Right Wing Watch

Right Wing Watch, a project of People For the American Way, is a project dedicated to ongoing presentation of right wing organizations and their communications (e-mails, television and internet broadcasts, blogs, websites).[2] It keeps track of and presents many of the embarrassing, vitriolic, or bigoted things that are said by them on a variety of topics, including LGBT rights, Islam, and reproductive rights.

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“”To our readers: A Donald Trump presidency threatens to empower dangerous elements of the Radical Right that have, until recently, been relegated to the fringes of America. Never has the work of Right Wing Watch, a project of the People For the American Way dedicated to exposing the Far-Right"s extreme and intolerant agenda, been more important. As a non-profit, our main source of support is readers like you. If you use Right Wing Watch, please consider making a contribution to support our work at this critical time.[1]

RWW is unashamedly partisan, but it does its homework and works to get its claims right.

Goals

The goal of Right Wing Watch is, by showing the many backwards things said by important right-wing organizations, to show that the organizations are harmful and should not be taken seriously. Many of the organizations they showcase are, despite the inhumane treatment they wish upon whatever groups they dislike, still taken quite seriously in the media and are often brought in to provide counterpoints to individuals on a panel that may disagree with them. By giving additional context to what the beliefs of these organizations and people espouse, they can show that the groups are not just "another side of the argument" but rather dangerous extremists (of course, when many of your positions involve denying human rights to minority groups based on their immutable characteristics, it's hard to come up with arguments that don't appear as extreme and bigoted as they actually are).

Organizations they keep track of

Right Wing Watch keeps track of a variety of organizations, but the groups they track do tend to be extremist in one regard or another. Common threads seem to include being against homosexuality, birth control, abortion, divorce, feminism, Islam, secularism, and atheism. Despite this, the groups bill themselves as just supporting "traditional" family values, defending the United States as a Christian nation, or otherwise trying to promote a return to the good old days. Several of the groups want more than just preventing things like gay marriage, going as far as to call for a return to the days before Lawrence v. Texas and the return of the criminalization of sex acts between homosexual men.

A more complete list of organizations they keep track of or have reported on is available here.

People they keep track of

Right Wing Watch tends to focus on individuals within the organizations that are high up or are a public face in the associations (on the radio, through press releases, on their blogs). This avoids accusations of the association fallacy, since the individuals are often representative of or representatives of the group they are members of.

A more complete list of the people they keep track of or have reported on is available here.

Their YouTube channel

They also run a YouTube channel to upload (usually) short clips of people that they keep track of to save you the time of watching their entire videos to see the good bits, with their watermark in the corner of the video. Chances are, if you watch The Daily Show, any show in the TYT network, or any MSNBC show that mocks Republicans, you've seen a video with their watermark a few times. Here are some of the people that they upload videos of frequently.

In 2013 Colorado Assembly candidate Gordon Klingenschmitt tried to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to shut down RWW on the grounds that it was violating copyrights by using extracts of his stupid videos in their own videos. RWW was briefly taken down twice, until the Electronic Frontier Foundation added their weight and threatened to take Klingenschmitt to court.[3]

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References
  1. Right Wing Watch
  2. About Right Wing Watch, Right Wing Watch, September 11, 2013.
  3. Attempt to Silence the Political Speech at Right Wing Watch, Takedown Hall of Shame, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2013
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