The mysterious Jay Maxson tried to work up a little anger in a Jan. 24 MRC NewsBusters post:
Tennys Sandgren, the 97th-ranked men’s tennis player in the world, just pulled off the greatest victory of his life in the Australian Open. He took out No. 5 seed Dominic Thiem in five sets Monday. The huge upset moved Sandgren into the quarterfinals with some of the great names of tennis, including Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. That alone should have been the big story, but instead liberal media checked out his social media, branded him “alt-right” and ganged up on him.
During the press conference after upsetting Theim, an unidentified Aussie reporter ambushed Sandgren about his alleged social media ties to the alt-right:
“Tennys, the rise in your profile has drawn attention to your social media output, which includes some political figures who might be considered outside the mainstream. Yeah, there was a #Pizzagate exchange at some point, and I just wondered if you were concerned about having yourself connected to some of these controversial figures.”
Sandgren found the question amusing and laughed. The reporter continued the questioning, asking him about various conspiracy theories and people identified as alt-right. Sandgren denied he’s alt-right and responded:
“I mean, no. I’m not concerned about it. It’s fine, it’s fine. Look, who you follow on Twitter I feel like doesn’t matter even a little bit. What information you see doesn’t dictate what you think or believe. I think it’s crazy to think that. I think it’s crazy to assume that, to say, ‘Oh well he’s following X person so he believes all the things that this person believes.’ I think that’s ridiculous.”
Sandgren added that he’s “a firm Christian” whose allegiance is for “Christ and following Him and that’s what I support.”
Maxson, however, is a little on the vague side about exactly what Sandgren tweeted that made the media (correctly) think he’s alt-right, stating only that his Twitter account had “numerous links to right-wing ideologues” and that he “had engaged with people spreading misinformation portraying Hillary Clinton as a Satan-worshiping occultist, and ‘Pizzagate, a similarly baseless conspiracy theory hoax that Clinton was connected to a pizzeria child sex ring.'”
In fact, Sandgren said in a tweet that he had read “everything” about Pizzagate and concluded: “It’s sickening and the collective evidence is too much to ignore.” And he went far beyond merely “engaging with” people spreading the occult stuff about Hillary (which may be the first time the MRC admitted something bad about Hillary is “misinformation”); he effectively endorsed it by claiming that people don’t know what to do with it. Or they are concocting a way to make it sound not so bad.”
Instead of telling us the full details of Sandgren’s tweets, Maxson whined that he was “ambushed” with questions about it and that one blogger “is now labeling Sandgren a ‘Pizzagate Truther’ and castigating him for believing in ‘fake news'”– a contention Maxson never disputes.