In recent months, Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver has repeatedly attacked us here at Right Wing Watch for being one of “the biggest purveyors of fake news in the country,” but has never provided any explanation of just what sort of “fake news” he believes that we have supposedly been spreading.
But on an recent episode of the “Faith and Freedom” radio program, Staver finally provided some “evidence” by citing our post from last month featuring audio of him insisting that the terrorist attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was not an attack on LGBTQ people and that first responders were traumatized because they had to “get tested for AIDS-related conditions because they’re literally walking in pools of blood.”
In our post, we provided audio of Staver’s remarks and a description of what he said:
Staver, who criticized memorials in the wake of the attack for turning into “homosexual love-fests,” went on to insist that local police who responded to the attack were traumatized because they had to “get tested for AIDS-related conditions” because of all the blood on the scene.
“In regards to the Pulse nightclub,” he said, “as tragic as it is, some of these officers have no doubt gone through trauma as well because they were going through the Pulse nightclub, it was blood everywhere and, you know, they’re having to get tested for AIDS-related conditions because they’re literally walking in pools of blood.”
Now, Staver is claiming that our post was “fake news.”
“Fake news is nothing new,” Staver said. “We’ve seen fake news all the time and Right Wing Watch and the Huffington Post and others like those publications or so-called media sources, if you will, are the epitome of fake news. We’re going to be talking about one of the fake news stories that was instituted by Right Wing Watch.”
“We also mentioned that the police were traumatized,” he continued. “I know that for a fact because I know people who have counseled with them and it would be natural to go in a place like that, to see all these dead bodies and blood everywhere, in literally their shoes and their bodies are filled with people’s blood. Well, as a natural consequence of that, they need to be tested for different kinds of diseases, including AIDS, and so some of them have to be tested for that. So Right Wing Watch said that was just crazy that we said that it was motivated by terror and that homosexuals have a higher incidents of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS, they were laughing at that and this is just part of the whole fake news.”
Staver and his co-hosts Matt Barber and Holly Meade spent the rest of the broadcast rattling off statistics and railing against homosexuality but didn’t provide any evidence that anything we reported about what they said on the initial broadcast was false or misleading.
Apparently, simply reporting on the things that they say and providing audio of them saying those things now constitutes “fake news.”
