions especially of business and labor leaders” — or through explicit coercion, Brennan found that both the suggestive and coercive means carried the same end, which was chilling, illegal government censorship: It is true that appellants’ books have not been seized or banned by the State, and that no one has been prosecuted for their possession or sale. But though the [Rhode Island Commission) is limited to informal sanctions -- the threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion, persuasion, and intimidation -- the record amply demonstrates that the Commission deliberately set about to achieve the suppression of publications deemed 'objectionable,' and succeeded in its aim. We are not the first court to look through forms to the substance and recognize that informal censorship may sufficiently inhibit the circulation of publications to warrant injunctive relief. Justice Brennan would be rolling over in his grave if he saw the organization named after him supporting the very kind of censorship in Murthy that he opposed in Bantam Books. The Brennan Center is effectively taking the complete opposite approach to the censorship issue, which is ridiculous given that the group itself was founded by Justice Brennan’s former law clerks. It would appear then that the Brennan Center is now more keen on taking its cues from one of its most notorious leftist financiers in Soros — who’s been on a multimillion-dollar vendetta against so-called mis- and disinformation for years — than the philosophy of the very liberal judicial icon whose name it carries with gusto.  Go figure.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

OLD GRAY KAREN: NYT Publishes 3,984-Word Eulogy Decrying Death of Gov’t-Big Tech Collusion

The Old Gray Lady continues to behave like a Karen triggered by people’s ability to express their opinions about elections freely online. Darn that pesky free speech! The New York Times effectively wrote what amounted to a 3,984-word eulogy for the death of the dystopian thought police. The Times mourned that former President Donald Trump’s “Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.” The newspaper — acting like a speech gatekeeper — bemoaned that Trump and free speech absolutists “have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online.” But the same outlet that’s whining about “disinformation” and “election lies” is the one that uses its own platform to gaslight struggling Americans on how President Joe Biden’s inflation-rattled economy “looks sunny.” But who's keeping track, right?  The disgruntled publication attempted to justify Big Tech’s collusion  whipped out the Capitol Hill riot on January 6, 2021 to justify government officials jawboning Big Tech platforms to censor speech. The newspaper dubbed the dystopian collusion a “groundswell built in Washington to rein in the onslaught of lies that had fueled the assault on the peaceful transfer of power.”  But alas, cried The Times, Trump and his pro-free speech cohorts have “unquestionably prevailed” in their “counteroffensive” to block “what they viewed as a dangerous effort to censor conservatives.” How horrible that “conservatives” aren’t exactly keen on their government being weaponized against them because of their opinions! But The Times, which developed a penchant for openly advocating for censoring political views on elections, couldn’t stand the fact that free speech could possibly be, er, free: Waged in the courts, in Congress and in the seething precincts of the internet, that effort has eviscerated attempts to shield elections from disinformation in the social media era. It tapped into — and then, critics say, twisted — the fierce debate over free speech and the government’s role in policing content. The newspaper even went as far as to say the quiet part out loud by boo-hooing the Biden administration “abandoning” its collusion with Big Tech platforms following political and legal blowback because it “helped cut a path for Mr. Trump’s attempt to recapture the presidency.”  Ah, so Biden will have to win without his bag of Orwellian censorship tricks weaponized against Trump and his allies? Heaven forbid! “Mr. Trump’s allies have succeeded in paralyzing the Biden administration and the network of researchers who monitor disinformation,” The Times continued.   Cry more. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the CensorTrack contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.