John Amato at Crooks and Liars caught yet another TV Trumper poisoning the minds of their audience:
On this morning’s 700 Club, the televangelist and Trump mega supporter Pat Robertson claimed that by calling Joe Biden, the President-elect, Americans are succumbing to Joseph Goebbels propaganda and are being brainwashed to believe it’s true.
Robertson opened his program with a bumbling and stumbling recap of the crazy conspiracy theory about Dominion and Smartmatic, (that he couldn’t pronounce) which was promoted by the now fired Sidney Powell that’s already been debunked by all credible people.
Robertson also claimed that Trump has several more legal avenues to explore and have the Supreme Court overturn the election.
Then he took it further and compared calling Joe Biden President-Elect was the equivalent of bowing to Nazi propaganda.
“I look back to the Nazis, the man who was in charge of the propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, and he said ‘if you tell a lie often enough people begin to believe it’,” Robertson said. “I believe the fact that we keep calling Joe Biden the president- elect, he is not elected until the electors decide in that hasn’t happened yet.
“We call him president-elect, he’s already choosing his cabinet, he’s talking about cabinet positions, he’s asking for money to run his transition team and we keep calling him President- Elect. He is not the President-Elect. He is Joe Biden, citizen, until such time as his election is certified and it hasn’t happened yet. Remember that.”
He’s nuts. But keep in mind that his Christian Broadcast Network serves the largest faction of Trump voters: conservative Evangelical Christians. This article from 2017 is instructive:
While CBN News has had a Washington, D.C., bureau since the 1980’s, the office was recently renovated and 10 staff positions — including correspondents, videographers and producers — have been added since Trump’s election.
CBN founder Pat Robertson interviewed Trump on July 12, in what CNN noted at the time was the president’s first non-Fox News interview in two months. Trump said he’s mistreated by the mainstream media, but, he told Robertson, “As long as my people understand. That’s why I do interviews with you. You have a tremendous audience. You have people that I love.”
The network’s flagship show is The 700 Club, which airs weekdays on Freeform. CBN claims that show has an average daily audience of one million American viewers. Programming is streamed online on CBN’s website, which comScore said attracted more than one million U.S. multi-platform unique visitors in June. CBN shows also air around the country on local television networks.
And this is interesting. I had forgotten that Jay Sekulow was a big CBN star. He almost certainly served as a major Evangelical validator for Trump serving as his lawyer through all the trials and tribulations:
Another one of CBN’s breakout stars? Jay Sekulow. A longtime guest on the network, the attorney joined the president’s legal team in June and has since become a ubiquitous presence on cable news, often trotted out by the administration to explain the inexplicable. Sekulow made his name as a lawyer for the Christian right and has long served as the chief counsel of a law organization founded by Robertson. “Jay doesn’t pull any punches, and he’s kind of channeling Trump in a degree, so it seems like a match made in heaven,” Brody said.
When CBN News has a Trump administration guest, some of the interview questions might strike someone unfamiliar with the network as unusual. “We get a question all the time on Facebook, to you specifically,” Brody told Spicer during a July 19 interview. “It’s a question from folks out there, they want to know how they can pray for you.”
Because CBN sees the mainstream media as uninterested in serving a Christian audience and unwilling to treat the administration fairly, the network’s talent goes easy on the guests they book. When White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared on Aug. 2, Brody said to her: “Here’s some breaking news for you: I’m not going to ask you about Russia right off the top. What do you think of that?” Sanders responded: “I like it. We’re off to a good start already.
Conservative Evangelicals are among Trump’s most loyal supporters. And those who watch CBN and Pat Robertson, likely the older set, are hearing that Joe Biden is a Nazi for doing what every president-elect does after they’ve won. Including, by the way, Donald Trump who was called president-elect starting the morning after election day. Of course Hillary Clinton didn’t act like a 5 year old and have a tantrum because she didn’t win, so I suppose that was on her…