Inside the bizarre propaganda Matt Gaetz was trying to push from 'China's Fox News'

During a hearing this week, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was humiliated after promoting a report from the Global Times to justify the end of military aid to Ukraine — only for the witness to point out the Global Times is Chinese state-run media.

But there's a lot more to the story, wrote Aaron Blake for The Washington Post on Tuesday.

"The Trump administration in 2020 designated the Global Times and three other outlets as 'foreign missions' because they are 'effectively controlled by the government of the People’s Republic of China,'" wrote Blake. "'This designation recognizes PRC propaganda outlets as foreign missions and increases transparency relating to the CCP and PRC government’s media activities in the United States,' the State Department said."

"Some media scholars have likened the Global Times to China’s Fox News. The New York Times in 2019 labeled it 'a 24-hour propaganda machine' whose top editor at the time was 'seen as a combative public voice of the administration of President Xi Jinping in an era of more open rivalry with the United States,'" said the report. "Responding to a request for comment from The Washington Post,Gaetz spokesman Joel Valdez said, 'Congressman Gaetz wanted to ask if the report was true. The panelist said it wasn’t true, and that was a good enough answer for him.' He did not address the congressman’s apparent surprise at where his source came from."

The specific article Gaetz was pushing alleged that the Azov Battalion was getting access to U.S. weapons. The Azov Battalion is a militia founded by far-right extremists that was later incorporated into Ukraine's military and separated from its original extremist mission. Russian propagandists have long used the existence of the group to claim, baselessly, that the entire Ukrainian government is run by neo-Nazis, one of the public justifications used by Vladimir Putin for the invasion of the country.

The Global Times article cites a 2018 blog post to support the idea the U.S. is training the Azov fighters — but there is no firm evidence to support this.

"The Global Times article goes on to cite various experts accusing the United States of 'inciting conflicts between Ukraine and Russia” and “being very much conniving with the neo-Nazi forces' in Eastern Europe," wrote Blake. "It cites the United States and Ukraine having voted against a United Nations resolution on 'combating the glorification of' Nazism and neo-Nazism. But it does not explain that this is a resolution frequently pushed by Russia, which many European countries abstain from voting on. The United States has repeatedly said the resolution calls for 'unacceptable limits on the fundamental freedom of expression' and that it’s a thinly veiled political attack on Ukraine and even a pretext for Russia’s invasion."