This week in stupid 

• Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk: “If you are a man in this country and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you’re not a man.”

This week in scary

• Alex Jones attacked “globalists” after the Trump shooting: “These people are beyond evil. They’re cancer, and they’re going to have to be cut out.”
• At Heritage’s Policy Fest at the RNC, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan pledged mass deportations under another Trump administration: “No one’s off the table.”

Excuse me?

• Fox’s Jesse Watters pushed debunked claims after the Trump shooting: “The Pittsburgh field office … buried the Biden bribery tip in Ukraine.”
• Former Daily Wire host Candace Owens criticized a Sikh prayer at the Republican National Convention: “It’s not emblematic of America.”
• CNN anchor Kasie Hunt claimed former President Donald Trump has embraced a message of unity during the Republican National Convention.
• The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh: “The public school system should be totally abandoned.”

This week in Project 2025

For Media Matters’ complete coverage of Project 2025, please visit this section of our website.

• Project 2025 proposes an extreme anti-worker agenda that would severely curtail unions’ ability to collectively bargain on behalf of their members and reverse gains organized labor has made in recent years.
• Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts agreed with Daily Wire host Michael Knowles that politics “is the medium” for achieving “supernatural ends.”
• Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller is attempting to distance himself and the organization he founded, America First Legal, from Project 2025.
• After airing footage of Vice President Kamala Harris criticizing Project 2025, Fox News rushed to distance Trump and Vance from it.
• A Project 2025 contributor is pushing tariff policies that would reignite inflation. Press coverage of his Republican National Convention speech didn’t mention it.

J.D. Vance described Alex Jones as a truth-teller to a Project 2025 partner organization

New reporting from ProPublica and Documented revealed that Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, praised far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as a truth-teller during a closed-door meeting with the Project 2025 partner organization Teneo Network in 2021.

In a speech to the network, Vance said that he got backlash when he said that Jones “is a better source of information than Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC gal,” which he described as a “plainly obvious observation.” He went on to add that “the most important truths often come from people who are crazy 60 percent of the time but they’re right 40 percent of the time.”

The Teneo Network is a right-wing networking group spearheaded by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. Vance joined the group six years ago, and it’s one of over 100 conservative partner organizations included on the Heritage Foundation’s advisory board for Project 2025, an extreme right-wing initiative to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration.

Meanwhile, on his July 16 show, Jones said he was “in a meeting with J.D. Vance a month ago,” calling him “a great guy” and adding that “he’s defended me when I was being censored.”

Republican convention features speakers who have called for and downplayed political violence

Donald Trump reportedly reframed the Republican National Convention on the fly around the theme of “unity” after a shooter targeted him during a rally a few days previously. But many of the featured RNC speakers, including Trump himself, have a history of encouraging political violence or downplaying it when it happens to Democrats.

Media outlets that covered the RNC should not buy the MAGA narrative that messaging has “softened” or that there is any sort of “unity” pivot.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who was given a prime-time speaking slot before Trump’s speech, has a long history of encouraging conspiracy theories that reportedly inspired multiple mass shootings throughout the country. He was also a primary validator of the lies that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Other speakers who have validated political violence include Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I invite you to read this thorough piece detailing the history many RNC speakers have of calling for and downplaying political violence.

Right-wing media and social media users spread conspiracy theories about the Trump rally shooting

Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, right-wing media figures and social media users have spread baseless conspiracy theories and claims about the shooting.

• Far-right figures spread a 4chan hoax that there was a stand-down order before the shooting.
• QAnon figures revived a baseless conspiracy theory that Alex Soros had threatened Trump, apparently suggesting it was connected to the shooting.
• Far-right figures claimed a protester at a 2016 Trump rally was the shooter.
• Far-right figures baselessly suggesting the shooting could be attributed to the “intelligence agencies,” the “deep state,” foreign actors, or “an RNC/Israeli hit job.”

In case you missed it

• During coverage of the Republican National Convention, news media had at times failed to adequately contextualize J.D. Vance’s extremism on abortion and failed to hold conservative guests accountable for whitewashing his radical anti-abortion legacy.
• After last week’s shooting at a Trump rally, right-wing media have claimed that Democrats and others should tone down their supposedly inflammatory rhetoric and that President Joe Biden should pardon Trump.
• A QAnon influencer said on a livestream that she received credential for the Republican National Convention, which she was attending.
• Major news outlets are downplaying and ignoring what happened to Trump’s last running mate in their coverage of his new one.
• After Trump survived an assassination attempt last Saturday, right-wing media attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle’s emphasis on hiring more women.
• After a Republican National Committee member conducted a Sikh prayer during the first day of the Republican National Convention, right-wing influencers attacked the “shameful” and “pagan” prayer, claiming it “betrayed the true God,” was “not emblematic of America,” and was actually “decorated word salad for ‘Hail Satan’” and “anti-Christian evil.”
• Media Matters’ Matt Gertz argues that a Republican National Convention featuring Tucker Carlson — a demagogue whose rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of a terroristic mass shooter — cannot preach unity. Matt also points out the role Carlson played in J.D. Vance’s right-wing rebrand.
• While reporting on the Republican National Convention, several media outlets fell for the GOP’s confusing messaging on its abortion platform, misleadingly suggesting that the party is shifting away from previous longstanding abortion positions.
• Though violent crime has plummeted this year and there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime spike, Fox News has run nearly 1,000 weekday segments on “migrant crime” in 2024.