A viral fake news story on Monday morning declares: “Ivanka’s Jewish In-Laws Call Out President Trump’s Unconstitutional Muslim Ban (VIDEO).”
From the headline, it might appear that Jared Kushner’s parents had actually criticized President Donald Trump’s recent executive order suspending the Syrian refugee program and temporarily restricting travel from seven terror-prone countries previously identified by Congress and President Barack Obama. In fact, the story is classic “fake news.”
The website, “Bipartisan Report,” calls itself “The Internet’s Largest newspaper.” (Alexa ranks it at 7,924 globally, and at 2,087 in the United States.) “Bipartisan” is rather fanciful advertising, as a quick glance at the site’s front page reveals an extreme, hysterical left-wing echo chamber, with “bipartisan” headlines like “Canada Just Made An Offer To Refugees That Exposes Trump As A Monster” and “Starbucks Gives Trump Defiant Middle Finger, Makes Refugee Announcement.”
The story about the Kushners cribs from a Slate.com story by Daniel Politi, “Watch Jared Kushner’s Grandmother Talk of Refugee Plight, Warn Against Another Hitler.” (Politi’s story itself is an aggregation of other news reports.) The core of the story is a video of Kushner’s grandmother giving an interview to an oral history project in 1982, discussing the plight of Jews trying to flee Nazi Europe. The story is only relevant if you consider Syrian refugees (who, theoretically, have dozens of Arab and Muslim states to which to flee, some of whom are also economic migrants) analogous to Jews, and Trump to Adolf Hitler.
The “Bipartisan Report” story recycles much of the Slate story, down to the embedded tweets. But the headline implies — as Slate’s story does not — that Mrs. Kushner was commenting on current events. Classic fake news — and catnip for the left.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.