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TruNews

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TruNews
Type of site
Available inEnglish
OwnerRick Wiles
URLtrunews.com
RegistrationNone
LaunchedSeptember 1998; 26 years ago (1998-09)[2]
Current statusActive
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TruNews is an American far-right[1] fake news website[11] and channel owned and hosted by Rick Wiles. TruNews frequently publishes conspiracy theories[12][13][14] in addition to racist, anti-LGBT, antisemitic, and Islamophobic content.[10] It has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.[15]

History

[edit]

Wiles founded the organization as America's Hope in September 1998 as a Christian ministry based in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. In the following months, Wiles toured the U.S. speaking of moral decline as he aimed to prevent "economic collapse" and "war on American soil". On May 24, 1999, the organization made its first radio broadcast. After five years of regular broadcasts, the news station briefly changed its name to America Freedom News, before settling on TruNews in 2004.[2]

In November 2019, TruNews was temporarily suspended from YouTube for violating its rules on promoting hate speech.[16][17] Wiles has denied his rhetoric has antisemitic intent and blamed George Soros for organizing a campaign against him.[14] In February 2020, TruNews was permanently banned from YouTube.[18]

Content

[edit]

In October 2014, TruNews urged that the spread of Ebola "could solve America's problems with atheism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, pornography and abortion".[19][20] In late January 2020, Wiles said COVID-19 was God's "death angel" and "plagues are one of the last steps of judgment."[21]

TruNews is known for anti-Christian-Zionist theories. The website frequently described President Barack Obama as a "demon from hell".[6] Obama, he claimed while the former president was in office, was the "jihadist-in-chief" who was "waging jihad against the United States from inside the White House" and murdered Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as a "pagan sacrifice".[22]

In 2017, TruNews guests included someone who claimed President Bill Clinton was a flesh-eating cannibal, leading to his contracting related diseases.[23] Another asserted that Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom was a "lizard person" who had Diana, Princess of Wales murdered because the Princess was in the process of revealing that the Royal Family was involved in Satanism.[24] He also asserted that Israel and the "Jewish mafia" had President John F. Kennedy assassinated. Another edition of Wiles' program claimed Israel and the "synagogue of Satan" are pushing the United States to fight wars on their behalf.[12]

On TruNews, Wiles has asserted that the effects of Hurricane Harvey upon the city of Houston, Texas, in September 2017 resulted from Houston's "LGBT devotion";[25][26] has described Judaism and Islam as "the Antichrist"; has called Central American immigrants a "brown invasion" being used by God to punish White Americans for legal abortion;[24] has claimed that the 2017 Las Vegas shooting was conducted by government death squads from a "gay / lesbian Nazi regime";[6] and, in July 2018, predicted an imminent coup (led by CNN's Anderson Cooper and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow) that would result in the nationally televised decapitation of the Trump family on the White House lawn.[24][27]

Wiles promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories of Jewish world domination while discussing the 2019 AIPAC conference on TruNews.[28] In November 2019, he said that the congressional hearings concerning the impeachment of Donald Trump were "infested with Jews" and constituted a "Jew coup".[17] He claimed: "That's the way the Jews work. They are deceivers. They plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda" and asserted the United States would reach a state of civil war before Christmas. Millions of Christians would be murdered by Zionists as a result.[29] Of the hoax Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Wiles said the authors had "accurately predicted what was going to happen in the world".[17] TruNews and Wiles have also claimed that the transgender rights movement is a Zionist plot to make all of humanity androgynous, that this supposed plot was inspired by Talmudic and Kabbalistic doctrines, and that it involves "putting specific things in food, in drink".[30][18]

See also

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References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b Sources describing TruNews as far-right: [3][4][5][6]
  2. ^ a b "About TruNews". TruNews. Archived from the original on May 14, 2019. Retrieved June 28, 2019.
  3. ^ Tebaldi, Catherine (May 27, 2021). "Speaking post-truth to power" (PDF). Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. 43 (3). Routledge: 9. doi:10.1080/10714413.2020.1729679. ISSN 1071-4413 – via ORBilu. Even more shockingly, perhaps is the headline from the far-right news source TruNews, "Rick Wiles: Liberals Intend to Put Conservatives in Concentration Camps." For the far right, schools are not just sites of liberal hegemony but indoctrination centers, camps, cultural marxist madrassas.
  4. ^ Brown, Jeremy (July 7, 2022). "A Plague of Biblical Proportions: Jews and Judaism in the Age of COVID-19". The Eleventh Plague: Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19. Oxford University Press. p. 315. doi:10.1093/oso/9780197607183.003.0014. ISBN 978-0-19-760718-3. Retrieved January 13, 2024 – via Google Books. For American Jews, there was a locally grown accusation. It was made by Rick Wiles, the Florida-based founder and host of the far-right Christian channel called TruNews. Wiles blamed Zionism for the spread of coronavirus: "There is a plague moving upon the Earth right now, and the people that are going into the synagogues are coming out with the virus. You are under judgment because you oppose his son, Jesus Christ. That is why you have a plague in your synagogues." For good measure, Wiles also claimed that COVID-19 outbreak in the United States was started at the AIPAC conference.
  5. ^ Chen, Yingying; Long, Jacob; Jun, Jungmi; Kim, Sei-Hill; Zain, Ali; Piacentine, Colin (January 30, 2023). "Anti-intellectualism amid the COVID-19 pandemic: The discursive elements and sources of anti-Fauci tweets". Public Understanding of Science. 32 (5). Sage: 641–657. doi:10.1177/09636625221146269. ISSN 0963-6625. PMC 9892881. PMID 36715354. These include three far-right alternative news media with questionable credibility (The Colorado Herald, TruNews, and The Western Journal)...
  6. ^ a b c Thebault, Reis (March 29, 2019). "News outlet that covered 'lizard people' and called Obama a demon just interviewed Trump Jr". The Washington Post. Retrieved November 27, 2019. The TruNews archive reads like a greatest hits collection of far-right conspiracy theories, a veritable potpourri of Nazi references and fear mongering about secret cabals.
  7. ^ Billard, Thomas J; Moran, Rachel E. (March 16, 2023). "Designing Trust: Design Style, Political Ideology, and Trust in "Fake" News Websites". Digital Journalism. 11 (3). Routledge: 519–546. doi:10.1080/21670811.2022.2087098. ISSN 2167-0811. Retrieved January 12, 2024 – via ResearchGate. Another such case was the website TruNews, which presented several stylistic features associated with the genre of "broadcast news outlet."
  8. ^ Grinberg, Nir; Joseph, Kenneth; Friedland, Lisa; Swire-Thompson, Briony; Lazer, David (January 25, 2019). "Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election" (PDF). Science. 363 (6425). American Association for the Advancement of Science: 374–378. Bibcode:2019Sci...363..374G. doi:10.1126/science.aau2706. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 30679368. S2CID 59248491.
  9. ^ Guess, Andy; Aslett, Kevin; Tucker, Joshua; Bonneau, Richard; Nagler, Jonathan (2021). "Cracking Open the News Feed: Exploring What U.S. Facebook Users See and Share with Large-Scale Platform Data". Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. 1. doi:10.51685/jqd.2021.006. ISSN 2673-8813. S2CID 236598470.
  10. ^ a b Puente, David (June 1, 2021). "I giornalisti NoVax di TruNews ricoverati per Covid19. Il conduttore Rick Wiles si definiva un sopravvissuto del «genocidio vaccinale»" [TruNews NoVax journalists hospitalized for Covid19. Host Rick Wiles called himself a survivor of the "vaccine genocide"]. Open (in Italian). Retrieved January 13, 2024. TruNews è un canale televisivo online americano basato sulle notizie false e le teorie del complotto, ma non solo: tra i contenuti pubblicati troviamo omofobia, odio razziale e religioso, incluso l'antisemitismo. Il suo fondatore e proprietario, il pastore cristiano Rick Wiles, ha sostenuto la tesi degli Stati Uniti controllati da un gruppo di sionisti satanisti e le teorie del complotto sulla Covid19, soprattutto quelle NoVax, un'accozzaglia di contenuti comuni alla narrativa QAnon. [TruNews is an American online TV channel based on fake news and conspiracy theories, but not only that: among its published content we find homophobia, racial and religious hatred, including anti-Semitism. Its founder and owner, Christian pastor Rick Wiles, has supported the thesis of the U.S. being controlled by a group of Satanist Zionists and conspiracy theories on COVID-19, especially the NoVax ones, a hodgepodge of content common to the QAnon narrative.]
  11. ^ Sources describing TruNews as a fake news website: [7][8][9][10]
  12. ^ a b "TruNews and Rick Wiles: 'End Times' Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism". Anti-Defamation League. January 13, 2020. Retrieved February 7, 2020. TruNews is a fundamentalist Christian streaming news and opinion platform that has increasingly featured anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist content, and also has a long record of disseminating radical Islamophobic and anti-LGBTQ messages.
  13. ^ Sravasti Dasgupta (October 21, 2021). "Right-wing radio host says Covid vaccines hatch eggs that grow into synthetic parasites within body as part of coup d'etat by 'evil cabal'". The Independent. Retrieved July 9, 2023. Mr Wiles has used the TruNews platform to peddle conspiracy theories and push racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic content.
  14. ^ a b Michael M. Grynbaum (January 26, 2020). "Site That Ran Anti-Semitic Remarks Got Passes for Trump Trip". New York Times. Retrieved July 9, 2023. TruNews, which Mr. Wiles founded as an online radio program in 1999 called America's Hope, has a history of spreading conspiracy theories and proclaiming an imminent apocalypse. I
  15. ^ "Hate Map".
  16. ^ Rudoren, Jodi (November 27, 2019). "Far-Right Pastor Calls Impeachment A 'Jew Coup,' Begs Trump To 'Wake Up'". Forward. Retrieved November 27, 2019.
  17. ^ a b c MacGuill, Dan (November 27, 2019). "Did Pastor Rick Wiles Call Trump Impeachment a 'Jew Coup'?". Snopes. Retrieved December 9, 2019.
  18. ^ a b Slisco, Aila (February 20, 2020). "YouTube Bans Anti-Zionist Channel TruNews After Founder Calls Trump Impeachment 'Jew Coup'". Newsweek. Retrieved February 21, 2020.
  19. ^ Martinez, Michael (October 18, 2014). "What's more disturbing than Ebola? The outrageous commentary". CNN. Retrieved November 27, 2019.
  20. ^ Stein, Nat (October 16, 2014). "Statetap: Evangelicals for Ebola; Snoop Dogg for Dunafon". The Colorado Independent. Retrieved January 30, 2021.
  21. ^ Lemon, Jason (January 28, 2020). "Christian Pastor Claims Coronavirus is God's 'Death Angel,' Blames Parent's 'Transgendering Little Children'". Newsweek. Retrieved February 7, 2020.
  22. ^ Malaea, Marika (November 18, 2019). "Florida Pastor Rick Wiles Claims Barack Obama is Anonymous Author of 'A Warning'". Newsweek. Retrieved November 27, 2019.
  23. ^ Mantyla, Kyle (May 8, 2017). "Just Another Day On Trunews: Queen Elizabeth Is A Satanist Lizard And Bill Clinton Is A Cannibal". Right Wing Watch. Retrieved January 30, 2021.
  24. ^ a b c Elfrink, Tim (September 27, 2018). "Trump Takes Question From Racist, Homophobic Florida Conspiracy Website". Miami New Times. Retrieved November 27, 2019.
  25. ^ Pasha-Robinson, Lucy (September 6, 2017). "Gay people to blame for Hurricane Harvey, say evangelical Christian leaders". The Independent. London. Retrieved November 27, 2019.
  26. ^ Mantyla, Kyle (August 30, 2017). "Rick Wiles: Hurricane Harvey Is Punishment For Houston's 'Affinity For The Sexual Perversion Movement'". Right Wing Watch. Retrieved January 13, 2024.
  27. ^ Williams, James (July 23, 2018). "Florida Talk Show Host Rick Wiles 'We Are 72 Hours Away From An Attack On The White House.'". News Talk Florida. Retrieved November 30, 2019.
  28. ^ Jensen, Tasia (March 28, 2019). "Far-Right Show TruNews Fearmongers: You're Going to See 'Christianity Become Criminalized'". Daily Beast. Retrieved April 5, 2019.
  29. ^ "'There Will Be a Purge:' U.S. Pastor Warns of 'Jew Coup' to Impeach Trump". Haaretz. November 27, 2019. Retrieved November 27, 2019.
  30. ^ Mantyla, Kyle (February 14, 2020). "TruNews: Zionism Is Using the Transgender Rights Movement to Make All of Humanity Androgynous". Right Wing Watch.
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