Tag: Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity calls for voter suppression in 5 more states: ‘This has nothing to do with race’

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Following passage of voter suppression bills by Republicans in Iowa and Georgia, Fox News personality Sean Hannity is now calling for his viewers to demand similar measures in five additional states.

“Now we turn to an important story on election integrity, and it matters. People ask me, ‘Hannity, what can I do?’ Well, first, if you live in Georgia, if you live in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, you want to work with your state legislatures,” he argued.

Four of the five states Hannity listed have Republican legislatures, with only Nevada controlled by Democrats. Continue reading.

Republicans siding with Putin over Biden are showing their ‘adoration’ for a ‘murderous autocrat’: journalist

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During his four years as president, Donald Trump made it abundantly clear that he did not consider Russian President Vladimir Putin an adversary of the United States. But President Joe Biden, during his two months in the White House, has been much tougher on Putin — and journalist Steven Beschloss, in a scathing March 22 article for his America, America blog, calls out Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Rep. Matt Gaetz and other Republicans he believes have become Putin’s useful idiots during the Biden era. 

Gaetz, during a recent appearance on Hannity’s show, told the Fox News host, “Putin and Biden, it would not end like ‘Rocky IV.’ I don’t think the American would prevail.” And Hannity joked that Putin would have the upper hand in a debate with the U.S. president.

Beschloss explains, “After four years of never a negative word about Putin from Trump — not after the interference in our election, not after the killings of Russian journalists and political opponents in Russia and on foreign soil, not after it was revealed the Russians put bounties on American soldiers — this cute interplay may have sounded like no big deal. Just more fun and games from among the same bunch who’ve perpetrated the Big Lie of election fraud and are determined to gloss over and move on from the deadly insurrection…. But make no mistake: The continuing adoration of Putin represents the embrace of autocracy over democracy — indeed, the dark desire to learn from the anti-democratic tactics of a murderous autocrat.” Continue reading.

Fox News’ Sean Hannity claims Biden only developed a stutter recently — videos show him talking about it years ago

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Fox News host Sean Hannity has doubled down on the conspiracy theories about President Joe Biden’s health. It’s a similar conspiracy that Fox hosts pushed in 2016 that Hillary Clinton was going to die any day, and desperately ill. She wasn’t and she’s still alive, obviously.

The new conspiracy is that Biden’s well-known and well-documented stutter only appeared recently. That too, is false, as Biden even addressed it accepting the vice-presidential nomination in 2008 on live television. Fox News was there. Biden also talked to the ladies of “The View” about it in 2010.

Biden then spoke about it in a video to the American Institute for Stuttering in 2014. Continue reading.

The RNC has spent nearly $1 million making Sean Hannity’s book a bestseller

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The Republican National Committee continues to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for copies of the latest book by Fox News personality Sean Hannity, which was published in August These efforts have helped boost the book up bestseller lists, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings.

This week the RNC reported $492,308 in expenditures on “donor mementos” at book retailers, all of it spent on Sept. 16. Salon has confirmed that at least $159,000 of that amount went for bulk retail purchases of Hannity’s book, “Live Free or Die,” which have been offered to GOP donors who gave $75 or more.

Additionally, a retail representative told Salon that the RNC placed at least one more recent order for the book, on Oct. 22: an additional 1,500 copies for $26,100. That purchase will not appear in public filings until after the election. Continue reading.

Here are all the times Fox News hosts went on ‘vacation’: An investigation

AlterNet logoNews personality and frozen food heir-apparent Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson drew eye-rolls Monday when he told viewers that he was embarking on a “pre-planned vacation,” widely understood to be a euphemism for a network timeout.His respite, however, was uncannily timed to an onslaught of criticism after CNN revealed that the show’s longtime top writer had been secretly posting vile and hateful comments on the internet for years. It also comes on the heels of a marked escalation in Carlson’s own race-baiting rhetoric, which Carlson pushed far enough to draw accusations of hate speech.

Although Carlson has also been in some senses riding high, turning in the highest cable news ratings in history and drawing speculation about his possible political ambitions, he’s also currently the subject of an IRS criminal complaint and an ongoing high-profile defamation lawsuit against his network.

Following the announcement, Salon took up an intrepid investigation into other Fox News personalities who have taken conspicuously timed “vacations” over the years. Here’s what we found.  Continue reading.

Trump’s new excuse on not releasing his taxes is ‘completely meaningless’ and may not even be in English: CNN’s Toobin

AlterNet logoCNN’s Jeffrey Toobin on Friday found himself flabbergasted by President Donald Trump’s new excuse for not releasing his tax returns, and he questioned whether the president was even speaking English when he made it.

During a CNN panel discussion, Toobin was shown a clip of Trump talking about releasing his tax returns during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

“I’m under tax audit, I have been for a long period of time,” the president told Hannity. “Once I ran for politics that deal was like we didn’t make it. So I’m under a continuing audit, and anyone that did that or showed that before you have it finalized, but they treat, they treat me horribly, the IRS. It is a disgrace what has happened. We had a deal done, I guess it was signed even. Once I ran or once I won, somewhere back a long time ago everything was like let’s start all over again.” Continue reading.

Trump Retreats to His Hannity Bunker

Beaten by the pandemic and down in the polls, a President and his propagandist create an alternate reality.

June began poorly for President Trump, and it’s ending worse. Despite Trump’s optimistic pronouncements about the coronavirus, the pandemic is surging across the American South and West. His poll numbers against Joe Biden are cratering. His former national-security adviser is selling a book that calls him a corrupt fool who’s unfit for office. The number of jobless Americans continues to climb. But, luckily, there are some things Trump can still count on—like the Fox News host Sean Hannity.

On Thursday night, with America deep in a crisis that shows no sign of easing, Trump appeared at a Fox News “town hall” led by Hannity. It was a reassuringly safe space for the President. There was not a single mention of the terrifying spike of covid-19 cases in Texas or Arizona or anywhere else. No one so much as alluded to the hundred and twenty-five thousand or so Americans who have already died from the disease. And Hannity—Trump’s close friend and confidant, who has been called his shadow White House chief of staff—refrained from citing the recent wave of national polls, including one by Fox, that show Trump losing to Biden by double-digit percentage points. The audience of Trump superfans, many of whom wore pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” gear, obliged as well. When Hannity got around to taking questions from them, twenty-five minutes into the forty-three-minute broadcast, a woman named Linda asked Trump, “What do you think is your greatest accomplishment?”

Hannity’s latest in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign was perfectly predictable, of course. The TV host, who is paid twenty-five million dollars a year by Fox, is so reliable a wingman to the President that my colleague Jane Mayer reported that Trump bragged he was a ten out of ten on the loyalty scale. Before the 2018 midterms, the President had Hannity appear onstage at his big preëlection rally, a faux pas even for Fox that earned Hannity a reprimand from his bosses. Before Thursday’s event, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump hosted Hannity as his guest on Marine One, and photographers snapped a picture of U.S. Marine guards saluting as Hannity walked on the tarmac to the plane’s steps. In a pre-town-hall interview, at a Wisconsin airplane hangar, the two looked like co-stars in a buddy movie; they were even dressed in matching long red ties and dark suits. When the show got going, Trump saluted Hannity as a “great journalist.” Hannity’s show is the Fox bunker that Trump runs to when everything is going wrong. Continue reading

Mark Cuban Enlightens Fox News Viewers With Key Difference Between Biden, Trump

The “Shark Tank” star compared Trump and Biden’s thoughts on running the country.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban appeared on Fox News this week to declare his support for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has been the subject of countless attacks on the conservative network.

The “Shark Tank” star used the Tuesday interview on Sean Hannity’s widely watched primetime show to highlight one key difference between the former vice president and President Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump doesn’t want to run a country. He wants to run a campaign. Joe Biden actually wants to run a country,” the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks said. Continue reading.

Fox News’ Sean Hannity gets caught flat-footed when Mark Cuban demolishes Trump live on air

AlterNet logoBillionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban publicly called out President Donald Trump for “always playing the victim card” during a Wednesday appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.

“This is what really bothers me about the president: He’s the most powerful man in the world, and he always plays the victim card,” Cuban said. “‘The Dems are out to get me! The media is out to get me!’”

“You’ve got to be the leader,” the billionaire added. “You’ve got to be the strongest man in the game, and he just hasn’t shown that strength.” Continue reading.

Study finds people who watched Sean Hannity were more likely to die from COVID-19

AlterNet logoA new study from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics found that “greater viewership of ‘Hannity’ relative to ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ was strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic.”

Fox News host Sean Hannity has been heavily criticized for echoing President Donald Trump’s initial attempts to downplay the threat posed by the new coronavirus. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, his colleague at the right-leaning network who has framed the issue in more nationalistic terms, has been credited with convincing the president to take the pandemic seriously.

“Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February, while Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February,” the researchers wrote in the working paper. Continue reading.