Posobiec

==

SEE POSO 2

see oann

CNP stop steal?

see fake news, alt rt troll

html cowboy bak 6 22

HILLARY EPSTEIN DEPOS ASKED ABOUT UFO AND PIZZAGATE

2 26 26

[

The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder

2.01M subscribers

47,700 views Streamed live on Feb 26, 2026 The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder

FUN HALF: https://youtube.com/live/MJip3WVxqDM?... 2/26/26 - Emma Vigeland welcomes Daniel Boguslaw, investigative reporter at the Intercept, and later DSA Co-chair Ashik Siddique (he/him) and DSA Co-chair Megan Romer (she/her). They are the two elected leaders of the organization for 2025-2027 Check out Daniel's work for the ‪@TheInterceptFLM‬ : https://theintercept.com/staff/daniel... Check out the DSA's website: https://www.dsausa.org/

Greg Gutfeld says Ilhan Omar has 'no right' to that level of rage in the US after SOTU outburst

// bs

The Gateway Pundit

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com › 2026 › 02 › greg-gutfeld-rips-ilhan-omar-her-behavior-during

Greg Gutfeld Rips Ilhan Omar Over Her Behavior During Trump's SOTU ...

2 days agoScreencap of Twitter/X video. During The Five on FOX News today, host Greg Gutfeld tore into Rep. Ilhan Omar over her unhinged behavior during Trump's State of the Union address last night. He began the segment by talking about all of the disgusting behavior of Democrats but eventually zeroed in on Omar, saying 'She Repulses me.' Gutfeld pointed out that Omar is lucky to be in America at ...

YouTube

rww Sean Feucht Says Democrats' Reaction During SOTU Was A 'Demonic Manifestation' | People For

2 26

---

rww --> huffpo

no lnx huffpo

The Far Right Is Having A ‘Coronation Ball’ At The Watergate Hotel To Celebrate Trump’s Inauguration

Major MAGA figures are set to attend the black-tie event, hosted by a publishing house whose marquee author has advocated for a “dictator” to run the U.S.

By

Christopher Mathias

:{Jan 7, 2025,

A far-right publishing house that publishes the works of historical and contemporary fascists is hosting a “Coronation Ball” at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., to celebrate Donald Trump’s second inauguration, featuring a guest list that’s a veritable who’s-who of MAGA influencers and so-called New Right luminaries.

Passage Press will throw the confab in the Watergate Hotel’s Moretti Ballroom on the evening of Jan. 19, the night before Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the U.S., according to an events page on the publishing house’s website.

That the event’s title refers to Trump’s inauguration as a “coronation” — a word typically reserved for the crowning of kings and queens in monarchies — underscores the anti-democratic, authoritarian nature of the black-tie soiree.

“Celebrate the inauguration of Donald John Trump,” Passage Press tweeted Monday, the four-year anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “Be there as NRX is introduced to the MAGA brain trust. Be there as MAGA meets the Tech Right.”

“NRX” stands for “neoreactionary” and is used as a shorthand for “the Dark Enlightenment,” a far-right movement whose adherents are often as explicit in their distaste for democracy as they are in their reverence for fascism and monarchism.

One of Passage Press’ biggest authors is Dark Enlightenment figurehead Curtis Yarvin. The former Silicon Valley programmer blogged for years under the pen name “Mencius Moldbug” before emerging as a kind of court philosopher for reactionary tech billionaires and prominent MAGA movers and shakers (including Vice President-elect JD Vance).

Yarvin has advocated for a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator” to be in charge of America. He is scheduled to attend the Coronation Ball, according to a post from Passage Press, as are Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Christopher Rufo, Steve Bannon, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova.

The publishing house later deleted its tweet listing the Coronation Ball’s “confirmed attendees.”

Hotels, particularly in the Washington area, have a history of canceling or refusing to host gatherings for white supremacists or other bigots.

Reached for comment about hosting a party whose organizers and prominent attendees have espoused fascist views, the Watergate Hotel — housed in the same building where former President Richard Nixon’s lackeys broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in 1972, precipitating Nixon’s resignation — sent HuffPost the following statement:

“The Watergate Hotel prides itself on being a luxury destination that reflects the values of inclusivity and respect. As a hotel with a long-standing reputation for excellence, we prioritize the safety, comfort, and dignity of our guests and our dedicated team of employees.”

What we know about Passage Press comes largely from a remarkable Guardian exposé published by journalist Jason Wilson last year. In the piece, he unmasked the head of the company, a far-right influencer who went by the name “L0m3z,” as Jonathan Keeperman, a former English lecturer at the University of California, Irvine.

Jonathan Keeperman speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington D.C., Wednesday, July 10, 2024.

Jonathan Keeperman speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington D.C., Wednesday, July 10, 2024. DOMINIC GWINN via Getty Images

As “L0m3z,” Keeperman accrued a following on X, where he currently has 95,000 followers, in part by posting invective directed at anti-racist protesters, queer people and journalists. He expressed support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the armed teenager who fatally shot two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020, writing, “May a million Kyle Rittenhouses bloom.”

He also wrote the he was “coming around to the idea that the most powerful and effective political argument against the left in 2020 is probably simple as: shut up fag.”

And Keeperman once appeared to advocate the mass execution of journalists. “The press are in fact the enemy,” he tweeted. “They are mewling midwit scum. Sniveling liars and desperate status junkies. My abiding contempt for them is only ever confirmed.” As Wilson reported, Keeperman also posted a list of “policy proposals” that included the phrase “lamppost the journos” — an apparent call to kill reporters by hanging them.

Keeperman and Passage Press didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about these statements, nor did they respond to questions seeking further details about the Coronation Ball.

Under Keeperman’s leadership, Passage Press has reprinted “out-of-print or public-domain books by historical fascist and reactionary writers,” Wilson wrote, including works “by radical German nationalist and militarist Ernst Jünger; Peter Kemp, who fought as a volunteer in Francisco Franco’s army during the Spanish civil war; and two counter-revolutionary Russian aristocrats, White Russian general Pyotr Wrangel and Prince Serge Obolensky.”

Passage Press’ contemporary authors include Steve Sailer, a blogger for the white supremacist site VDARE. Sailer has written that Black people “tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups” and “need stricter moral guidance from society.” Sailer’s book for Passage Press, Noticing, is an anthology of his musings on, among other subjects, “human biodiversity,” the preferred white supremacist nomenclature for eugenics and so-called race science. (Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson provided a fawning blurb for the book, writing that “if the meritocracy were real, Steve Sailer would be one of the most famous writers in the world.”)

Passage Press also publishes a magazine called Man’s World, which is edited and run by the pseudonymous misogynist “Raw Egg Nationalist.” In the Fox Nation documentary “The End of Men,” hosted by Carlson, Raw Egg Nationalist argued that “globalists” were manipulating food supplies to lower testosterone levels and emasculate men. Before working with Passage Press, Raw Egg Nationalist published books with Antelope Hill, a neo-Nazi publishing house based in Pennsylvania.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis listens to activist and New College of Florida trustee Christopher Rufo before signing three education bills on the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla. on Monday, May 15, 2023. The Washington Post via Getty Images

Keeperman has also formed relationships with major figures in the MAGA movement, including Rufo, a fellow at the major conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute and close ally of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Republican governor is known for fanning the flames of outrage surrounding “critical race theory” and “trans ideology,” which right-wing figures like Rufo claim are being taught in America’s schools.

After Trump’s election victory in November, Rufo claimed he was set to meet with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago to pitch him on policy proposals.

Rufo is listed as an attendee of the Coronation Ball, according to a tweet from Passage Press, but didn’t immediately respond to a request to confirm his attendance.

Rufo, Yarvin and Keeperman are often considered part of the New Right, a rebranding of familiar counter-revolutionary and anti-democratic politics. It’s the same ideology that animated the “alt-right,” the white supremacist movement that exploded into the public consciousness for its close relationship to the 2016 Trump campaign, only to collapse in the wake of its deadly and disastrous “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Coronation Ball hearkens back to two alt-right gatherings in Washington D.C. celebrating Trump’s election win. In November 2016, the city hosted a conference held by the now-defunct National Policy Institute, the fascist organization helmed by suit-and-tie neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Spencer finished his speech by declaring “Hail Victory!” — the English translation of the Nazi cry “Sieg Heil” — and “Hail Trump!” A viral video from the event captured Spencer’s supporters throwing up the stiff-armed Nazi salute in response.

There was also the Deploraball event in January 2017, on the eve of Trump’s first inauguration, attended by a slew of conspiracy theorists and bigots, including the anti-Muslim activist Pamela Gellar; Gavin McInnes, the founder of the violent fascist street gang the Proud Boys; white nationalist Lauren Southern; Jim Hoft, founder of the misinformation-heavy news site Gateway Pundit; Cernovich, a pundit and date rape denier; and Posobiec, a conspiracist with a long history of associating with extremists.

Cernovic and Posobiec are both scheduled to appear at this month’s Coronation Ball, according to a tweet from Passage Press. They also both confirmed that they would attend in posts on X.

Posobiec’s path from PizzaGate influencer to fancy Watergate gala attendee is representative of how Trump’s ascent in politics has catapulted a coterie of once-fringe media figures into powerful positions in American politics.

He got his start as a “Game of Thrones” blogger before pivoting to promoting multiple far-right conspiracy theories, all while developing extensive ties to white supremacists and publicly posting racist and antisemitic messages online.

Posobiec nevertheless became a MAGA star and a prominent pro-Trump propagandist, appearing regularly on Fox News and at the Conservative Political Action Conference, among other forums. Last year he published the book “Unhumans: The Secret History Of Communist Revolutions (And How To Crush Them),” in which he argues that Americans with left-of-center views are subhuman while praising the violent fascistic regimes of Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. (Vance provided a blurb for the book.)

“President Donald J. Trump is waiting in the wings,” Posobiec said while promoting ”Unhumans” at the National Conservatism Conference last year. “And when he assumes office again, let me tell you, the globalists and their entire regime will be smashed to pieces and scattered to the winds.”

He then added: “We don’t negotiate with unhumans because that’s the stakes of this — humanity versus unhuman; populist nationalist versus atheistic Marxist; strength, beauty and genius versus weakness, ugliness and stupidity; civilization versus barbarism; crime and chaos versus law.”

Other expected guests at the Coronation Ball, per Passage Press, include Joshua Lisec, a ghostwriter for right-wing influencers and a co-author with Posobiec of ”Unhumans.”

Jack Posobiec, center, attends the cocktail hour of the New York Young Republican Club's annual gala at Cipriani Wall Street, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2024, in New York.

Steve Bannon is set to attend, too, according to Passage Press. He cofounded Breitbart, which he called the “platform for the alt-right,” before running Trump’s 2016 campaign and later serving in Trump’s White House. Bannon was recently released from prison after serving four months for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. He is currently the host of the popular ”War Room” podcast. Bannon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he would attend the Coronation Ball, but his War Room co-host, Natalie Winters, tweeted that she will be at the event.

Two other popular podcasters, Khachiyan and Nekrasova, hosts of “Red Scare,” are also scheduled to attend the Coronation Ball, according to Passage Press. Khachiyan and Nekrasova started the podcast years ago as a nominally left, socialist program, but eventually emerged as apostles of the New Right, cozying up to Yarvin and far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel, along with the type of conspiracy theorist they used to skewer — InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Neither Khachiyan or Nekrasova immediately responded to a request for comment.

Grimes, the famous musician and ex-wife of Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and a close Trump ally, currently on a campaign of embracing Europe’s most extreme right-wing and fascist political parties — was listed by Passage Press as a “confirmed attendee,” but a representative told HuffPost she will not be in attendance.

Also listed as an attendee is Jeremy Carl, a fellow at the Claremont Institute, the influential MAGA think tank. Carl is the author of the book ”The Unprotected Class,” which ludicrously asserts that “anti-white racism is the most predominant and politically powerful form of racism in America today.” Carl didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Countdown To Trump Is On

On Jan. 20, Donald Trump will reclaim the most powerful seat in our nation's government. HuffPost will continue to fearlessly report on the new administration — but we need your help.

On Tuesday morning, Passage Press tweeted that the Coronation Ball was sold out. That tweet was deleted Tuesday afternoon, around the same time the ticket price for the event on the Passage Press website shot up from $250 to $875.

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/jack-posobiec/fbi-warns-threats-state-poll-workers-right-wing-media-and-denialist-groups-spread

mma 10 22

a combination of local election denialist groups and national conservative media figures are driving conspiracy theories about voter fraud in Pennsylvania — the same falsehoods and misinformation that are putting election workers at an increased risk of violence, according to the FBI and Department of Justice. Pennsylvania is one of several states that have seen increased threats of violence toward election officials, driven by false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that future voter fraud is likely.

Nearly all of the groups and media figures pushing these narratives in Pennsylvania support the gubernatorial campaign of Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who helped to incite the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, and has embraced numerous extremist positions. Mastriano also unsuccessfully used his position to attempt to overturn Pennsylvania’s presidential election results, ingratiating himself to some of the state’s most extreme conservative activists.

Against this backdrop, former President Donald Trump has already begun organizing attempts to challenge the results of the state’s midterm elections, according to Rolling Stone.

Trump has been briefed on plans in multiple states and critical races — including in Georgia. But Pennsylvania has grabbed his interest most keenly, including in the Senate contest between Democrat John Fetterman and the Trump-endorsed GOP contender Mehmet Oz. If the Republican does not win by a wide enough margin to trigger a speedy concession from Fetterman — or if the vote tally is close on or after Election Night in November — Trump and other Republicans are already preparing to wage a legal and activist crusade against the “election integrity” of Democratic strongholds such as the Philly area.

Already, MAGA activists and Republican Party officials are creating the conditions that make voter suppression and violence against workers more likely. Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee's director for election integrity inPennsylvaniasaid on a conference call with election denialist group Audit the Vote PA that they’d filled “6,000 poll watcher positions in the state this year, compared with 1,000 in 2020,” according to Reuters, which noted that “election conspiracy groups also often appear at events with Republican officials, focused on recruiting volunteers to help watch the polls, according to the groups themselves and county officials.”

Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state recently told PennLive that “a lot of these threats are fueled by mis- and disinformation,” emphasizing, “It’s important to get out accurate information about the election process in Pennsylvania so voters and the public know that when there are delays in counting, it doesn’t mean anything nefarious happening.”

The deep connections between these denialist influencers, their groups, and right-wing media outlets illustrate the extent to which conspiracy theories about voter fraud have become a unifying principle in conservative organizing. Now, those same false claims are potentially driving threats and harassment against election workers across the country.

Right-wing media champion Doug Mastriano’s campaign

Mastriano rose to prominence challenging Biden’s win in Pennsylvania in 2020, and election denialism has been at the forefront of his campaign for governor. He has spread these conspiracy theories across conservative media while rejecting mainstream interviews. He’s a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, which has become a hub for election denialists from all over the country.

One of Mastriano’s top champions in conservative media is neo-Nazi collaborator and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec,who has appeared at campaign events for Mastriano as recently as this month. Posobiec is another War Room mainstay and occasional guest host,often using Bannon’s platform to praise Mastriano’s campaign, including in an interview in July

Citation From the July 20, 2022, edition of War Room: Pandemic, streamed on Rumble

"The question on everybody’s mind I believe, certainly for this audience, the War Room audience, and if Steve were here right now he’d be asking the same exact question, is voter integrity,” Posobiec said near the beginning of the segment, focusing on the false idea that Pennsylvania's elections are insecure. “What can be done between now and November for the current election that you are in to preserve that idea of voter integrity and fight back against some of these issues that we’ve brought up in the past?” (Bannon was not on his show that day because he was in court unsuccessfully fighting his contempt of Congress case for refusing to testify before the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.)

“We’re going to have to have eyeballs on all the election stations,” Mastriano responded. “I need 20,000 poll watchers to cover the state.”

He then implored War Room listeners who were interested in volunteering “instead of complaining” to go to his website and sign up. To underline the point, Posobiec closed the interview by reminding the audience where they could go to volunteer to become a poll watcher.

More recently, Posobiec told War Room viewers that the governor’s race in Pennsylvania is even more important than in many other states, stating that whoever controlled that office would determine the state’s electoral votes in two years.

“If you’re looking at 2024, you have to understand that Pennsylvania is the keystone,” Posobiec said on October 1. “I railed on this in 2020. The secretary of state in Pennsylvania is an appointed Cabinet position of the governor. It is not a separately elected office.”

“That means the 2022 race for governor is the presidential race, because that determines who your secretary of state is going to be in a state which gives you 20 electoral votes,” he continued. “We’re going to make sure everybody understands the stakes that are at play here, because this is the game for our republic.”

Posobiec’s comments illustrate how Mastriano’s allies in right-wing media continue to shore up his conservative bona fides, even as his campaign attempts to obscure his extremist views. After winning the Republican gubernatorial primary in May, Mastriano or his staff apparently began deleting some of his more controversial videos and social media posts from his official accounts. These actions follow a pattern; as Media Matters previously reported, Mastriano has also posted and deleted more than 50 tweets in support of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

He may now be attempting to downplay his rampant election denialism in the weeks before the midterms. On the morning that Bannon was sentenced for contempt of Congress, Posobiec sat in as a guest co-host to interview Mastriano, and the two avoided the topic completely.

The previous evening, Mastriano appeared on conservative YouTuber Tim Pool’s show,further illustrating the candidate’s total enmeshment in right-wing media. Over the course of that more than two hour-long interview, Mastriano largely avoided pushing voter fraud conspiracy theories as well. Yet even when he seemingly attempts to moderate his position, Mastriano still perpetuates the idea that elections are fundamentally insecure and voter fraud is rampant.

“We’re working real hard to get at least one trained poll watcher in every polling station for transparency and accountability,” he said on Newsmax on October 24.

“Merely asking questions about the elections — it does not make me an election denier,” he said on One America News the same day.

But Mastriano had struck a very different tone immediately after the 2020 election. “We're going to take our power back,” he said on Bannon’s War Room on November 27, 2020, promising to “seat the electors" from a fake pro-Trump slate instead of recognizing Biden’s victory in the state.

A web of election denialist influencers

War Room has also been a platform for some of Pennsylvania’s most active conspiracy theorists, includingToni Shuppe, who heads denialist group Audit the Vote PA.Shuppe has argued that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory – which purports that high-ranking Democrats were involved in a child sex trafficking ring – is “absolutely real.” She also claimed that QAnon, which has many of the same themes as Pizzagate, is a “very valuable resource.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Posobiec also pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and created disinformation about the origins of QAnon in an apparent effort to save the Trump campaign from embarrassment.

In August, Shuppe appeared on War Room to advocate against using machines to count and tabulate votes, based on the debunked theory that voting machines were used to rig the 2020 election.

“We have a massive grassroots movement in Pennsylvania,” Bannon said. “It’s essentially what got President Trump elected in 2016, and to be brutally frank, it’s real votes, certifiable votes, it’s what got him to win Pennsylvania in 2020.” (In reality, Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020.)

“We’re dealing with a weaponized government, which, I don’t have to tell you or anybody that watches your show that that’s what we’re dealing with,” Shuppe told Bannon. “So there’s a risk there, but there’s nothing in the law that says we can’t make these changes in our report that’s on our website.

[vid CitationFrom the August 29, 2022, edition of War Room: Battleground, streamed on Rumble

in addition to appearing frequently on War Room and failing Fox News competitor One America News, Shuppe hosts her own streaming show, also called Audit the Vote PA. The show serves as a combination of propaganda outlet and organizing space to enlist new adherents and keep those already engaged active in the run-up to the midterms.

In July, Shuppe interviewed election denialist and retired CIA officer Sam Faddis, who reportedly recently met with Trump to lay out plans for challenging the midterm results in Pennsylvania.In that segment, Faddis promoted an upcoming rally he was participating in with election denier Catherine Engelbrecht,whose group True the Vote has become a leading voice in the nationwide denialist movement. Faddis also defended Mastriano, and cautioned that conservatives should not become demoralized at the prospect of needing to overcome stolen elections.

“And just in case you’re thinking about staying home and not voting, I get the frustration around 2020 isn’t fixed, we still have what appears to be an illegitimate president, and it is very tempting to throw in the towel and say, ‘What’s the point of voting?’” Shuppe said. “But I strongly encourage you otherwise because November 2022 in Pennsylvania is going to be a pivotal election, not just for our state, but I believe for the rest of the country.”

Shuppe also interviewed Posobiec earlier this month and the two pushed conspiracy theories about the state’s supposed election vulnerabilities.

“If you can get everything right in terms of turnout, if you get everything right in terms of integrity, then you get Pennsylvania back, you flip Pennsylvania,” Posobiec said. He later added, “In order to do that, you need to lay the groundwork out years ahead of the race. And that’s what Sen. Mastriano provides.”

Shuppe responded by claiming Democratic gubernatorial nominee and state Attorney General Josh Shapiro is “ultimately afraid that we’re going to get a transparent, free and fair election process with a Gov. Mastriano and they won’t be able to stuff ballots and cheat the way they did in 2020 [vid CitationFrom the October 5, 2022, edition of Audit the Vote PA, streamed on Rumble

on October 19, Shuppe interviewed local denialist activist Bill Borton, who opposes the use of drop boxes on the false grounds that they have been used to perpetuate widespread ballot stuffing.

“I am reasonably certain there hasn't been a free and fair election in the United States in over 20 years,” Borton said. “Maybe longer.”

“I would agree,” Shuppe responded.

Borton is a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by America First Legal (AFL), a conservative legal group founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller,against Chester County, Pennsylvania, over allegations that ballots had been dropped in unmonitored drop boxes in violation of state law. Borton, who helped obtain the footage, hopes the case or others like it will bring an end to ballot drop boxes altogether.

“Me being the eternal optimist that I am, this could conceivably mean that a day or so after the drop boxes open, we nab a couple people, have proof of it, and they all get shut down for the rest of the time leading up to the election,” Borton told Shuppe.

Though the complaint alleges that surveillance video shows “over 300 individuals” dropping off more than one ballot, which is against Pennsylvania law, some extremist media figures have exaggerated this case as an example of verified, intentional voter fraud and pressed that this exemplifies the need for physical monitoring at drop boxes.

Infowars’ resident insurrectionist Owen Shroyer opened his September 19 discussion of the subject by complaining that the media is “demonizing conservatives, demonizing Republicans for staking out polling locations and drop boxes,” citing evidence from the AFL that allegedly “found individuals stuffing ballot boxes, same people showing up multiple times with dozens of ballots.” Shroyer asked his audience, “Why don’t Democrats want you watching drop boxes? Because Democrats are using drop boxes to cheat and steal an election.: judge in a similar case brought by AFL in Pennsylvania ruled that in-person monitoring was not necessary.

“Since mail-in ballots have been in use, no fraud has been detected in Lehigh County with the mail-in ballot process,” Judge Thomas Capehart wrote.

Fox News hosts amplify bogus ballot stuffing claims

[vid]

Borton has played an outsized role in some of the national media attention on Pennsylvania’s elections. Most of the national conservative media coverage centers around mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes, both of which have been identified, incorrectly, by Pennsylvania election deniers and the Republican Party as previous sites of voter fraud.

Fox host Mark Levin celebrated AFL’sChester County complaint as a win, adding, “I suspect there's a hell of a lot more than one.”

Separately, a long-running legal fight over undated mail-in ballots came to a head on October 11, when the Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling that allowed undated ballots to be counted in a 2021 local county judge election. Pennsylvania law requires that mail-in ballot envelopes be hand-signed and dated, though both the state’s Commonwealth Court and 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that this provision was designed to unfairly throw out ballots. Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman issued guidance that same day directing counties to continue to count undated mail-in ballots, as the Supreme Court’s decision was not relevant to midterms.

On his radio show,Fox host Sean Hannity pressed that Chapman’s guidance was an excuse for Democrats to give their voters an advantage: “Of course, Democrats, they don't want to follow laws. They want to make them up as they go along and, you know, make everything work to their advantage.”

Levin was more direct, arguing that this shows “they're trying to steal the election for” Democratic Senate nominee and current Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. According to Levin, “This is the sort of thing that changes election results.”

On a previous show, Levin accused Democrats of “causing all this anguish, this anarchy,” as “the Republicans aren't in there trying to change state law through well-placed Republican officials. It’s the Democrats.”

Of course, as Posobiec outlined above, this is exactly the election denialist plan for 2024: Disrupt midterms, get Republicans elected, and lay the groundwork for an easy 2024 Trump win.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/mike-flynn/

no lnx

Inside the secret campaign to distance a former Trump NSA official from Michael Flynn's security team

Jordan Green and Raw Story July 28, 2022

In late 2020, Lt. General Michael Flynn sent a security team to the home of Staci Burk, an Arizona law student. The team leader asked Burk to prepare an affidavit with information about ballots on planes that could be used to support lawsuits filed by attorney Sidney Powell to overturn the 2020 election.

Members of the security team, part of a group called 1st Amendment Praetorian, took Burk’s cell phone against her will. She later learned that it turned up in Washington, DC a couple of days before Trump supporters overran the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Burk herself was not in DC in December 2020 and January 2021. She said in a court filing in February 2021 that she learned on Jan. 11 that her phone was at the Willard Hotel, which has been described as a “command center” of the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

The 1st Amendment Praetorian security team’s seven-week residency at Burk’s home upended her life. Burk fled her home, incurred financial debt, reassessed her beliefs about the election and struggled to repair her reputation as various conspiracy theorists in the election denial world assailed her credibility.

Burk’s ordeal with 1st Amendment Praetorian — better known by its initials 1AP — pulled her into the orbit of a dizzying array of pro-Trump actors, including Arizona politicians, conspiracy theorists and associates of Flynn and Powell.

In January 2022, almost one year after her cell phone was confiscated, a lawyer who served in theTrump White House Office of Presidential Personnel namedAndrew Kloster reached out to Burk with an unusual request. He wanted a written statement from her disassociating a former National Security Agency official and Flynn associate from 1AP.

The request came just as the investigation of the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol was causing increasing unease among allies of the former president.

Kloster told Burk he was representing Trump NSA official Jim Penroseas a “sort of a favor” during the phone call earlier this year, which Raw Story is reporting for the first time. Kloster also indicated he was familiar with the former president’s interest in the widening congressional probe.

Described in his Federalist Society bio as “a longtime fixture of the conservative movement” who had worked at the Heritage Foundation, Kloster joined the Trump White House Office of Presidential Personnel in 2020. After Trump left office, Kloster served as chief of staff for a special counsel appointed by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to investigate the outcome of the 2020 election in Wisconsin.

“I was in the Trump White House, and I know many people; I talk with them continually about what’s going on,” Kloster said. “And I’ve been involved with some of these other January 6th matters. And it’s really — I think at the highest level, [Penrose is] not involved with anything untoward. But there’s always concern when you’ve got these giant Democratic sort of fishing expeditions that he just wants to button things up so that he can — if anyone does come to him, he can say, ‘Look, I had nothing to do with this. I had nothing to do with that.’

“So, it’s one of those things, like, a lot of people are concerned — Jim is concerned,” Kloster continued. “And it’s more like what can he do affirmatively before anything — before anybody does anything to kind of help him protect himself. And so, I think your issue is one of those loose ends that he just wanted to button up — not because he has any — you know, things could just continue and nothing could ever happen, and he could not get that from you and things could still be totally fine. Or, he might need it at some point.”

Emails to the January 6th Committee for this story seeking clarification on whether Penrose is under scrutiny went unreturned.

According to a professional biography, Jim Penrose retired from the NSA as a senior-level defense intelligence analyst in 2014. Lin Wood, the defamation lawyer who collaborated with Powell to file election challenge lawsuits, has confirmed that Penrose joined Powell and Flynn at his South Carolina estate in November 2020 to work on the election, along with Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence captain, and Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas who would later lead the partisan review of the Arizona election.

Raw Story initially contacted Staci Burk in August 2021. She has continually expressed reluctance about going on the record due to her concern about ongoing threats from associates of Michael Flynn, including 1AP member Michael Kenny. She says she is releasing the recording now because she feels the public has a right to know about matters important to democracy.

Robert Patrick Lewis, the 1AP cofounder, received a subpoena from the January 6th Committee in November 2021, requesting that he appear for a deposition and turn over documents. Lewis’ lawyer, Leslie McAdoo Gordon, has since indicated that Philip Luelsdorff, the other cofounder, and the organization itself have also been subpoenaed. Lewis appeared before the committee in April and invoked the Fifth Amendment, on his lawyer’s advice.

Citing a ruling by a federal judge in California that gave credence to an assertion made by the committee that President Trump participated in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election, McAdoo Gordon said in a letter to the committee that the committee’s position puts pressure on the US Department of Justice to pursue charges.

“Thus, the committee’s theory creates a genuine risk of criminal exposure for anyone who may have, in the opinion of motivated prosecutors, assisted former President Trump or his supporters in any way as they contested the election results between November 2020 and January 6, 2021,” McAdoo Gordon wrote.

In an addendum provided to the committee in July, McAdooGordon confirmed that Joshua James, who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, was “a member of 1AP for a very short time in 2020.” James was charged as part of a conspiracy with other members of the Oath Keepers militia. McAdoo Gordon told the committee that James left 1AP after being advised he could not simultaneously be in the Oath Keepers and 1AP. She added that James was not a member of 1AP in January 2021 and has had no association with the group since that time.

Kloster told Burk that Penrose told him he had previously approached 1AP with a similar request seeking a statement absolving him of responsibility, without success.

“It’s timely because of all this general January 6th stuff,” Kloster told Burk. “And he’s not involved with any of that. But it’s just like, they certainly are at one level or another. And they’re probably flailing about. I mean, part of the reason — you’re like, ‘Oh, maybe they would collude to give him that’ — no, they don’t want to give him that because what they’d rather do is have anything to pin on anybody to save their own butts. But, according to him, they had talked and approached them several times to get some letter like this from them. And that is his interpretation of them kind of stiff-arming him is that they want to have him in their back pocket, along with whatever else they have, just to save their own butts on X, Y and Z.”

Burk did not accede to Kloster’s request because she told him that would be a lie, and she said he did not contact her again.

‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’

Based on his conversations with Jim Penrose, Andrew Kloster told Burk he understood his client’s relationship with 1st Amendment Praetorian to be minimal.

“It seems like he thinks that his relationship was that they were there in the mix and that he would talk with people because they reported to other people,” Kloster said. “He comes in as a contractor with a very limited relationship on his technical stuff. He sticks to that lane, but of course, everyone’s talking with everyone, and so he will talk to people. But he was not in the chain of command. He had no idea about X, Y and Z with your phone or whatever.”

As previously reported by ProPublica, Penrose told Burk during a phone call in late December 2020 that he had spent $75,000 to pay former FBI agents to look into two separate allegations about potentially illegal ballots delivered by plane in Phoenix and Seattle.

“Let me be crystal clear: I’m investigating this on behalf of Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, right, the people that are going to take this right up to the president and the Supreme Court and work on these cases,” Penrose told Burk during that call.

The call, which Burk recorded, took place on Christmas day after she and a 1AP member named Brandon Pittman had returned from a local shooting range. According to an incident report by the Florence Police Department, Richard “Chi” Chichester, a former correctional officer from Massachusetts who was also a member of the 1AP security team, reported that two black SUVs had followed Burk home from the shooting range. The incident also prompted a phone call to Penrose.

The recording reveals that Penrose, who expressed concern about Burk independently investigating the two ballots-on-planes leads, set parameters and conditioned the 1AP security team’s continued presence at her home on her compliance.

“Here’s the deal: If we’re going to protect you, we need to have some kind of understanding about what the parameters are and the way you’re going to engage publicly and how you’re going to expose yourself to threats publicly,” Penrose said. “Because it’s all of us, right? We’re all in this together.”

Penrose added that anything Burk did — from picking up the phone to inviting someone into her home — was “impacting the guys in the room with you, and anybody who’s going to be assigned to your protective detail.”

Burk told Raw Story she turned over her recording of the phone call to the January 6th Committee in October 2021.

Raw Story reviewed more than 20 recordings — which Burk has not publicly shared — that provide a picture of how her cell phone was stolen and how it wound up at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, just before Jan. 6.

In recorded statements, Pittman and Chichester — the two 1AP members assigned as Burk’s protective detail at the time — have both admitted that her phone was stolen, while giving conflicting accounts of how it took place. In one of the recordings, Pittman told Burk that he learned that Chichester had her phone in Washington, DC.

Joe Flynn, Michael Flynn’s brother, corroborated the account in a phone call with Burk.When the matter was brought to his attention, Flynn indicated he turned to a man named Geoffrey Flohr for an explanation.

Flohr, whose nickname was “Yoda,” was a former Michigan State Police officer and former polygrapher with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Pittman described him as the “team leader,” and Chichester called him “the guy in charge.”

“Yoda told me that Chi took it out of your hands,” Flynn told Burk. “Or something like that. And when I heard that, I said, ‘What are these people doing taking somebody’s property without their permission?’”

In his phone call to Burk in January, Andrew Kloster said that Jim Penrose acknowledged he was engaged with 1AP “as a general matter, about security.” If Penrose expressed the view that Burk’s phone was needed, Kloster suggested, the 1AP members took it to a level that his client never intended.

“I mean, it’s almost like the Thomas Becket [quote], ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” Kloster told Burk. “And then they take it as an order to murder the bishop—same thing. Like, ‘We’ve got to worry about our phones. And here’s a phone.’ And then they take that as, ‘Well, let’s go steal the phone.’ That is the darkest interpretation that you can reasonably draw.”

“They decided to do that, yes,” Kloster continued. “And again, I don’t know. But they decided to do that. And then claim that it was an order to, like, cover their butts. Which shouldn’t cover their butts…. But it just makes it look worse for all involved… when really they’re just overzealous nutcases.”

The precise reason why Burk’s phone was stolen and who, if anyone, ordered it remains unclear. Regardless, responsibility for the misdeed ultimately fell to Flohr, who also served in Michael Flynn’s personal security detail for his speech in front of the Supreme Court during the Jericho March on Dec. 12, 2020.

Chichester told Burk he encountered Flohr at the Willard hotel after Burk’s phone surfaced in DC.

“He just tapped me on the shoulder, didn’t say a f***ing thing, okay?” Chichester recounted. “And I was just watching him as he came past, all right? I was angry. I probably showed a little bit of anger in my face or something because I was pissed off at him because of the whole clusterf***…. Because of the whole thing — the stealing — the phone being stolen. The way he did things, it was just all f***ed up, and he was the guy in charge.”

James Curtis, a Marine Corps veteran who replaced Chichester on the 1AP protective detail at Burk’s house, also blamed Flohr.

“Seeing Yoda plan the theft of the phone — that by itself is problematic,” Curtis said. “But the timeline that sets this in motion and moves this off of you being a team player and to a target is knowing that on day one, they came asking for your phone.”

In a call with Burk, Flohr told her he was told “to be quiet” about the phone debacle “because this had the potential of blowing up all over the place. You literally hold — I’m telling you right now — you literally hold 1A Praetorian in your hand. That’s how it’s viewed. But I wanted the f***ing truth.”

Flohr said he reported the matter to Matthew Wallach, a prominent 1AP member.

“We want to do the f***ing right thing,” Flohr said. “And it’s all on my shoulders. So, listen up. It’s all on my shoulder. I went and told him forty-five seconds after f***ing numb nuts there right next to you told me what it was. I went and drilled it right into the people that run this place. And I said, ‘We got to fix this. We gotta f***ing fix this.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’re gonna take it under advisement, get through the DC op, and then address it.’”

Flohr ended his involvement with 1AP shortly after Jan. 6, 2021. After the phone debacle, Pittman told Burk that Flohr’s departure was directly linked to the handling of her security detail.

“Because of the issues that we had with you, and the way that they were handled was a bunch of bulls***, and Yoda was the guy that was like, ‘This is a bunch of bulls***,’” Pittman told Burk. “And so, Yoda, like, shields me from a lot of flak, because I tell Yoda, and Yoda tells the bosses. The bosses hit back at Yoda, and then Yoda hits back at me, you know?”

As previously reported by Raw Story, Flohr was on the grounds at the US Capitol, along with a second 1AP member named Alan Kielan.

Leslie McAdoo Gordon, 1AP’s lawyer, said in a statement provided to the January 6th Committee in early July that she learned following Robert Patrick Lewis’s deposition that “two members of 1AP went with or followed the portion of the crowd from the Ellipse that went to the Capitol grounds.” McAdoo Gordon minimized Flohr and Kielan’s connection to the organization, writing, “They had already completed their work with 1AP at that time.” She added that the two men went to the Capitol “without the knowledge or approval of 1AP or Mr. Lewis.”

Flohr could not be reached for comment for this story.

After Burk’s phone was stolen, James Curtis accurately predicted that she would become the target of a campaign to discredit her. He also entertained the possibility that Penrose bore some responsibility for the theft.

“I don’t know Penrose, but if he’s self-serving enough to take your phone, he’s also self-serving enough to help fabricate tales about you that aren’t true,” Curtis said. “But right now, your actions are being defined probably — I’m making some assumptions here — your actions are being defined by whoever it was that wanted your phone. And so, your actions are not going to be defined in a way complimentary to you or the truth you understand, right? They’re going to be defined in ways that benefit whoever took your phone — presumably Penrose, right?”

When Kloster called Burk nearly a year later, she told him that's almost exactly what ended up happening.

“He pushes this out there: ‘She’s crazy, she’s this, she’s that,’" Burk said of Penrose. "And tries to discredit and do all of this stuff, which leads all of those minions who thought they were saving the country and all of that to then chase me out of town and dox and harass and threaten."

Penrose could not be reached for this story.

Reached by Raw Story by phone, Joe Flynn said he doesn’t know why Burk’s phone was stolen, but indicated he was surprised to hear Penrose’s name come up in connection with the episode.

“It was inconsequential,” Flynn said during a brief interview. “It doesn’t mean much to anybody.”

Joe Flynn has acknowledged his role in assigning the 1AP security team to Burk’s home.

“At the time we were working with 1st — 1A Praetorians,” Flynn said in an interview for the QAnon-aligned Patriot Voice channel on Telegram in January. “We were working with them for a very short period of time, just after the election when we were participating in the rallies in Washington. And their team provided General Flynn, myself, Sidney, Patrick [Byrne] and a few others security…. By the way, they provided that security free of charge.At the time, we didn’t have any money, so that was a benefit not having to pay that money. As I understand it, we sent a team out to watch over her out in Phoenix.”

Joe Flynn told Raw Story that his brother “didn’t have anything to do” with the decision to assign a security team to Burk, but Flohr gave a different account to Burk.

“It started with Joe,” he told Burk. “I got a call from him. He goes, ‘And we need ya in the Southwest.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ He says, ‘Hold on.’ And then Mike comes on the phone. He says, ‘Yoda, this is Mike Flynn. I need you to get to the Southwest for a whistleblower that we have down there. How long is it going to take you to get there?’ I said, ‘I haven’t been out to Arizona before.’ I said, ‘It’s going to take me a day and a half.’ He says, ‘Get going.’ And so, I did, because I had to pack my car. Two and a half hours later, I was on the road.”

Before 1AP’s arrival, a man named John Shattuck, who is linked to Michael Flynn through the Gold Institute for International Strategy, arranged for a local firm in Arizona called Mayhem Security Solutions to provide security for Burk.

Joe Flynn later explained to Burk that Mayhem was replaced because their fee was too expensive.

“We couldn’t afford it,” Flynn told Burk. “We weren’t going to be able to pay them. They wanted us to pay them thirty thousand dollars. We don’t have that kind of money. So, we said, ‘Okay, we got this other group who can do it for free.’”

‘If there’s going to be a second Trump term…’

Burk, who has since concluded there is no evidence of widespread election fraud, looked into two separate allegations about potentially illegal ballots on planes shortly after the Nov. 3, 2020 election. She said that Geoffrey Flohr, the team leader for the 1st Amendment Praetorian security detail at her house asked her to prepare an affidavit for Powell. Burk said assertions about extensive fraud by Powell and Michael Flynn helped convince her there must be something to the allegations of ballots on planes, which Powell herself mentioned in a speech at a Dec. 2, 2020 rally in Alpharetta, Ga.

“I listened to General Flynn and Sidney Powell say they had reliable evidence there were bad actors rigging the election and their team validated there was a great deal of corroborating evidence it was true and that I was in grave danger of being killed and needed a security team,” Burk said in a statement to Raw Story.

“Those were obviously lies,” Burk continued. “I believed the lies because, at the time, I thought, why else would they be taking the South Korean plane story so seriously when it was their associates who were on the ground with the plane taking video.I now see in their psyop I was a pawn, and it was much easier to raise money if they terrorized the witnesses and then said they needed money to protect the witnesses. I was just a pawn in their elaborate money-making venture,” Burk added.

Burk claims that in late December 2020, she had not been aware of a Dec. 18 meeting that took place at the White House in which Flynn, Powell and Byrne urged President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and order the National Guard to seize voting machines.

“It was my understanding Trump had a plan, and I trusted that,” Burk said. “As things came to light, I now see everything their associates did with me between November 2020 and May 2021 was all gaslighting, cover up and narrative control with an ends-justifying-the-means mentality and little care or concern for how their actions terrified my family and disrupted our lives.”

Joe Flynn said in a text to Raw Story that his brother was not interested in responding.

“This is a story about nonsense and nothing,” he said, “and anyone who reads Raw Story needs to get a mental exam.”

Sydney Powell could not be reached for this story.

Despite describing Penrose as a “contractor” during the period he engaged with 1AP, Kloster also suggested to Burk that his client’s relationship with Michael Flynn was insignificant.

“He knew General Flynn,” Kloster said. “He knew who he was. They had some communication. There was no hand in glove. He didn’t report to him, or vice-versa.”

Kloster also dismissed the notion that Penrose was working on behalf of President Trump, telling Burk: “I’m a little bit closer to some of that stuff. I kind of know — yeah, that’s a little bit, uh, that’s on the order of puffing up, for sure, yeah.”

Kloster did not return messages for this story. But in a post on Telegram in early July, he announced a new project to protect the professional reputations of so-called “America First” public servants.

“We’re just getting started, but if you’re looking to assist in giving our conservative public servants the tools they need to survive attack, pls look at this new org run by our former WH staff,” Kloster wrote.

The website for Personnel Policy Operations describes the new nonprofit’s foundational precept as a belief that conservative public servants targeted for “persecution” by “the radical left, corporate media, tech companies, leftwing NGOs and other activists” need support in order to succeed, while warning that without a robust safety net, “others will be deterred from entering public service in the first place, or from taking real action for their country.”

Klosterrecently spoke up in defense ofKenneth Klukowski,a former senior counsel to Trump Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark. Kuklowski reportedly helped Clark draft a letter to state officials in Georgia in late December 2020 requesting that they delay certifying their votes to allow time for federal prosecutors to investigate election fraud allegations.

“The January 6th investigation is all about attacking mid-level and senior staff like Ken, to ensure that we don’t have a farm team in 2024, no matter who the president is,” Kloster told The Federalist last month. “This isn’t about the truth, but about making it impossible for conservatives to successfully enter and leave government.”

In a recent Axios report, Kloster was named as part of a group of “former Trump administration and transition officials working on personnel, legal or policy projects for a potential 2025 government.”

Jack Posobiec, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a political operative who is “known primarily for creating and amplifying viral disinformation campaigns,” praised Kloster’s Personnel Policy Operation while filling in as a host on the “War Room” show for former White House strategist Steve Bannon on July 1. (Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress on July 22 for refusing to cooperate with the January 6th Committee.)

“We’ve got the precinct project that’s going on here from the War Room,” Posobiec told Kloster. “That’s precinct by precinct across the country. We’ve got the dismantling of the administrative state. That’s the other project. But what you just said, I think, is one of the most important lessons, shall we say, from the first Trump term, which is that personnel is policy.

“If there is going to be a second Trump term — and that’s basically been kind of the theme of this show today — that this key office, the PPO and the staffers across the government, right, getting into the administrative state and wrestling down with Leviathan.”

It was through another Trump administration official that Kloster became acquainted with Jim Penrose, he told Staci Burk earlier this year.

“So, I got connected with Jim through a friend of mine who was in the administration, who’s very, very good,” Kloster said. “I had reached out to him thinking it was not quite a pro bono, but sort of a favor, because I don’t actually represent people too often. Then, I spoke to Jim, and I thought, ‘My gosh, he’s done a lot, he’s good, and a lot of people are vouching for him.’ And then, so I’m now representing him.”

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/**2020/11**/06/operatives-tied-to-council-for-national-policy-organizing-protests-alleging-voter-fraud/

no lnx twt

as ballot counting to determine the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election continues in swing states, right-wing operatives with ties to the influential Christian Right group Council for National Policy (CNP) are organizing daily #StoptheSteal protests. #StoptheSteal, a “coalition/team effort” that The Washington Post reported yesterday was shut down on Facebook, and FreedomWorks are promoting and hosting rallies across the country based on the false claim that Joe Biden’s growing lead is based on election fraud.

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone announced in a statement that its banning of the #StoptheSteal group page with 360,000 members was due to it being “organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group.”

The new #StoptheSteal site was registered on November 4 by viceandvictory.com in Fort Worth, Texas. Vice and Victory is nothing but a landing page for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts. An examination of the three, leads to one individual: Ali Akbar AKA Ali Alexander.

Akbar, who has a book written on him titled “Vice and Victory,” has taken on the name Ali Alexander to distance himself from his past legal troubles. In 2007, he pled guilty to felony property theft in Fort Worth, and in 2008 he pled guilty to a felony charge of credit card abuse, reported the daily dot.

Alexander’s homepage, which links to his blog for subscribers and offers a “Persuasion Masterclass” for $199, links to StoptheSteal.us, as does his Twitter profile.

Alexander calls himself an “interpreter of energy for this period,” and is Pro-Trump influencer on Twitter with over 140,000 followers. It is unclear who funds Alexander’s activities, but Politico noted in 2018 that Robert Mercer, one of the “blow-it-all-up billionaires” behind the rise of Trump, gave a PAC Alexander advises $60,000.

Alexander, a former member of CNP, announced the StoptheSteal.us site with a video and a tweet, “Proud to be working with these patriots to Save the Election,” and listed 15 Twitter handles.

Proud to be working with these patriots to Save the Election@ScottPresler @alexbruesewitz @Cernovich @EagleEdMartin @KylieJaneKremer @AmyKremer @thecjpearson @JackPosobiec @debostic @MichaelCoudrey @hollandcourtney @stclairashley @BrandonStraka @DrPaulGosar @ReaganBabe pic.twitter.com/9otKQA7tWv

— Ali stopthesteal.us (@ali) November 5, 2020

Many of the individuals listed are organizers of individual states protests. Jack Posobiec, a correspondent for the far-Right One America News Network, and pro-Trump activistScott Preslerare leading a protest at the capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Georgia protests held yesterday at in Atlanta and Savannah were led by Kylie Kremer, executive director of the Women for Trump PAC; right-wing activist CJ Pearson; former congressional staffer Daniel Bostic; and Amy Kremer, chair of Women for America First and co-founder of Women for Trump. Women for Trump’s co-founder Caroline Wetherington is a member of the CNP.

Trumpist Courtney Holland and right-wing social media operative Mike Coudrey are listed as organizers of a protest scheduled for 6 p.m. tonight at the Nevada Clark County Elections Department in Las Vegas.

Right-wing social media influencer Brandon Straka and Amy Kremer led a Detroit, Michigan protest this morning at the TCF Center, where ballots were being counted. Protesters blocked a bridge, and at least one arrest was reported.

Protests at the capitol in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday, today, and tomorrow are being led by Alex Bruesewitz, co-founder and CEO of the PR firm X Strategies.

Although not listed in Alexander’s tweet, Turning Point USA‘s founder and president Charlie Kirk is listed as leading an Arizona protest at the Maricopa Tabulation Center in Phoenix at 6 p.m. this evening. Kirk is also a CNP member.

Ed Martin, president of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, listed by Alexander as a partner in the tweet above, is also a member of the CNP.

Early today, Alexander announced protests for every state capital tomorrow at noon.

We want everyone at their state capitols on Saturday at noon. #StopTheSteal @BrandonStraka @ScottPresler @AmyKremer @tracybeanz @alexbruesewitz @stclairashley @EagleEdMartin @JackPosobiec @Cernovich @hollandcourtney @RyanAFournier @thecjpearson

Peaceful Protest

— Ali stopthesteal.us (@ali) November 6, 2020

FreedomWorks, led by president Adam Brandon, who also serves on the advisory council for Turning Point USA and the CNP Action Board of Directors, is also organizing “Protect the Vote” protests in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Oklahoma today. The times of the events do not match the #StoptheSteal events.

FreedomWorks, a group that grew out of a Charles Koch-founded organization and that helped launch the Tea Party in 2009, was also behind many of the protests to reopen the economy amidst the pandemic this year, as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported.

A number of CNP members are major donors to FreedomWorks.Lawson Bader, president of DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund is a CNP member. DonorsTrust has given $3.4 million (2006-2018) and Donors Capital Fund another $667,000 (2008-2016) to FreedomWorks.

Bradley Foundation president and CEO Richard Graber is a CNP member.Bradley has given FreedomWorks $1.2 million (2007-2017) and disclosed another $100,000 this year to fund FreedomWorks “Save Our Country initiative,” as CMD first reported.

Heather Higgins is a CNP Gold Circle member, and her Randolph Foundation gave FreedomWorks $10,000 in 2017.

The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation gave FreedomWorks $600,000 (2009-2011). Richard DeVos is a former CNP member.

Tea Party Patriots Action (TPPA) announced this morning that it is “working with FreedomWorks, Turning Points, Heritage, and countless social media influencers” to promote and hold “Protect the Vote” rallies in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. TPPA’s honorary chairman Jenny Beth Martin serves on the CNP Executive Committee and a number of those working at the Heritage Foundation are also members.

CNP is deeply tied to the Trump administration. In August, Trump himself spoke to CNP on the last day of the meeting, where he repeatedly thanked the Christian Right group for its leadership.

Trump’s vice president Mike Pence went further in thanking CNP in November 2019, for “standing by him” and for giving him counsel “every single day.” Pence later followed up in March of this year in a letter made public by investigative researcher Brent Allpress, in which he “thanked the Council for National Policy for your support and for consistently amplifying the agenda of President Trump and our Administration.”

Brent Allpress contributed research on #StoptheSteal and Vice and Victory for this report.

About David Armiak

==

==

6 22

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ali-alexander-and-stop-the-steal-were-central-to-jan-6-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

no lnx twt pix

"I was the person that came up with the Jan. 6 idea with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks, and then Congressman Andy Biggs,” GOP operative Ali Alexander said in a Dec. 28, 2020, Periscope video. “We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting, so that who we couldn’t lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”

The video, which was captured by investigative reporter Jason Paladino before it was deleted, highlights the role played by Alexander, his so-called “Stop the Steal” campaign, and far-right members of Congress in the failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack launches its first public hearings June 9, and Alexander and “Stop the Steal” are likely to figure prominently in its findings. Alexander sat for eight hours of testimony in front of the committee on Dec. 9, and in April, a lawyer for Alexander said he would cooperate with the Department of Justice’s Jan. 6 investigation—a claim on which Alexander promptly threw cold water.

Right Wing Watch extensively covered Ali Alexander and the so-called Stop the Steal movement ahead of Jan. 6. Here’s what you need to know.

Who is Ali Alexander? What is “Stop the Steal”?

On Nov. 4, 2020, as mail-in ballots began to be counted and shifted the election in favor of Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump falsely declared that the ongoing efforts to count millions of outstanding ballots were an indication of fraud and that he had in fact won.

Hours later, Alexander publicly launched “Stop the Steal,” a campaign to get right-wing activists to discredit mail-in voting, disrupt vote-counting, and ​falsely accuse Democrats of stealing the presidential election. The campaign held its first rally outside Arizona’s state capitol building in Phoenix that evening, featuring Rep. Paul Gosar, who with a bullhorn in hand, addressed the crowd before introducing “Pizzagate” booster Mike Cernovich, who threatened imaginary anti-fascist activists. 

And so began months of “Stop the Steal” rallies featuring far-right members of Congress, QAnon and election conspiracy theorists, Christian nationalists, and far-right anti-government groups, all under the MAGA banner.

Ali Alexander and Roger Stone (Image Source: Twitter)]

Alexander, née Ali Akbar, has long worked in Republican politics, coming up under the tutelage of “dirty trickster” Roger Stone. He has connections to deep pockets, too: ​a PAC advised byAlexander received a $60,000 donation in 2016 from pro-Trump billionaire Robert Mercer​. These Republican connections have persisted despite his habit of noting when members of the media he criticizes are Jewish and despite associating with far-right figures like Unite the Right white supremacist attendee Matt Colligan and members of the neo-fascist Proud Boys.

Alexander’s “Stop the Steal” campaign wasn’t the first to go by that name. Longtime GOP operative and Trump confidant Roger Stone first popularized the phrase “Stop the Steal” during the 2016 presidential election. In 2018, Alexander,  Stone, and far-right commentator Jack Posobiec launched a “Stop the Steal” campaign during a ballot recount for Florida’s Senate race between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Bill Nelson. Pro-Trump activists from around the country descended on Florida to protest and spread misinformation, insisting that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election from Scott. It served as a dry run for the 2020 presidential election. Sure enough, in September 2020, Posobiec and Alexander discussed rebooting the campaign. 

What was their role in the lead up to Jan. 6?

Alexander served as the lead organizer for “Stop the Steal.” The campaign targeted Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia—battleground states won by Joe Biden and whose cities are home to predominantly Black and brown voters—holding rallies and spreading election disinformation on social media.

He called on figures he knew from his time as a member of the highly secretiveCouncil for National Policy and through his years in Republican politics to join the effort, including activists Amy and Kylie Kremer, Jack Posobiec, Brandon Straka, Scott Presler, Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, Ed Martin of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. He brought into the fold Trump’s short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn and Trump team attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood—who have since been disciplined for bringing false lawsuits alleging election fraud. Most joined the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement in a public capacity; others promoted the same messaging through their own organizations and organized behind the scenes.

Ali Alexander and other “Stop the Steal” activists at Dec. 15, 2020 press conference (Image from NTD livestream posted on Epoch Times YouTube channel.)]

Alexander welcomed extremists into the campaign’s ranks. Male supremacist Mike Cernovich, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones were among the first to answer Alexander’s call. Alongside white nationalist Patrick Casey, Vincent James, and Baked Alaska, Fuentes galvanized crowds of white men to attend “Stop the Steal” rallies across the county, while Jones spread disinformation through his Infowars network, raised funds for the Jan. 6 rally, and brought a caravan of supporters to rallies.

On Nov. 14, “Stop the Steal” came to the nation’s capital. Thousands of Trump loyalists, conspiracy theorists, and members of far-right groups took to the streets. Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn—all recently elected to Congress—addressed the crowd alongside organizers. Radical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones yelled unintelligibly into a bullhorn. Members of the Proud Boys hate group roamed the streets looking for fights and found them late in the evening.Fuentes’ America First group, ​a youth-focused white-nationalist outfit, commanded the crowd’s attention with chants of “America First.”

A second Dec. 12 rally was deeply steeped in Christian nationalist and violent rhetoric. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law, threatening a “much more bloody war”should he fail to do so.

While rallies brought the whole of the MAGA movement together, Alexander held regular Periscopes to spread disinformation and provide action items to Trump supporters.

:{

}:

Alexander called on “Stop the Steal” activists to lobby the state legislatures of battleground states won by Joe Biden to ignore the election results andsend Republican electors to the electoral collegeto give Trump enough electoral votes.He called on state Republican legislators to declare the election fraudulent and threatened them with a primary challenger should they not.

By mid-December, right-wing activists and lawyers were focused on Jan. 6, the day Congress would certify the electoral votes. More than 100 House members and a dozen Senators committed to voting against certifying the election. Trump and the apparatus around him began to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to use his ceremonial duty to block or delay Biden’s certification. “Stop the Steal” fed into that pressure, with “Stop the Steal” friend Lin Wood going as far as to call for the vice president’s execution.

On Dec. 19, Trump declared it “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election.” [~ his own # guy 1/6 hearing] He encouraged his followers to come to D.C.: “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Alexander had already planned a Jan. 6 D.C. protest, but he began fighting his one-time fellow activists Kylie and Amy Kremer for control of the big Jan. 6 rally. The Kremers had used the “Stop the Steal” banner for their cross country bus tour and a competing December rally, much to Alexander’s chagrin. ProPublica reported that Katrina Pierson, whom the White House put in charge of the rally planning, “helped arrange a deal where those organizers deemed too extreme to speak at the Ellipse could do so on the night of Jan. 5.” That meant Alexander and his cohort were relegated to speaking on the evening of Jan. 5, while the Kremers took the lead on the Jan. 6 event held at the Ellipse.Alexander held that Jan. 5 rally and planned his own separate “wild” Jan. 6 protest on the east side of the Capitolbuilding to follow the main “Save America” rally.

Alexander spent weeks in the lead up to the Capitol insurrection calling for “rebellion,” starting chants of “victory or death,” and using rhetoric of the American Revolution and spiritual warfare to call for action should Congress certify the election of President Joe Biden. He engaged in violent rhetoric, appearing to even advocate for physical attacks against members of Congress who he said stole the election. 

The Jan. 5 rally served as the penultimate event of those calls. Speakers delivered Christian nationalist messages and veiled threats of violenceif Congress failed to reject Biden electors. Bikers for Trump founder Chris Cox told rally-goers that the United States was on the brink of a revolution and that he would “take the first bullet.” Right Wing Watch reported at the time: 

Standing in front of a sign declaring “MARTIAL LAW NOW,” so-called Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander led the crowd in chants of “Victory or death!” Alexander told activists, “Our government is only our government if it is legitimate” and declared, “1776 is always an option.” [new boogaloo? less racist?] He said Stop the Steal activists were starting “a rebellion against the Deep State.”

What was Ali Alexander and the campaign’s role on Jan. 6?

On the day of the insurrection, Alexander took to Twitter early in the morning to declare it the “First official day of the rebellion.” Alexander was supposed to hold his “wild” protest by the Capitol, but it would never materialize.

Trump loyalists packed into the Ellipse, eager to stop what they saw as a fraudulent election. Speaking from the stage and wearing a bulletproof vest, Rep. Mo Brooks, whom Alexander had recently called a friend, told attendees that Jan. 6 is “the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass. … Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder! Will you fight for America?”

“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump told the crowd. He urged activists to march to the Capitol to make their voices heard. They did as they were told.

Leaving the rally at the Ellipse after Trump’s speech, where he was a VIP guest with far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Alexander followed Jones through the Capitol grounds, past barricades, and up the Capitol steps. At that point—around 2 p.m.—the Capitol had already been breached.

“Democrats and Media ended the Republic and the people responded. Welcome to ‘duhhh’,” he tweeted an hour later.

Alexander emerged on One America News Network’s terrace overlooking the Capitol to record a video, posted on the “Stop the Steal” Twitter account by his associate Michael Coudrey at 4:26 p.m.—well after the violence had begun.

“I don’t disavow this. I do not denounce this,” Alexander said, gesturing to the scene behind him. Trump loyalists were descending on the Capitol and up the Capitol steps. “This is completely peaceful, looks like, so far. And there are a couple of agitators that I obviously don’t endorse,” he claimed despite having seen what took place on the steps not long before. By the end of the video, Alexander was back to encouraging rebellion. “StoptheSteal.us is going to be the home of the rebellion against an illegitimate government.”

Right Wing Watch captured the video, which was later deleted.

Where is Ali Alexander now?

Ali Alexander went into hiding following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.In February, he briefly reappeared and said he had been plotting to restart rallies in March,abolish the media, and build a separate society for Trump supporters. He declared that “civil war” was the only outcome available to those who opposed Biden’s presidency.

But Alexander was kicked off Twitter and most mainstream social media platforms. He lost access to his Venmo, Cashapp, and Paypal. He turned to alternative social media platforms and briefly became a Bitcoin influencer. 

In October 2021, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack issued three subpoenas to Alexander, the Stop the Steal organization, and Nathan Martin, who worked with Alexander and reserved the Jan. 6 rally space. Alexander accused the government of “gaslighting” and blamed the violence on “agitators dressed in militant outfits.” Jan. 6, he said, was a government “psyop.”

In December 2021, Alexander testified for eight hours in a closed-door hearing andasked the House select committee to suspend reality. In a draft of his opening statement, which was leaked to the New York Times, he denied wrongdoing and passed the buck, placing blame for the violence on Katrina Pierson, Kylie Kremer, and Amy Kremer. 

In a lawsuit seeking to prevent the select committee from obtaining his phone records, Alexander confirmed to congressional investigators that ahead of Jan. 6, he had communicated with several GOP congressmen—Reps. Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks, and Andy Biggs—as well as with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend and member of Trump’s inner circle.

In April, a lawyer for Alexander said he would cooperate with the Department of Justice’s Jan. 6 investigation. The following day, Alexander joined Alex Jones’ show to suggest he wouldn’t cooperate.He went on to call the effort to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol a conspiracy to “stop Trump from running in 2024” and “usher in a New World Order.”

A few days later, Alexander joined Alex Jones’ show again. He mused that “there is a time for legitimate violence when there is legitimate tyranny.”

Tags: Alex Jones Ali Alexander Jack Posobiec

===

https://www.thebulwark.com/the-decay-at-the-claremont-institute-continues/

:{

}:

when the Claremont Institute, America’s Trumpiest think tank, is in the news nowadays, it is mostly because of John Eastman, the institute senior fellow who wrote the notorious “coup memos” for Donald Trump.Last month, a federal judge ruled that Eastman and Trump were likely involved in a criminal conspiracy together. The ruling arose from a civil suit concerning Eastman’s claim that some of his documents should not be disclosed to the House Jan. 6th Committee, and the judge only opined on possible criminal behavior because it factored into the narrow decision regarding Eastman’s claims. Still, the ruling is an important reminder of what was at stake with Eastman’s work for Trump: nothing less than a concerted effort to overturn a democratic election and thwart the peaceful transfer of power, which, had it succeeded, would have brought on a major constitutional crisis. The judge ordered Eastman to hand over to the committee 101 documents he had been withholding, and Eastman has grumblingly said he will comply—although he now wants to withhold another big batch.

The Eastman saga has been the most prominent Claremont Institute-related drama in recent weeks, but it hasn’t been the only one. The institute’s descent into Trumpian trolling, conspiracism, and fringe extremism has continued to have bizarre ripple effects. It is worth taking a look at some episodes of the last few weeks and what they reveal about the institute’s character—and how Claremont’s leaders seem to understand that character themselves.

Last month, theAmerican Mind, the Claremont Institute’s web magazine, published an article called “The Decline is Real.” Brimming with male sexual anxiety, the piece discusses some research suggesting that testosterone levels and sperm levels are falling in Western populations. It edges up close to replacement theory. And it gripes about “clownworld”—“Soy boys. Simps. Plant-based lifestyles. Polyamory. Incels. Furries. Et cetera… honk honk!”—and suggests that the “dissident right” is “unique[ly]” well suited to making men manly.

But the problem with the piece is less its content than the author’s background. The American Mind has made something of a habit of publishing pseudonymous writers: “Peachy Keenan,” “The Huntsman,” “Horatius,” “Rebecca,” “Privata,” and others. So it is, too, with the article worried about Western man’s sperm count—but its pseudonymous author, “Raw Egg Nationalist,” stands apart for having recently published a book with a Nazi publishing house. As in: a publishing house that is infatuated with Adolf Hitler.

I wish I were joking or exaggerating. What Raw Egg Nationalist’s American Mind byline doesn’t tell you is that his Raw Egg Nationalism Cookbookis published by Antelope Hill Publishing. Antelope Hill is a small publishing house that translates and publishes books like A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, by Richard Walther Darré, described in this way on the Antelope Hill site:

Richard Walther Darré, an Obergruppenführer in the SS, was the leading “Blood and Soil” ideologist of Germany and served his people as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. This book,A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, was massively popular in the Third Reich and led to a strengthening of the agrarian and agriculturalist movements. Highly influential on Hitler, the principles in this book are foundational to the National Socialist worldview.

Antelope Hill, we learn, is proud to present this new translation of Darré’s book, which is the first English-language edition. A *Daily Beast* article from January referred to Antelope Hill as “openly fascist”; a blog that tracks reactionary racism labeled it “a white supremacist publishing company”; and Amazon has faced calls to stop selling its products. The Antelope Hill Twitter and Instagram feeds contain promotional material that playfully celebrates “uncle Hitler.” To celebrate Hitler’s birthday yesterday, Antelope Hill offered a discount on all its books, and an even bigger discount on a collection of Hitler’s speeches, with the cutesy discount code “birthday_boy”:

The Claremont Institute seems to have no qualms publishing one of Antelope Hill’s main authors.

And it is impossible to believe that the publishers of the American Mind do not understand who Raw Egg Nationalist is and what he stands for.

For one thing, he appeared as recently as November 11 of last year on Jack Murphy’s podcast. Murphy was a Lincoln Fellow at the institute last summer, and numerous prominent Claremont folks have come on his podcast since its inception in 2018. For example, Matthew Peterson, the founder and original editor of the American Mind, was Murphy’s guest a couple of weeks before Raw Egg Nationalist, and Glenn Ellmers, a Claremont senior fellow, was on the show a few days before that.

Other Claremonters Murphy has hosted include Ryan Williams (president of the Claremont Institute); Thomas G. West (senior fellow and a member of Claremont’s board of directors); Spencer Klavan (an editor at the Claremont Review of Books and features editor at the American Mind); :{J:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:**ack**Posobiec (2019 Lincoln Fellow); Michael Anton (Claremont senior fellow); Christopher Caldwell (Claremont senior fellow); Dave Reaboi (Claremont fellow and 2012 Lincoln Fellow); and Arthur Milikh (executive director of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life). Several of Murphy’s other guests have been alumni of Claremont’s fellowship programs, including Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari, anti-critical-race-theory activist Christopher Rufo, and Trumpist conspiracy theorist Darren Beattie.

In short: Jack Murphy is a Claremont intimate, and his hosting Raw Egg Nationalist is another indication that the latter is a known quantity to the Claremont crowd.

Murphy’s interview with Raw Egg Nationalist is, unsurprisingly, offensive. The two men share an interest in bodybuilding as a way of life; during a discussion of the relationship between mind, body, and aesthetics, Murphy asks Raw Egg Nationalist to explain how he understands the relationship between physiognomy and politics. Raw Egg Nationalist says:

I think that it’s difficult . . . today not to see just how closely linked together nutrition and lifestyle and political orientation are. . . . Bring up all of the mug shots from the “mostly peaceful protests” of last summer and you’ll see that all of these people look the same. I mean, they are hideously ugly, malformed people.

Raw Egg Nationalist concludes that the left has abandoned all concerns with health and “is for a kind of dysgenic existence.” It follows, then, that, “the right, or some people on the right and some traditionalists, just have to be for a healthy physical lifestyle. I think it’s that simple.”

Murphy agrees: “It really is. And I was out on the streets during all the riots in Washington, D.C., and I’ve seen the protesters right up front.”

The exchange, which takes place ten minutes into their conversation, offers a crystal-clear glimpse of this Claremont writer’s character, in case his choice of publishing house isn’t already enough of a tell.

it’s worth saying more about Jack Murphy.

Murphy is a prominent influencer in the “Manosphere” and the founder of a secretive manliness club called the Liminal Order. “Jack Murphy” is also a pseudonym. His real name is reportedly John Goldman, a fact that became common knowledge in December of last year following salacious revelations about his past.

In 2018, Murphy wrote a blog post about sending his girlfriend to have sex with a stranger from Tinder. This became known as Murphy’s ,” and it caused a stir on the right—both the family-values right and the cult-of-masculinity right. It further turned out that Murphy had participated in amateur pornography, and that he had been placed on administrative leave from a job with Washington, D.C.’spublic charter schools for wildly misogynist and racist screeds he had posted online.

The revelations about Murphy/Goldman received coverage last December from conservative journalists like Rod Dreher at the *American Conservative*, Mary Harrington at *UnHerd*, and Megan Fox at *PJ Media*. (This scrutiny came after an earlier period of wagon-circling: Two months earlier, one Twitter user was blocked by several prominent Catholic integralists after he criticized their acceptance of Murphy.)

But a far more tragic story was unfolding right around the time of Murphy’s scandals: On December 27, a deadly shooting spree in Denver left six people dead, including the alleged shooter, Lyndon McLeod.

Before the tragedy, McLeod was a far-right novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Roman McClay. The Denver shootings followed the plot of his novels, and two of his victims were mentioned by name in the books.

McLeod was also a fan of Jack Murphy’s, and he even appears to have been a member of Murphy’s club, the Liminal Order.

What’s more, Murphy returned the future mass shooter’s admiration. In an online post from February 2020, he deemed Roman McClay’s work “an epic three volume masterpiece.” (He praised the work of reactionary writers Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin in the same context.) After the Denver shootings, even Anthony Dream Johnson, the self-professed “President of the Manosphere,” was willing to denounce Jack Murphy. But Claremont stayed mum.

To summarize: One of Claremont’s future Lincoln fellows had an unconventional sexual relationship with his girlfriend that he wrote about publicly, created pornography, broadcast truly vile racist and misogynist views, and celebrated the violent fictions of a person who would later use them as a roadmap for conducting his own mass shooting.

you will recall Murphy’s Claremont-heavy roster of podcast guests before his scandals in December. The description for one of those episodes contains this intriguing line: “Ryan Williams, The President of the Claremont Institute, explains to Jack Murphy why they engaged with Bronze Age Pervert, Curtis Yarvin, and Jack Posobiec.”

The interview took place in March 2020, the month after Murphy praised McLeod’s violent novels. Much of it is dedicated to standard-fare Claremont grievance-mongering against identity politics, multiculturalism, and the left. But almost an hour into the conversation, Murphy does ask Williams directly why Claremont decided to engage with “underground new media figures” like Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), Yarvin, Posobiec, and himself.

First, he praises Williams for Claremont’s engagements with “your grassroots population,” mentioning Michael Anton’s review of Bronze Age Pervert’s book in the Claremont Review of Books and a BAP symposium at the American Mind. “This was, like, a big signal to me that you guys understood the landscape,” Murphy says. “So can you tell me how the Bronze Age Pervert connection came to be?… How did it all work out? Would you do it again?”

Williams is prepared for this. Beginning cautiously, he says that he and others had noticed BAP’s “weird little book” floating around among young folks on the right and wanted to talk to Claremont’s “very boomer” audience about it as a youth phenomenon. He also wanted to communicate the way “some of his older peers and fellow travelers at Claremont talked about politics and took seriously this energy amongst the young on the right that was sort of up for grabs.”

Williams acknowledges the dangers involved in making these overtures, and says that Claremont traditionally stands for equal rights and believes reactionary politics is a “dead end.” He appears to suggest that his goal in engaging BAP’s audience was to show them an alternative approach and outlook.

But soon Williams starts to hedge. Sounding increasingly sympathetic to what Murphy calls the “grassroots,” he praises BAP’s book as a piece of philosophical art, and admits that they published Anton’s piece in part “to stir things up.” He concedes that Claremont had something to prove: that “we weren’t just fusionist Reagan Republicans,” but are instead “open to new ideas” and “not . . . afraid of the arguments that are gaining some traction on the right.”

Then Williams takes a more evangelical turn. He talks about how important it is to bring eclectic and heterodox thinkers like Yarvin to new readers in order to “continue the conversation.” He and Murphy gloat about how these thinkers have influence in Trump’s White House. Williams argues that the very online landscape of the New Right is an “increasingly huge thing” that is quickly replacing and delegitimizing the old media. After windily defending the right-wing conspiracy theorist**Jack Posobiec**as “nothing but a gentleman and respectful, an engaged discussant in our seminar and a family man,” Williams insists on the importance of engaging seriously with “this new media landscape” and “this growing cohort of people with huge influence.”

He resumes a cautious stance at the end of the episode. In case the audience has forgotten, Williams reminds listeners that Claremont hopes to be the teacher and fearless influencer in its relationship with Murphy’s “grassroots,” not the one being taught and influenced.

Murphy, though, heard things differently: “I really commend you guys for . . . the direction you’re taking the organization. I respect it. It got my attention. If the Bronze Age Pervert thing was meant to be a bat-signal to the young and new right and the internet right—well, we heard it, we saw it, here we are.”

Williams chuckles at the mention of the bat-signal and doesn’t object to the characterization of Claremont as inviting Murphy and his ilk into its domain. He thanks Murphy for his public-spiritedness, saying that “America is a better place because of what you do, so keep doing what you do.” The Claremont Institute would accept Murphy as a Lincoln Fellow the following year.

Maybe Raw Egg Nationalist will make the cut for 2022.

this trip through the Claremont underworld ends with a return to a more familiar and respectable side of the institute: a March 17, 2022 episode of the Power Line podcast hosted by Steven Hayward and featuring guests Charles Kesler and John Yoo. Titled “The Claremont Question,” the episode raises explicit questions about the coherence of the organization and the relationships among its various constituents.

Hayward is a resident senior scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley and a graduate of Claremont Graduate School. Kesler is a professor at Claremont McKenna College and the founding editor of Claremont’s premier publication, the Claremont Review of Books. Yoo, a professor at Berkeley Law School, is best known for authoring the Bush administration’s notorious “torture memos,” which made him a figure of perennial controversy. It is a sign of strange times that he is among the least polarizing figures in Claremont’s orbit today.

The title of the episode suggests that the three longtime Claremont associates might address the institute’s efforts to accommodate Murphy’s “grassroots.” But while Ryan Williams showed a measure of confidence and security in responding to Murphy’s questions, this conversation went differently. The 44-minute Power Line talk alternates between chummy banter, outrage at the left, and the occasional nod to non-MAGA realities. It is also full of awkward yuks and guffaws. Hayward, Kesler, and Yoo may represent the Claremont Institute’s old guard—the conservative intellectuals who like to have deep conversations about statesmanship and the Founders and the dangers of progressivism—but they don’t have any of the confidence one might expect from them. A mood of uneasiness prevails. The three men often fall into anxious laughter at one another’s bad jokes.

“My goodness!” Hayward begins. “The Claremont Institute has everybody’s attention these days, and lots of enemies on the left and on the right. . . . I’m not quite sure where to begin!”

After reviewing the facts, he asks Kesler to explain the sources of controversy at Claremont.

From the perspective of, say, Bronze Age Pervert and company, Kesler makes a handful of “normie” admissions: His colleague John Eastman’s plan for Vice President Mike Pence was “impossible” and “not credible”; Jan. 6th was “a terrible stain” on the Trump presidency; Trump should probably cede the stage to a younger Republican to draw a better contrast with Biden. But before Kesler gets to all that, he acknowledges a simpler truth: Trump was a boon for Claremont. Everything is going great at the institute, and some of their good fortune has resulted directly from their public pro-Trump stance. Subscriptions to the CRB are at an all time high and growing, he says. They have real momentum.

But given everything that has been going on at Claremont, the discussion is awfully evasive. For example, while the three men agree on the most salient part of the Eastman debacle—that there was no real dispute over any state electors—they do not grapple with the implications of that admission. Instead, they act as though Eastman’s various legal notions about Pence’s decision-making authority on Jan. 6th are still worth taking seriously. The truth is closer to this: Eastman can interpret the law however he pleases, but because there was no serious dispute about the electors, his ideas are, at best, perfectly irrelevant to the reality of the situation.

Yoo says that Eastman “got the facts wrong but the law right.” Imagine if someone understood the laws governing murder but merely “got the facts wrong” in a given case: it would be the definition of a miscarriage of justice. And when Hayward, Kesler, and Yoo concede that there were no disputed electors, they unwittingly imply that Eastman’s perspective runs closer to delusional fabrication than to serious legal commentary, let alone reasonable advice to a sitting VP with a crucial role to play in the peaceful transfer of power.

Rather than grapple with that truth, the group praises Kesler for expounding the Eastman controversy in the pages of theClaremont Review of Books. They revel in the seriousness of a followup exchange between Eastman and critic Joseph Bessette in the CRB. They take credit for presenting “both sides” of the issue “utterly without snark or invective on either side.” And Kesler prides himself on allowing the magazine not to take a stance on such “very complicated” issues.

To be clear, Bessette’s critique of Eastman’s position is excellent. The problem is that the CRB’s “both-sides” approach launders Eastman’s arguments and gives them false legitimacy.

And what the CRB did for Eastman, Hayward’s Power Line conversation does for Claremont as a whole. The three members of the old guard are reticent about Eastman, their “friend and colleague,” throughout the episode. This reflects a larger unwillingness to attempt a substantive reckoning with Claremont’s recent past.

That past includes plenty of cynical publication decisions—among them, Anton’s solicitous review of Bronze Age Pervert’s book; institutional decisions to grant fellowships to conspiracy theorists and extremist influencers; an eagerness to publish authors too timid to put their real names on their articles, including an author who sends his writing to a Nazi publishing house. Does Charles Kesler think these decisions represent a brave stance on the part of the institute?

Conservatives are very good at calling out instances of excess zeal and censoriousness on the left. But the decline at the Claremont Institute demonstrates inverse dangers: namely, the cratering of accountability and good judgment. The Claremont old guard acts as though the rest of what’s happening at the institute isn’t their concern, and with a few exceptions the intellectuals of the New Right operate the same way with respect to the Claremont Institute: as though there are no right-wing viewpoints or associations that can be unequivocally condemned, no liberal norms that don’t deserve challenging, no fringe that’s too fringey for them.

In its outreach to the Manosphere, in its welcoming of fascist-curious and bigoted Trumpy writers, not to mention its months of support for lies about the last presidential election, the institute is allying itself with some of the most dangerous tendencies in politics.

The Power Line episode ends on a surreal but fitting note:

Steven Hayward (abruptly): Well, we never really did get to the contents of the issue, but that would take us four or five hours. Thank you, Charles; thank you, John.

John Yoo (genuinely surprised): That’s it? It’s over?

Hayward (cheerfully): I think we’ve taxed our listeners long enough with our quips and jests.

Charles Kesler (deadpan): Do you mean to ask . . . is that all there is?

(guffaws all around)

That’s it: no reckoning, no grappling, no calling to account. Instead, we are left with a throwaway reference to a wry little song by. But “Is That All There Is?” also happens to capture the essence of intellectual life at Claremont today: the carnival atmosphere, the old boys’ club, and the deca

salon:

...As mentioned in our first installment, this is all part of a broader pattern of overlap between the far-right, including the white nationalist right, with right-wing Catholicism.In 2017, groyper leader Milo Yiannapoulos was drummed out of many right-wing movementsfor statements he made minimizing child sex abuse, and subsequently used his return to Catholicism as an opportunity to rebrand.

This March he headlined an anti-abortion convention in Ohio that was blessed by the local Catholic bishop, and in June he will be a featured speaker at a Church Militant Resistance bootcamp. Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy, who was disgraced after appearing on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, likewise touted her return to the church as part of her rehabilitation. "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander found his way to a new audience at the end of 2020 with a highly public conversion to Catholicism, as did "Kent State gun girl" Kaitlin Bennett in late 2021. They joined a core group of far-right activists who have deployed their Catholic identity in service of their movements, including Pizzagate provocateur-turned conservative commentator Jack Posobiec, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Fuentes himself. 

As the alt-right was planning its 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, one of the most popular places where activists did their planning was a Discord chat forum called the "Nick Fuentes forum," dedicated to exploring connections between "Unite the Right" and the Catholic Church. Within it, hundreds of posters discussed traditionalist Catholicism and posted memes alternating, or combining, Crusades-era imagery with neo-Nazi and antisemitic content.

As journalist Eric Martin reported at the liberal Christian magazine Sojourners, some posters identified themselves as "Charles Coughlin Roman Catholics," for the 1930s pro-fascist priest and broadcaster who helped pioneer the demagogic media style that is fracturing our democracy today. Fuentes himself has waxed nostalgic about fascist and monarchist regimes in Europe and Latin America that were grounded in Catholic teaching, and in 2018 declared on a livestream that, "in an ideal world," there would be "a global Catholic theocracy" and that "the state should enforce morality that is informed by Catholic teaching."

More broadly online, far-right activists online began adopting phrases like "Viva Cristo Rey" (Christ the King) or "Deus Vult" (God wills it) in their posts and tweets, and Catholic symbolism like medieval crosses and Crusader imagery. 

Some conservative Catholics have welcomed this development. In a 2019 article published by the Catholic right magazine Crisis, "Kids in defense of the culture," American Greatness editor Pedro Gonzalez praised Fuentes' groypers. "They have chosen to be guided by a Christianity hammered free of the dross of the modern world," Gonzalez wrote. "In an age of compromise and petty principles, groypers have chosen to stand for something, armed with little more than digital slingshots. That alone is reason enough to hear them out."

Some conservative Catholics have embraced the groypers, arguing that they "have chosen to be guided by a Christianity hammered free of the dross of the modern world."

But moderate and liberal Catholics were appalled."It's such a horrifying appropriation of Catholicism," noted writer and researcher D.W. Lafferty in a 2020 podcast episode produced by Where Peter Is, a moderate Catholic website that tracks the Catholic right. Lafferty described the new far-right aesthetic as"Pepe Catholicism," while Georgetown University theologian Adam Rasmussen called it "Catholic LARPing": a way for the alt-right to pretend they were "Knights Templar fighting the forces of darkness in the deep state."

As Vatican correspondent Christopher Lamb, author of the papal biography "The Outsider: Pope Francis and His Battle to Reform the Church," explained during the 2020 presidential campaign, the far right's adoption of Catholic symbolism was a means for the movement to infuse itself with deeper spiritual meaning. "The populists and nationalists were looking for some kind of soul for their politics. And they found it in some symbols of the faith," Lamb said. "And they're powerful symbols. Quite often they make the whole case that the past has been lost."

"In a sense, you empty the content of the religious," Lamb noted earlier this year, "and use the externals — the rosary beads, the crucifix, some words, perhaps some prayers — but you use it as an identity marker to give your movement a sense that it has a soul or deeper intensity at a moral level."

But that influence goes both ways, and as Lamb noted in 2020, as more and more right-wing Catholics identified themselves with Trump's re-election campaign, "Trumpism," in turn, "got into the church."

As Lafferty said at the time, "What's happening on the right, I think, is unprecedented," except for the historical examples of ultranationalist fascist groups before World War II, such as Action Française in France or the Falangist movement in Spain. "But fascism isn't new and the Catholic Church was often complicit in fascism," he added. "So it's not totally shocking that people can come in and do this."

The revelation that some highly enthusiastic and visible elements of the Catholic right are now partnering with a group whose reputation is based on snarky displays of over-the-top bigotry just marks an escalation of that trend.

"This is a continuation of a pattern that's been happening for years," said Lafferty, "and it's only going to become more intense now that we're looking at the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned." As a faithful Catholic, he agrees with the Church's stance against abortion, he said, but he also sees the imminent SCOTUS reversal as one more "pillar of what we call 'normal' falling."

...

https://www.mediamatters.org/russias-invasion-ukraine/right-wing-personalities-promote-kremlin-conspiracy-theory-about

no lnx twt

Right-wing personalities promote Kremlin conspiracy theory about biological research facilities in Ukraine

Conspiracy theorists spin an intelligence hearing about Russian disinformation strategy to help excuse Putin's unprovoked invasion

WRITTEN BY CYDNEY HARGIS

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 03/09/22

After the State Department reconfirmed the existence of biological research laboratories in Ukraine and expressed concern Russia may seize them, far-right media accused the United States of both controlling the labs for nefarious purposes and orchestrating a false flag operation against Russia. In reality, the idea that these facilities are controversial, much less a threat to Russia, is a Kremlin-backed conspiracy theory.

During a March 8 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) asked Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland if Ukraine has “chemical or biological weapons.” Nuland responded that Ukraine has “biological research facilities,” adding that the U.S. government was “quite concerned” about the facilities falling into Russian hands. When Rubio noted the existence of a Russian disinformation campaign already in-effect to blame Ukraine for a future release of biological weapons, Nuland replied that “it is classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they're planning to do themselves.”

Citation From March 8, 2022, C-SPAN coverage of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing

Russia isn’t the only state actor helping spread this conspiracy theory, which was also promoted by a spokesperson from the Chinese government — following a pattern of Chinese disinformation established during the pandemic.

The conspiracy theory that there are U.S.-funded bioweapons labs in Ukraine, and that they have been directed to destroy whatever pathogens are inside, has been floating around fringe and far-right media for several days since the conflict began. This burgeoning conspiracy theory has followed closely behind what theBritish Ministry of Defense described as “a notable intensification of Russian accusations that Ukraine is developing nuclear or biological weapons,” which the Kremlin hopes could provide “a retrospective justification” for its unprovoked war.

Ukraine does have biological research labs that were modernized as a result of a pact between its Ministry of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense. The U.S. and Ukraine entered into theagreement in 2005 — brokered, in part, by then-Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) – to jointly-prevent the spread of deadly pathogens developed as part of the former Soviet Union’s expansive biological weapons program. As part of the agreement, the U.S. provided funding for security upgrades to the Soviet-era facilities to support the “peaceful research” of infectious diseases.

The DOD’s Biological Threat Reduction Program was designed as part of an arms control program to secure “pathogen strains and sensitive biological knowledge within Ukraine," specifically to prevent those resources from being released or weaponized. In fact, the agreement governing these facilities evolved from the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which assisted Ukraine with the removal and decommissioning of Soviet nuclear weapons.

Some variations of the conspiracy theory go even further to claim that the labs are being run by the U.S. In reality, the labs are funded and operated by the Ukrainian government. But claims to the contrary have existed for years and are part of a Russian disinformation campaign to discredit the U.S. in the eyes of former Soviet republics. Indeed, FactCheck.org produced a full article debunking a previous iteration of this conspiracy theory on March 2, nearly a week before Nuland’s testimony.

Despite the abundance of evidence showing that these are not weapons facilities, far-right media personalities pounced on Nuland’s testimony about “research facilities” in Ukraine to hype Russia’s narrative justifying the invasion and to falsely claim she “confirmed every conspiracy theory about the existence of those labs”:

During the March 9 edition of Real America Voice’s War Room: Pandemic, host Steve Bannon claimed that Nuland was let “off the hook” and told all Florida residents to contact Rubio and ask him if the CIA, Defense Department, or DIA gave him the questions to ask. Bannon went on to play a clip of the hearing and said Rubio should have asked, “Is that a lab? What are they creating? Are we involved in any way? Have we financed it? Are we partners? Do we actually know what’s going on?” Bannon later said that “no Republican should vote for any money on Ukraine, zero dollars,” until we know exactly what is going on with the labs.

On March 9, the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft shared a video that he said was of the “Director of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation” telling the U.S. that Russia has “found your biological weapons” after Nuland’s testimony.

In a March 8 Gateway Pundit article, Hoft repeated China’s claim that there are “26 US biological labs in Ukraine alone” before running through the conspiracy theory that there was “biological testing in Ukraine near the Russian border.” Hoft went on to call Nuland’s comments an “explosive development.”

In a March 8 Telegram post, former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn shared a post claiming, “I was told that biolabs in Ukraine was a conspiracy theory yet here we are. They are now admitting it openly.”

Former 8kun administrator, QAnon influencer, and GOP congressional candidate Ron Watkins shared an Epoch Times article in a March 9 Telegram post that questioned whether Vice President Kamala Harris will “negotiate the cover up of the US Biolabs in Ukraine.”

A March 8 post on thefar-right forum TheDonald shared a video of Nuland’s comments and added, “Another win for conspiracy theorists: the biolabs in Ukraine exist! CONFIRMED!”

A March 8 post on theQAnon forum The Great Awakening shared a video of Nuland from theRussian state media outlet RTand called her comments “Narrative Spin 101.”

In a March 8 Gab post, QAnon influencer Anonymous Patriot shared a post about Nuland’s comments and wrote, “And there it is. PANIC.”

Human Events’ Ian Miles Cheong:

Human Events’ Jack Posobiec:

Far-right conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich:

The Epoch Times’ Hans Mahncke:

Big League Politics:

Far-right commentator Chuck Callesto:

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/turning-point-usas-america-fest-aims-to-reach-gen-z-with-christian-nationalists-conspiracy-theorists-and-country/

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec wants you to hang out with him at Turning Point USA’s “America Fest,” billed as the “biggest event in the conservative movement” in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec 18-21. At least that’s what hesays on Twitter, where he offers a promo code for the event and insists it “makes a great Christmas present.” Joining him will be TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, and Donald Trump Jr.

The event brings together right-wing Congress members, Christian nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and even right-wing activist athletes. A flashy promo video shows young conservatives dancing at what looks like a concert—and indeed, the event promises full concerts from a handful of younger country music stars, “God Bless the USA” singer Lee Greenwood, and Dee Jay Silver.

While the promotion makes the event look more like a party, Turning Point USA is an organization that trains and mobilizes right-wing college students. This summer, that mobilization focused ontargeting public school boards for allowing schools to teach about racism in U.S. history and implementing LGBTQ-inclusive policies. The group has raisedtens of millions of dollars, peddled disinformation about President Joe Biden’s win in 2020, and stoked fears about COVID-19 vaccines. TheAssociated Press writes that Kirk, who has called George Floyd a “scumbag,” “exploits the racial divide to reach Gen Z.”

Kirk has increasingly partnered with Christian nationalist forces, and the “America Fest” speaker attendee list reflects that.Religious-right activist pastor Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills will be in attendance as willreligious-right activist musician Sean Feucht, who hastoured the country protesting pandemic-related restrictions on public gatherings. Feucht launched a projectto mobilize conservative Christian millennials after his unsuccessful run for U.S. Congress in Northern California.

The speaker list includes some newer (and younger) Congress members: 26-year-old Madison Cawthorn, who released a ferventlyChristian nationalist ad urging Christians to “take our country back” and in another speech called on parents to raise their sons to be“monsters”; Lauren Boebert, whose extremist rhetoric includessuggesting Rep. Ilhan Omar is a terrorist; and Matt Gaetz, who is facing a Justice Department investigation into whether hepaid women for sex and, separately,whether he slept with a minor and transported her across state lines.

:{Rep. Louie Gohmert and Rep. Andy Biggs, the latter of whom Ali Alexander said helped plan the Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6, are also scheduled to speak. The attendee list also features athletes and gun aficionados of the right-wing movement: with appearances from Michael Chandler, a Trump-supporting mixed martial arts fighter with the UFC; professional bow hunter Cameron Hanes; and John Lovell, better known as}:{, who offers trainings on tactical pistol and rifle use and small unit tactics as well as his vision of a “bold and dangerous masculinity.”}:

The event’s speaker list indicates the right’s vision for the future. 

Posobiec, who peddled the far-right Pizzagate conspiracy theory, is a contributor to TPUSA and, judging from his promotion of the event, will likely be a main feature of it.

He recently teamed up with Kirk to interview18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three and killed two protesters at a Black Lives Matter protest last year. Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all charges last month andbecame a hero, first in the eyes of the far-right and then the broader right-wing movement. The interview opened with Kirk expressing personal affinity: “Kyle, from the first moment I saw you in the news and saw video of you defending yourself, I felt we had something in common.”

Tags: Charlie Kirk Donald Trump Jr. Jack Posobiec Kayleigh McEnany Lauren Boebert Louie Gohmert Madison Cawthorn Matt Gaetz Sean Feucht Tucker Carlson

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/oregon-trump-supporters-antifa/

no lnx twt eg poso no pix 3 dn arrow = 3percent?

trump supporter pulls gun as tensions flare at clash with antifascists in Oregon

Zachary Petrizzo and Salon March 29, 2021

On Sunday, Trump supporters, reportedly including members of the far-right militia the Proud Boys, exchanged blows with approximately 150 antifascist demonstrators in Salem, Oregon. The two rival groups clashed near the State Capitol building as the day came to a close, with one Trump supporter being detained after drawing a firearm on black-clad demonstrators who had allegedly damaged his vehicle dressed in "black bloc."

During the afternoon hours, anti-fascist demonstrations could be seen blocking access to a street nearing the Capitol building where Trump supporters were parading with pickup trucks bearing pro-Trump flags. The apparent objective of the antifascist demonstrations on Sunday was to derail a planned right-wing event called "Freedom" in Salem's central town square.

"The 'Freedom' rally was advertised starting in February on social media as an event to honor those who 'fought for our freedoms,'" The Statesman Journal reported. As the afternoon progressed and tensions flared, an additional video emerged of a blue truck barreling through the demonstration's roadblock and nearly crashing straight into one demonstrator in the middle of the street.

According to Oregon Public Broadcasting reporter Sergio Olmos, some vehicles apparently belonging to Trump supporters were pelted with various objects or "splattered" with paint. "Several other vehicles also drove in and near the crowd over the course of the afternoon. Anti-fascist protesters threw objects and splattered some of the vehicles with paint," OPB reported.

Late in the afternoon, one Trump supporter was detained by Salem police after he pulled a gun on antifascist demonstrators, apparently after one of his windows was smashed and paint was flung on his silver pickup, which was festooned with American flags and bore red, white and blue striping. As seen in news images, the man was wearing a hoodie that read, "I Stand for the Flag/ I Kneel for the Cross," a popular right-wing slogan. The man appeared to pull a handgun from his waistband, but no shots were fired.

Police quickly moved in to detain the man, who tossed the firearm into the bed of his pickup truck before complying with law enforcement.

Oregon has been the site of numerous confrontations between right-wing and left-wing protesters over the past few years, but this was the first notable such encounter since the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. "Violent protests between the sides were common during the Trump administration, as anti-liberal groups would often travel to cities like Portland and Salem to engage in the conflicts," as Oregon Public Broadcasting noted in its report.

Following the Salem clash, One America News (OAN) correspondent Jack Posobiec — who has frequently collaborated with neo-Nazis and white supremacists — attempted to frame the incident in quite different terms, writing that "armed Antifa insurrections attempted to overthrow the Oregon state capitol today." That does not appear to be the case.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Here's how wacky state Republican Parties are getting as Trump ... ›

'Antifa arson' hoax rumors spread faster than wildfires in besieged ... ›

Republican lawmakers caught helping pro-Trump mobs at US ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Antifa protester vandalizes Trump supporter's truck at Oregon ... ›

Antifa Protester Implicated in Killing of Trump Supporter in Oregon ... ›

Trump Supporter in Oregon Pulls Gun on Antifa Protesters Who ... ›

===

rww 121

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/evading-twitter-%e2%80%8bpurge-jack-posobiec-peddles-%e2%80%8bmore-conspiracy-theories-ahead-of-bidens-inauguration/

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/compromising-giuliani-footage-ny-posts-suspect-story-and-cernovich-and-posobeics-meltdown/

no pix thank god twt lmx

Compromising Giuliani Footage, NY Post’s Suspect Story, and Cernovich and Posobeic’s Meltdown

By Kristen Doerer | October 26, 2020

Comedian and prankster Sacha Baron Cohen came out with a new movie Friday containing a compromising scene of Trump’s personal attorney and top sycophant Rudy Giuliani reclining on a bed with his hands in his pants in front of a woman playing the 15-year-old daughter of Cohen’s character.

Photos of the compromising scene were released in advance of the movie last Wednesday, incensing far-right activists Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, who complained that the media was not paying enough attention to the highly suspect story they’ve been pushing about Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter.The pair—who peddled the debunked 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory accusing top Democrats of child-sex-trafficking—accused Twitter of bias for allowing the photos of Giuliani to remain on the site and called the photos “revenge porn.” Neither Cernovich nor Posobiec appeared to see any irony in their meltdown over the compromising Giuliani photos.

Cohen has made a career out of pranking conservative politicians, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.In “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” Cohen returns to play Borat, a racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic character from Kazakhstan who must deliver his 15-year-old daughter to Vice President Mike Pence. After Borat fails to deliver his daughter to Pence at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, his daughter, played by 24-year-old actress Maria Bakalova, becomes a conservative journalist and must deliver herself to Giuliani. Here’s The Guardian’s description of the scene:

In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist.

Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.

After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

Unsurprisingly, the images and discussion about what they mean for Rudy Giuliani, an incessant peddler of conspiracy theories, circulated over social media since their release last week.

Giuliani, who is known for making false claims about the Bidens, was a main source for the New York Post’s Oct. 15 story that claimed to have “smoking-gun” emails showing Hunter Biden was using his father’s position as vice president for his own gain and that Joe Biden was in on it as well. The emails were supposedly retrieved from a laptop obtained by Giuliani after it was dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved, and Giuliani supposedly learned about the existence of said emails from former Trump campaign manager and disinformation peddler Steve Bannon, who is currently under indictment for fraud.

As many journalists pointed out, the story by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post was chock full of red flags, including that the emails were never verified, that Russian operatives had sought to feed Giuliani disinformation to use against the Bidens, and that neither Giuliani nor Bannon are trustworthy sources. Three men allied with the president had first tried to pitch the story to the Wall Street Journal before Giuliani’s explosive, tabloid claims and publication of the New York Post article. The Wall Street Journal’s eventual reporting on the matter stated, “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden.”

Both Facebook and Twitter have limited distribution of the New York Post story due to the unsubstantiated claims to limit the spread of disinformation, and Twitter initially blocked users from sharing pictures of the unverified emails or links to the New York Post’s stories with the unsubstantiated claims.

Nonetheless, it has been heavily pushed on conservative media and in right-wing circles, with conservatives crying of censorship. 

The day before the compromising photos of Giuliani were released, Giuliani told right-wing Newsmax TV that Hunter Biden had numerous pictures of “underage girls” on the laptop he claimed belonged to Hunter. Conspiracy theorists and radical commentators like Wayne Allen Root and Alex Jones, have gone all in accusing Hunter Biden of pedophilia, and Josh Bernstein went on to accuse Joe Biden of it as well.

:{

}:

Both Cernovich and Posobiec peddled the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which claimed that hacked emails sent by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager contained coded messages connecting several high-ranking Democratic Party officials to an alleged human trafficking and child sex ring at a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that Cernovich “made his career on trolling the liberal establishment by accusing people of pedophilia or child sex trafficking.”

The pair, normally in favor of accusing people of pedophilia, came rushing to defend Giuliani with gusto once the compromising footage was released.

:{

}:

Cernovich attacked Twitter for locking the New York Post out of its account for violating its hacked-materials policy. “The New York Post got locked out of its twitter account but Twitter is going to let everyone post revenge porn of Rudy Giuliani, a clear violation of New York law and also Twitter’s own terms of service,” he tweeted. About 20 minutes later, Posobiec tweeted, “Twitter is allowing a coordinated unlawful revenge porn campaign against Rudy Giuliani to flood their networks today.” 

Claiming it met the statutory definition of revenge porn, Cernovich took to Periscope to ask, “Why is Twitter allows reveng porn re Rudy Giuliani?” Revenge porn is the nonconsensual publication and distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of an individual.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘You’re defending Rudy, blah, blah, blah.’ Some people are making assumptions about me,” Cernovich said, before going on to defend Giuliani, attack Cohen, and accuse the media of a disinformation campaign.

“Sacha Baron Cohen said she was 15,” Cernovich said, referring to the moment when Borat busts into the room in pink lingerie and asks Giuliani to take him and not his 15-year-old daughter. “So, I think Sacha Baron Cohen should be investigated immediately.”

“If you’re laying down because a woman put you on your back because you think you’re about to get a BJ, that you’re laying down on your back, because you’re about to get a BJ, and your hands are in your pants, is that an intimate encounter?” Cernovich asked. “That’s what I mean, you don’t have to be a constitutional lawyer to say, yeah. Clearly.”

Posobiec agreed that the images were revenge porn, claiming, “I didn’t post the Hunter Biden revenge porn photos, because I know how the law works” and “Everyone posting the Rudy Giuliani Borat photo is in violation of revenge porn law.”

But that narrative didn’t fly with Giuliani.

About three hours after the images were shared, Giuliani shared his own narrative, arguing that the video was a complete fabrication and that he was really just reclining on the bed to tuck in his shirt after asking for Borat’s daughter’s number. “This is an effort to blunt my relentless exposure of the criminality and depravity of Joe Biden and his entire family,” he tweeted in a thread, which Posobiec promptly retweeted, seemingly forgetting the revenge porn narrative he had just helped shape.

On Friday, the day of the release of the new Borat movie, Posobiec took to Bannon’s “War Room Pandemic” to push the Hunter Biden conspiracy theory. While there, he asked whether Child Protective Services was ever called on Hunter Biden’s family, presumably in reference to Giuliani’s pedophilia charges.

Tags: Hunter Biden Jack Posobiec Mike Cernovich Rudy Giuliani Sacha Baron Cohen Steve Bannon Pizzagate

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-post-millennial-and-jack-posobiec-close-relationship/

the Post Millennial, a right-wing Canadian news site gaining fans among the U.S. far-right, has a strange degree of closeness with far-right propagandist and One America News Network figure Jack Posobiec, who​ the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch reports buil​t his modern-day career by collaborating with “white supremacists, neo-fascists and anti-Semites.”

Posobiec is among The Post Millennial’s biggest fans on Twitter. Since Posobiec first shared a link to a story published on The Post Millennial to his Twitter account on March 21, 2019, he has posted approximately 450 additional links to stories on the outlet’s site. By contrast, Posobiec has shared OANN links 54 times since July 2018. These counts do not include instances where Posobiec retweeted ​stories.

“Outstanding original journalism and commentary,” Posobiec wrote of The Post Millennial in September 2019. “One of the best and most straightforward new sites out there. Ton of respect for their work.”

It appears the affection is mutual. Google search results turned up more than 130 articles published on The Post Millennial in which Posobiec is mentioned by name, including instances where he is mentioned directly or his posts on Twitter are cited as source material in news articles. The outlet has also come to Posobiec’s defense when​ Posobiec​ has faced criticism​ for false reporting.

The Daily Beast reported in June that Posobiec had falsely claimed in a viral tweet that crates of pipe bombs were found near the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. as chaotic ​anti-racism protests ​rocked the nation’s capital city​. The Post Millennial published an article claiming that The Daily Beast had bungled it story​, but in its attempt at a refutation, it failed to produce proof that the reporting was inaccurate and that Posobiec had been telling the truth about the supposed pipe bombs. Rather, it allowed Posobiec to claim that an unnamed government agency not reached for comment by The Daily Beast had discovered the bombs. To date, no hard proof supporting this claim has been publicly produced.

In another article, The Post Millennial attacked CNN anchor Jake Tapper for drawing attention to words in a graphic shared to Twitter by Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson. The graphic pitted CNN ​Chief Media​ Correspondent Brian Stelter against Posobiec, stating that Stelter had “dubious loyalty” compared to Posobiec, who the graphic presented as being a “Devout Christian.” The comparison echoes centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes that allege Jewish people are only loyal to their religion, not the countries they reside in. Stelter is not Jewish, but far-right extremists have repeatedly claimed that he is while directing hate toward him. The Post Millennial accused Tapper of attacking Posobiec “for being Christian.”

During the rollout of an SPLC investigative reporting series on Posobiec’s connections to extremist figures, The Post Millennial published multiple articles defending Posobiec’s character and attacking the SPLC. One article claimed that the SPLC’s reporting was “filled with guilt by association smears” and highlighted Jewish right-wing figures who said they stood by​ Posobiec. Another story sought to smear SPLC’s current president for posing for a photograph in 2016 with celebrity Nick Cannon, who this summer lost his contract with ViacomCBS after making hateful and anti-Semitic remarks on a podcast.

​SPLC senior investigative reporter Michael E. Hayden told RWW that one such story was published​ by The Post Millennial after he reached out to Posobiec for comment regarding a photograph showing him at a “We Build the Wall” event alongside Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son. Hayden said that about one hour before his own article went live, The Post Millennial published its story on SPLC’s president being photographed with Cannon, which cites Posobiec as its primary source. Posobiec then tweeted the link to The Post Millennial’s story while his connections to Donald Trump Jr. were discussed online in wake of the SPLC’s story.

RWW emailed Posobiec to inquire about his relationship with The Post Millennial, asking if he had a working relationship with the site​, and if so, whether the connection ​was similar to the one he had to the congressional campaign of YouTube personality Joey “Salads” Saladino. According to FEC documents reported by The Daily Dot​ in 2019, Saladino’s campaign paid Posobiec hundreds of dollars for social media advertising.

Regarding The Post Millennial, Posobiec replied: “I just follow them on Twitter, read their stuff.” Posobiec told RWW he does not receive financial compensation from sharing links to content published at The Post Millennial​ nor does he have a formal relationship with the outlet.

The Post Millennial did not respond to interview requests sent via email. Current and former editorial staff did not respond to attempts to make contact via email and Twitter direct message.

Tags: Jack Posobiec Media One America News The Post Millennial

==

https://aldianews.com/articles/politics/jack-posobiec-link-connecting-france-trump-and-russia/48031

the  internal documents of the electoral campaign of Emmanuel Macron, president-elect of France, were the subject of a cyber attack during the last electoral week, and its dissemination was carried out on May 5, through an anglophone forum, before being immediately spread on Twitter by an "American militant, near the far right," according to the Huffington Post France:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background-image:url("):}:. 

Belgian social media analyst Nicolas Vanderbiest said that after the publication of the documents in the 4Chan forum, frequented by surfers close to the American alt-right, Jack Posobiec:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background-image:url("):}: was the first to share the data to his 100,000 followers on Twitter, inaugurating the hashtag "#MacronLeaks".

Flashpoint of New York and Trend Micro based in Tokyo have shared intelligence suggesting that the group of hackers known as Advanced Persistent Threat 28, Fancy Bear and Pawn Storm was responsible for filtering Emmanuel Macron’s documents. The group has been linked to the GRU, the Russian Military Intelligence Directorate, according to The Guardian:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background:url("):}:.[guk]

Days before the publication of the documents, Jack Posobiec had been active in social media against the candidate Macron, pressing the rumors about an alleged tax evasion and assuring that the now president attacked the journalists to evade his responsibility, according to the newspaper Le Monde.:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background:url("):}:

One day before the election, Posobiec requested on Twitter to speak in front of the French parliament in an open session on #MacronLeaks.

According to the French media, Posobiec represents a digital site (The Rebel:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background:url("):}:) openly supportive of Trump and Le Pen, which often disseminates inaccurate data.

"The militant appears as part of the 'Slavright', a far-right movement mainly located in Eastern Europe, considered racist and white supremacist”, according to the French media.

In Trump’s forefront

Hours before disseminating the hacked information of Emmanuel Macron's campaign, Posobiec had been tagged in a photo along with former editor Breitbart and one of the main right-wing figures who supported Donald Trump, Milo Yinanopoulos, on a Caption that read "Happy #CincoDeMilo".

[pix]

posobiec has been part of the spread of false information, such as the "pizzagate" issue - conspiracy theory involving the Clinton team with pedophilia -as well as the call for a boycott of the latest Star Wars film, "Rogue One," for allegedly broadcasting an anti-Trump message, according to L'Obs:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background:url("):}: newspaper in France.

[pix]

for its part, Reuters:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;width:10px;height:10px;background-image:url("):}: published yesterday that Posobiec has received access to the White House, from the Trump Administration.

Posobiec, " attended the daily press briefing on Tuesday and later broadcast video from the White House grounds with positive commentary on President Donald Trump's abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey”, explains the media.[vid rebel news]

posobiec would have requested temporary credentials in April, but he is currently in the process of requesting a permanent pass.

The cyber attack of the French president-elect has worried the international security community since it could imply a connection between Russian digital intelligence organizations and public figures of the American extreme right.

Through social networks, Posobiec and William Craddick, for example, founder and editor-in-chief of Disobedient Media:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background-image:url("):}: have been perceived as close to each other. Craddick would have warned that French documents had been leaked minutes before it was made public.

According to Reuters:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background:url("):}:, "two US intelligence officials said that they are increasingly confident that hackers with connections to the Russian government played a role in the French election.” Similarly, US intelligence agencies have also concluded “hacking attacks on the Democratic Party and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign were part of a Russian-backed effort to help Republican Trump win the presidency”.

==

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jack-posobiec-pizzagate-and-seth-rich-conspiracy-theorist-has-top-secret-security-clearance

no lnx pix twt

Jack Posobiec, Pizzagate and Seth Rich Conspiracy Theorist, Has Top Secret Security Clearance

WAIT, WHAT?!

Members of the intelligence community want the Navy to ‘explain how the f*ck he still has access to classified information.’

James LaPorta

Updated Aug. 17, 2017 9:14AM ET / Published Aug. 16, 2017 8:05PM ET

Jack Posobiec is one of the right’s leading agitators and conspiracy theorists.

He implied there may be a child-sex ring under a D.C. pizza joint run by Democrats. He peddled rumors about the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich. He interrupted a supposedly anti-Trump Julius Caesar play, yelling “you are all Goebbels.” He popularized a WikiLeaks campaign against a French presidential candidate. He even tried to sabotage a D.C. protest by holding up a sign that said, “Rape Melania.”

Posobiec did all of this, and more, as a U.S. Navy intelligence officer, apparently while he had one of the military’s highest security clearances. How can a person with a record of spreading disinformation for political reasons be allowed access to raw intelligence?

Posobiec told The Daily Beast his security clearance was put on temporary hold in February while he was in between units and after concerns were raised by his former commanding officer over his Twitter account.

“They told me it was under review, but they didn’t really explain to me what exactly it was for, but my security clearance is only on a temporary hold, it was not suspended by DoNCAF,” Posobiec said, referring to the Department of the Navy Central Adjudication Facility that is responsible for investigating and determining who within the Department of the Navy is eligible to hold a security clearance.

“Yes, I can confirm his clearance was suspended. I don’t have any additional information as to why,” a Navy spokesperson told The Daily Beast following an NBC News report about the suspension.

Though he’s now a reservist, Posobiec maintained one of the highest clearances, known as Top Secret, Secret Compartmentalized Information.

“A clearance holder who has a full-time job in a non-Governmental capacity is still bound by the rules and restrictions that come with holding a security clearance,” national security attorney Brad Moss told The Daily Beast. “Mr. Posobiec cannot ‘turn on’ and ‘turn off’ his obligation to the U.S. Government, even as a Reservist.”

That obligation would include not promoting #MacronLeaks, the Wikileaks-led effort to release 20,000 emails from the presidential campaign of Emmanuel Macron before the French election, Moss said.

“As a matter of policy, clearance holders are not supposed to be accessing WikiLeaks or particularly viewing leaked classified documentation to which they were not otherwise already authorized access,” he said.

Posobiec says he currently serves in an administrative role and does not have regular access to classified material.

“I think [Moss] is completely off-base [regarding his security clearance and WikiLeaks] because I have never once mishandled classified information, I’ve never once tweeted out classified information, I’ve never linked to classified information, I’ve never done anything on duty with classified information that would be seen as mishandling it in any way.”

[RELATED IN POLITICS

Fox News Thought Their Seth Rich Fiasco Would Be Vindicated

The Party of Lincoln Belongs to QAnon Now. Thanks, Donald!]

Posobiec’s military unit, the Joint Reserve Intelligence Support Element Dekalb did not respond to a request for comment.

Posobiec learned about the forthcoming email dump before it was promoted by WikiLeaks when he was the Washington bureau chief for a right-wing Canadian outlet called The Rebel.

Posobiec tweeted links to WikiLeaks on at least three separate occasions, along with screenshots of being on the site from his web browser on his verified Twitter account—an apparent violation of Defense Department policy for members of the U.S. Armed Forces that came in the wake of the Chelsea Manning leaks.

Malcolm Nance, a retired Navy senior chief petty officer and former member of the U.S. intelligence community, said Posobiec “and people like him are a danger because these people are literally a fifth column for Russian intelligence. They have weaponized their contributions and conspiracy theories in the culture war.

“How he can hold a Top Secret clearance working actively in the intelligence community as a known factor in the information operations of the alt-right, which is essentially a war on media reality itself, shows that he quite possibly is one of the greatest security dangers to whatever organization he’s working on.”

More bluntly, Nance called Posobiec a “disgrace to the uniform” and said he wants the Navy to “explain how the fuck he still has access to classified information.”

Posobiec reacted to Nance’s comments by saying people who call his security clearance and service into question are “xenophobic racists.” Posobiec said Nance was referring to his fiancée, who was born in the former Soviet Union.

“It’s disgusting and offensive that he would say something like that about a fellow Navy veteran. There are many people in the military who have wives that are not born in this country and no one is calling their service into question,” Posobiec said, adding he properly reported his fiancee to his chain of command because she is a foreign national.

From Pizzagate to Presidential Retweet

On Nov. 16, 2016, Posobiec, livestreamed a visit to Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., that right-wing conspiracy theorists claimed housed a child sex-slave ring underground.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to me,” he said, adding he would do a quick “IPOE,” which stands for “intelligence preparation of the operational environment.”

Posobiec had his friend pre-dial the first two numbers of 911, saying, “He’s ready to dial the last 1.”

Posobiec was kicked out by management for livestreaming and could be overheard saying they received death threats and that Posobiec was spreading false rumors. Posobiec would later ask for “sub-sources” to go in with hidden cameras. He told The Daily Beast that this call for sub-sources was to provide further confirmation that Comet Ping Pong was not engaging in anything nefarious.

In January, Posobiec was caught holding up a sign at an anti-Trump protest that said, “Rape Melania.” Posobiec told The Daily Beast the Secret Service “debunked” this, but the Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment.

Not long after, Posobiec used a one-day White House press credential to ask President Trump about the conspiracy theory that Seth Rich leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks. (Fox News and a local Fox affiliate released a now-retracted report claiming Rich “had contact with WikiLeaks prior to his death.”) Trump ignored Posobiec’s question.

Posobiec has since said he does not believe in the conspiracy theory surrounding Rich and believes he was the unfortunate victim of a crime wave in Washington, D.C.

This past weekend, Posobiec promoted a report from GotNews.com that falsely accused a Michigan man of being the driver of the vehicle that plowed into protesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer.

“Literally, I was trying to find out about the car crash, who did it and that [the GotNews.com article] was the first article I saw and I accidentally hit the retweet button,” Posobiec told The Daily Beast. “I immediately took it down, once I realized I did, but to say that I helped frame an innocent man is posterous.”

Despite being associated with the so-called “alt-right,” Posobiec said he was invited to speak in Charlottesville but he didn’t return the request.

“I’m not associated with them. They’re white nationalist scum and I condemn their objectives.”

On Monday night, Posobiec’s whataboutism tweet about murders in Chicago was retweeted by Trump and more than 26,000 other accounts.

“Like all good white supremacy conspiracy theorists, the reality of his damage to the naval service and the nation is always an attack on his race,” Nance said. “His very words are reason to remove his clearance and demand he resign his commission. Send him back to the fever swamp of Pepe the frogs.”

—with additional reporting by Ben Collins

==

• Michael Savage likened Black Lives Matter to ISIS and Al Qaeda. Glenn Beck compared supporting Black Lives Matter to supporting Nazis in the 1930s.
• Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) criticized Black Lives Matter in an interview with OAN personality and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who has documented white supremacist ties.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/new-trump-official-tried-to-cover-up-a-trove-of-conspiracy-laden-and-bigoted-tweets

no lnx

New Trump official tried to cover up a trove of conspiracy-laden and bigoted tweets

Written by Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos April 23, 2020

Michael Caputo is a former adviser to Donald Trump’s 2015-2016 presidential campaign. He is now the brand new spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A New York Republican operative, you may remember Caputo from his very worried and somber post-Mueller investigation interview in May of 2019. Since the Republican Party is unwilling to do anything to remedy the issue of our treasonously impeached and corrupt president, people like Caputo continue to rise.

CNN reports that Mr. Caputo has all kinds of conspiracy-laden, illogical, and bigoted ideas that we have come to expect from the Trump administration, the Tea Party, and their conservative base. In a series of tweets, which Caputo deleted—but exist forever because it’s the internet, stupid—Caputo has all kinds of truly terrifying ideas about the COVID-19 pandemic. According to CNN’s KFile, Caputo did away with his entire Twitter history of over 1,300 tweets and retweets. And none of these ideas are good or smart or remotely helpful to the public health in general.

Using an internet archive, some of Caputo’s statements have been saved here. So what sort of things does one of Trump’s “best people” think? On Feb. 28, 2020, Caputo had this to say about the novel coronavirus:

“Bottom line, a lot of Americans have to get sick and die for coronavirus to tank the Trump economy.

The Democrats’ only hope for 2020 victory is a sunk economy. They’re talking it down right now.

But their strategy only works if a lot of Americans get sick and die.”

On March 8, 2020, Caputo—clearly tweeting his resume to Trump directly—wrote this:

“Coronavirus is the Democrats’ new Russia, their new Ukraine. And nobody will believe them except their zombies.

But know this: The Dems’ strategy to defeat @realDonaldTrump requires 100s of thousands of American deaths.

Will on of their nutjobs make it happen, a la Hodgkinson?”

“Hodgkinson” here is James T. Hodgkinson, the man who opened fire at a congressional softball practice, injuring Rep. Steve Scalise. The right-wing conspiracy world has floated all kinds of theories about Hodgkinson since he is the only domestic terrorist of the last few decades to reportedly not be an entirely racist right-wing asshole. On March 12, 2020, as the novel coronavirus pandemic became considerably more real and the evidence began mounting that the Trump administration has completely dropped the ball on this, Caputo—clearly feeling a bit testy—attacked people who questioned the administration’s racist pivot to calling COVID-19 “Wuhan flu,” or “the Chinese virus.”

”Sure, millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters but some foreigner snuck in a bottle of the good stuff. That’s it. [frowny face emoji]”

Replying to a tweet by right-wing dirtbag and “Pizzagate” extraordinaire Jack Posobiec, who was attacking Democratic donor and billionaire anti-Semitic conspiracy theory flash point George Soros for not funding coronavirus aid (Soros has directed a reported $130 million in foundation funds to coronavirus aid), Caputo wrote:

“Are you kidding? Soros’s political agenda REQUIRES a pandemic.”

Caputo is the perfect spokesperson for this administration: He’s the opposite of what his job requires.

==

==

bannon

:{

}:

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-pushing-debunked-claims-about-coronavirus-are-linked-his-billionaire

many lnx vids (see bak)

Steve Bannon is pushing debunked claims about the coronavirus that are linked to his billionaire benefactor

WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ

PUBLISHED 02/06/20 11:04 AM EST

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has pushed a debunked theory about the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China on his daily radio broadcast War Room: Pandemic. The claim echoes fake news pushed by G News, a website that has reportedly paid him at least $1 million for consulting and offered him a position as senior editor.

War Room: Pandemic launched on January 25 as a spin-off to War Room:

Impeachment, Bannon’s rapid response operation defending President Donald Trump during his Senate impeachment trial. Since the new show began, Bannon has repeatedly pushed the false narrative that the coronavirus was leaked from a covert biological weapons program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which includes a secure research facility where scientists study highly contagious and infectious diseases.

The unfounded narrative that the coronavirus was engineered and leaked from the lab has been wholly rejected by experts, with The Washington Post labeling it a “fringe theory,” PolitiFact calling the claim made in the G News article “false,” and Foreign Policy describing it as “an outbreak of nonsense.” Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright told the Post that “based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus.”

But evidence is no object when Bannon is on a mission to propagandize. On the podcast, Bannon has repeatedly cited stories by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times that suggest, based on speculations from a single source, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is researching biowarfare, and that the coronavirus was engineered and leaked from there. Bannon kicked off the show’s inaugural episode by interviewing Gertz to promote his flimsy reporting.

BuzzFeed recently reported on Bannon's ties to G News, a digital media outlet launched by Chinese billionaire-in-exile Guo Wenguithat has also published two false stories about how the coronavirus was first introduced to residents of Wuhan. One G News story falsely alleged that the Chinese government would imminently confess that the virus was genetically engineered and leaked from a lab near the densely populated city. The other included a document purporting to validate a conspiracy theory that the Chinese military spread the disease on purpose.

Bannon’s contracts with the project were first reported in October by Axios, which showed that he had signed on to serve as a consultant for one year starting in August 2018 and was to be compensated at least $1 million. Axios also reported on a second, unsigned contract that specified Bannon would serve as a senior editor for G News starting in August 2019. According to BuzzFeed, “Guo and Bannon frequently appear together in videos on G News that attack the Chinese government.” (According to The New York Times, Guo described his connection to Bannon in a 2018 interview: “We both naturally despise the Chinese Communist Party. That’s why we’ve become partners.”) Episodes of War Room: Pandemic are also cross-posted to the G News website.

Video file

CitationFrom the January 25, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Bill Gertz from the Washington Times, Bill Gertz had an amazing piece in the Washington Times about the biological labs that happen to be in Wuhan.

The episode also featured J. Kyle Bass, a China critic and hedge fund investor with connections to G News owner Guo, on the same day that Bass tweeted out a CBC article from July 2019, falsely claiming that “a husband and wife Chinese spy team” smuggled viral samples out of a Candian research facility to Wuhan. “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who tweeted the CBC link that day with the same unsubstantiated claim, was also a guest on the episode.

Later in the show, Gertz and Bannon delved further into the thinly sourced theory. Despite admitting that “we have no evidence that this current coronavirus leaked from that institute,” Gertz speculated that “it’s certainly possible that this outbreak of this animal virus could have come from one of their biological weapons labs.” The U.S. Department of State has raised concerns regarding China’s compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, but has not affirmatively identified the existence of such a program.

Video file

CitationFrom the January 25, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Bill, can you briefly summarize the article that you did yesterday? Talk about these biological labs that are in Wuhan and what aspect do you think they may have in this crisis?

BILL GERTZ: Sure, yeah, good to be on the show, Steve. This is a significant development in the sense that what I’ve identified is the sole declared facility in China capable of handling deadly viruses. In other words, this is the place where they do all of their civilian research. And I spoke with a former Israeli military intelligence officer who studied the Chinese biological warfare program and he says that this institute is clearly linked to this covert Chinese biological warfare program. Now, we have no evidence that this current coronavirus leaked from that institute, but in China and the way secrecy works and the lack of controls, it’s certainly possible that this outbreak of this animal virus could have come from one of their biological weapons labs.

There’s also a second facility in Wuhan that’s also linked to the biological weapons program.Again, that’s a secret program that last year the State Department in it’s annual report on arms compliance stated fairly bluntly that they believe that China is engaged in a covert offensive biological weapons program.

Gertz returned to the show on January 27, claiming, “Obviously, the question of their covert biological weapons program should come into play here.” Bannon replied, “Your point is that there are no coincidences” related to the coronavirus, and the lab facility raises “certain suspicions.”

Video file

CitationFrom the January 27, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

BILL GERTZ: Obviously, the question of their covert biological weapons program should come into play here because, you know, there is only one declared hospital, research center, laboratory in Wuhan -- in all of China -- and it’s in Wuhan, capable of dealing with this level 4 of infectious diseases. And then you have then --

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Your point is there are no coincidences, if the level 4 [facility] that was built by the French for them in 2007 is in Wuhan, then that leads to certain suspicions.

GERTZ: Absolutely. This has, you know, the Chinese have to respond to this.

Bannon’s guest Dr. Steven Hatfill, an expert who previously worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, told the host repeatedly that the theory about coronavirus leaked out of an infectious disease research facility was incorrect, adding, “You know, I'm sitting in an SL4 laboratory right now, and there is no way you could get anything out of here. There’s no way a bad guy could get in.” From the January 29 edition of War Room: Pandemic:

Video file

CitationFrom the January 29, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Today, The Washington Post is out there, mocking and ridiculing The Washington Times, Bill Gertz, one of our colleagues reporting about the Wuhan level 4 laboratory, saying it’s a fringe theory, that anything could have come out of that laboratory, et cetera. We’re not trying to make an assertion that they were building a biological weapon. But given the fact that there’s now no direct link at least as shown today between patient zero and the market, it maybe some that’s later. How do you think this thing started?

DR. STEVEN HATFILL: I think it was natural. You know, I'm sitting in an SL4 laboratory right now, and there is no way you could get anything out of here. There’s no way a bad guy can get in. The people around me are of the highest professional caliber, both mentally, technically, emotionally, and every other consideration. I'm sorry but I kind of downplay the fact that this came out of a BW laboratories.

BANNON: Well, I think that’s fantastic. I think people need to hear that. I think that’s great. And why do you come to this conclusion?

After this exchange, Bannon ignored Hatfill’s expertise and returned to his irresponsible speculation, declaring that “there are no coincidences.”

Video file

CitationFrom the January 29, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Now, people will tell you that’s also where biological warfare are done, those types of places. That’s why there’s so much focus -- Bill Gertz’s articles in the Washington Times focus very much on this level four lab that is in Wuhan, right. And I’m not a believer, as you know, I’m not a conspiracy guy, I always tell you it’s out there in plain daylight. The party at Davos, the way they roll is right up in your grill and there are no coincidences.

On February 1, Bannon again asked Hatfill about the theory, and again Hatfill rejected it:

Video file

CitationFrom the February 1, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Also Zero Hedge, who I'm a huge fan of, Zero Hedge has had this analysis of what the Chinese lab and the two Chinese -- the Canadian lab in I think Winnipeg, that there are now issues -- one of the Chinese scientists took some of the viruses back to Wuhan. I'm not a conspiracy theory guy, not a deep state guy, never have been because I say it’s all up there in your face, the party at Davos, the way the whole thing rolls is in your grill you just have to see it. But there are no coincidences.

...

These are the elite institutions in the world the french built one from the ground up for the Chinese, it just randomly happened to be in Wuhan, right? And relatively in geospatial terms relatively close to the market, a mile or two. There’s been tons of things, they’re using HIV serum to cure people there. This report comes out and it’s been tweeted out all over. Bill Gertz, Washington Times, done some good reporting. The Post calls it a fringe kook theory Miles Guo put something up, said he had a report from inside the CCP and Politifact saying he’s lying so it’s all over the map.

But in your assessment, at what you see in [INAUDIBLE], I asked you to look overnight at this,  where do you think we stand as people know the information today? Is this something that’s naturally occurred? Do you think there’s a possibility in what you read so far that it gives you even a scintilla that this could be some sort of weaponization thing gone wrong that somehow got out of the lab.

DR. STEVEN HATFILL: From what I’ve looked at I think the authors of these papers are overreaching a bit. Now that said this is an odd virus its genome. It’s got a very, very, long, very different from the other SARS virus.

Now, the unsubstantiated theory is being repeated by U.S. government officials in a position of power to take action. According to a report from Business Insider, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) pointed out the proximity of the outbreak to “China’s only bio-safety level four ‘superlaboratory’ that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

==

dunno but jaylo headline banner

https://deadline.com/2019/09/rachel-maddow-msnbc-one-america-news-network-1202729817/

One America News Network, one of the rivals to Fox News for right-leaning viewers, filed a defamation claim against Comcast, MSNBC and Rachel Maddow on Monday, over Maddow’s claim that the conservative channel “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.”

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego (read it here) claims that the defendants retaliated against One America because its president, Charles Herring, called out MSNBC’s parent company. Comcast, “for their anti-competitive censorship” in refusing to carry the conservative channel. In an email to Comcast’s president of content acquisition, Gregory Rigdon, Herring had sought carriage on Comcast’s cable platforms and stated his concern that the cable giant “opposes including another conservative counter channel to counter MSNBC,” according to the lawsuit.

A week later, Maddow opened her show by telling her audience that OANN “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda,” according to the lawsuit.

“Their on-air U.S. politics reporter is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government,” Maddow said in the July 22 segment.

Skip Miller, a partner at Miller Barondess who represents OANN, said in a statement: “One America is wholly owned, operated and financed by the Herring family in San Diego. They are as American as apple pie. They are not paid by Russia and have nothing to do with the Russian government. This is a false and malicious libel, and they’re going to answer for it in a court of law.”

Maddow made the claim after the Daily Beast ran a story by Kevin Poulsen reporting that one of One America’s on-air reporters, Kristian Brunovich Rouz, also was on the payroll for Sputnik, the Kremlin news outlet. One America then demanded a retraction.

But One America said in the lawsuit that “Rouz has never been a staff employee of Sputnik News. He worked as a freelancer for Sputnik News and his work there had no relation to his work for OAN. Rouz submitted articles to Sputnik on his own and would receive approximately $40 if the articles were accepted.”

The lawsuit seeks more than $10 million in damages.

A spokeswoman for MSNBC did not immediately return a request for comment.

==

==

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/pizzagater-jack-posobiec-granted-fellowship-by-increasingly-white-nationalist-think-tank

California-based conservative think tank The Claremont Institute has been working to define and attack multiculturalism as part of a campaign aimed at shaping national rhetoric ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and its top voices have employed nationalist rhetoric and sought untraditional figures to meet its ends.

The Claremont Institute, founded in 1979, is influential within the conservative movement nationally. The organization’s approach to influencing politics is three-fold: it educates conservative influencers, it publishes the Claremont Review of Books, and it files legal briefs and engages in litigation. In May, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addressed the organization’s 40th Anniversary Gala in California. Founding Director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence John Eastmanis a figure that conservatives have often turned to when opposing LGBTQ equality and immigration issues.

Claremont Institute provided early support of President Trump’s 2016 candidacy, including its publication of a now-notorious anonymous essay called “The Flight 93 Election,” which described a potential Hillary Clinton presidency as “Russian Roulette with a semi-auto,” and a vote for Trump as a heroic act on a par with the passengers on September 11, 2001, who rushed the cockpit of their hijacked plane. The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf described the essay at the time as “flagrant sophistry that should embarrass The Claremont Institute.” But instead of feeling ashamed, it appears the organization has ratcheted up its overt support for Trump, and is seeking to intellectualize white nationalist talking points, akin to what Fox News host Tucker Carlson does.

Today we find another work of sophistry on the front page of The Claremont Institute’s website, an article titled “Defend America—Defeat Multiculturalism.” In the essay, Claremont Institute president Ryan P. Williams writes that “today’s multiculturalist enforcers seek to erase and replace America,” an echo of the “replacement theory” and assertions of “white genocide” put forward by white nationalist and white identitarian groups around the world. (Last year, Right Wing Watch reported on Tucker Carlson’s appropriation of the theory to assert that black South Africans were seeking to steal the land of white farmers.) A note on the Claremont Institute piece states that the essay is a “launching document” for a Claremont Institute effort “in defense of America against the threat of multiculturalism” ahead of the 2020 general election. Williams writes:

If we do not reverse multiculturalism’s advance, it will continue to undermine our country and constitutionalism, destroying the possibility of a common good and a life of civic peace. Indeed, multiculturalism threatens to take down western civilization as whole.

By multiculturalism, we do not mean the mere presence of many cultures, races, or ethnic traditions, which are a fixture of modern American life and can be found across our states, communities, institutions, and private associations. One of America’s—and Americanism’s—great virtues has always been the maintenance of a wide realm of liberty and civic society in which a vibrant mix of cultural heritages and individual excellence could flourish.

America’s most important politico-cultural virtue, though, has been the insistence to its current—and especially potential—citizens that they assimilate to a certain view of justice embodied in the Declaration of Independence and safeguarded by our state and national political institutions, first and foremost the U.S. Constitution. E pluribus unum (“out of many, one”), America’s motto, means that assimilation has always been in our national DNA.

Williams writes that right-wing conservatives and intellectuals in America “have a disordered view of priorities and policies, of ends and means,” which has led many people on the Right to “misinterpret and underappreciate President Trump’s virtues and his significance as a political phenomenon.” Multiculturalists, Williams continues, pose an existential threat to the nation. Williams writes that Claremont Institute will employ rhetorical campaigns “to fuse civic nationalism with the popular, cultural, and historical touchstones of American greatness.” And over the past few months, its commentators have made clear just what exactly they mean by “American greatness.”

In an episode of Claremont’s Institute’s podcast “The American Mind,” James Poulos says that “social justice dogma” seeks “the wholesale repudiation of American justice as we’ve known it since the Founding.” On the podcast, Williams compares social justice efforts to slavery and Communism during the Cold War. Williams says the analogy “isn’t perfect, but I think, thinking of it that way, at a regime level challenge, is the proper way to think about it.” Multiculturalism, Williams says, threatens to destroy America “and could be the downfall of Western civilization as a whole.” On the same episode of the podcast, Tom Klingenstein, Claremont Institute chairman, claims that multiculturalism “aims at the destruction of America and the West.”

Conrad Black, who was pardoned of fraud and obstruction of justice convictions by Trump earlier this year, wrote at Claremont Institute that “waves of desperate people in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America who have tried to swarm into Europe and North America more closely resemble, though they are less organized, the barbarian masses who surged into the Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries.”

These sentiments published by the Claremont Institute, reverberate with white nationalist philosophy as it was popularized and mainstreamed with the rise of Trump during the 2016 election. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that fighting multicultural programs has been a common cause of white nationalists and paleo-conservates.

Vox reporter Jane Coaston pointed out that Claremont Institute had selected One America News Network pundit Jack Posobiec, a notorious “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist with past ties to extreme-right figures, as a Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Lincoln Fellow for 2019. The institute will host Posobiec for a week-long fellowship in August alongside figures working closely with the White House, Capitol Hill, and State Department. Mona Charen at National Review wrote earlier this month that the selection of fellows, including Posobiec, should embarass The Claremont Institute “for beclowning itself with this embrace of the smarmy underside of American politics.”

Tags: Conrad Black Jack PosobiecJames PoulosJohn EastmanRyan P. WilliamsTom Klingensteinconspiracy theorieswhite nationalismClaremont Institute

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/former-fbi-special-agent-heres-why-oans-kremlin-journalist-proves-that-merger-between-russian-state-sponsored-propaganda-and-american-conservative-media-is-complete/

no lnx

OAN’s Kremlin journalist proves the ‘merger between Russian state-sponsored propaganda and American conservative media’ is complete: Former FBI special agent

Kremlin

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement July 22, 2019

Its headlines look like they’re written to please an audience of one.

“Political Strategist: President Trump’s reelection looks good in state-by-state analysis of chances.”

“Pres. Trump touts strong approval rating as economy remains solid.”

“GOP businesswoman Scherie Murray announces campaign for AOC’s seat.”

It’s been called an “obscure” pay-cable TV station, but One America News Network, which at time feels more like Fox News than Fox News, is President Donald Trump’s new favorite news channel. It worked hard to get there, and as a 2017 Washington Post article noted its “taking ‘pro-Trump’ to new heights.”

The President has noticed, occasionally tweeting out their stories.

“There’s not one shred of evidence that President Trump has done anything wrong.” @GrahamLedger One America News. So true, a total Witch Hunt – All started illegally by Crooked Hillary Clinton, the DNC and others!

...

==

https://kpfa.org/episode/its-going-down-june-28-2019/

mass up , black bloc ~  dayton ohio vs 5 kkk  pop mob

joey  gibson  on tucker, homophobe

youtuber, livestreaming

used to be semi-strategic, confront ppl and then try to portray themselves as victim

over longer term, white nat'list will cozy up to more mod org/celeb, but when that runs out, they get desperate for attn thus violent.

cpac : ID europa exclude but posob in

Shane  researcher

alt lite sorta benefitted from not being so close to charlottesville but then? getting to be more integral in gop

==

==

mma 519

The newest "political correspondent" for the pro-Trump network One America News Network is Chanel Rion, a right-wing editorial cartoonist who has drawn illustrations that have promoted anti-Muslim bigotry, Seth Rich conspiracy theories, and a call for "armed citizens" to defend the country against the "violent left."

One America News Network is an openly pro-Trump network that pushes conspiracy theories, including about the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. The Washington Post reported in a 2017 profile that the network's owner, Robert Herring Sr., has directed his channel to push the president's agenda. Jack Posobiec, a Pizzagate and Seth Rich conspiracy theorist who has previously advocated for the "alt-right," also works for the network.

President Trump recently tweeted his support for the network, writing: "Also, congratulations to @OANN on the great job you are doing and the big ratings jump ('thank you President Trump?')"

During a 2017 interview with conspiracy theory outlet TruNews, Rion said that she started cartooning "when all these sleazy women started coming out attacking Trump saying that they touched him [sic] or did what this or that under flimsy grounds and I thought that the media really dropped the ball on that."

Rion's illustration have pushed anti-Muslim messages and conspiracy theories. She drew a cartoon wondering if the "deep state," DNC, or "Clinton crime family" killed Seth Rich and if the Clintons killed :{author Victor Thorn:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{ :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:, a Clinton critic and virulent anti-Semite. She also made an illustration that said we need "armed citizens to defend America from [the] violent left" because the left is supposedly plotting an "assassination coup to kill [the] right," and the Democrats are plotting "to inspire killers."  

Far-right grifters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have pushed a number of conspiracy theories previously; recently they failed in trying to smear special counsel Robert Mueller.

The Daily Beast reported that the man purportedly behind allegations against South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg came forward to say that the entire thing was actually the idea of Wohl and Burkman and that all the allegations were false: "Kelly said he expressed concerns about the scheme but Wohl told him to sleep on it. When Kelly woke at around 11 in the morning, Wohl 'was already dressed in a suit because he "can’t do a Monday if he isn’t in a suit”' and—of more significance—the fabricated statement had been posted to Medium, along with fake Twitter and Gmail accounts in Kelly’s name. According to Kelly, Burkman tried to calm his nerves by claiming that he was a '"star"’ and people are eating me up.' The trio, according to Kelly, ate Subway sandwiches, during which Kelly continued to express his regrets. Burkman and Wohl tried to calm him down by promising to purchase 'any house I wanted' and insisting that his family would 'get over it.'"

In the short time before Wohl allegedly posted the vague accusations online and the real Kelly came forward to dispute them, far-right media ran with them -- despite no actual evidence whatsoever. Not only did a number of far-right digital outlets run with it, but Trump-favorite cable news station OANN did as well. OANN later covered the collapse of the smear, saying it made no sense -- never mentioning that it had covered the smear a day prior.

ref

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/04/30/Trump-endorsed-One-America-News-Network-among-right-wing-amplifiers-of-Jacob-Wohls-attempt/223596

many pix twit vid

Trump-endorsed One America News Network among right-wing amplifiers of Jacob Wohl's attempted smear of Pete Buttigieg

Blog ››› April 30, 2019 3:01 PM EDT ››› ALEX KAPLAN

Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Far-right network One America News Network and others helped spread a hoax from pro-Trump trolls Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman regarding Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.

One America News Network has repeatedly pushed conspiracy theories and employs well-known right-wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. President Donald Trump has praised the network, and he regularly watches and cites its programs -- just last week, he pushed a false claim from OANN that the United Kingdom helped the Obama administration spy on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

On April 29, the network aired a segment about a Medium post purportedly from a man named Hunter Kelly accusing Buttigieg of sexually assaulting him earlier this year.

Media Matters did not find a segment since then correcting the report.

The real Kelly has since come forward to deny he wrote the post; he said Wohl and Burkman tricked him after approaching him to ask him to make up the allegation. From The Daily Beast:

Kelly said that Wohl and his similarly infamous cohort, lobbyist Jack Burkman, booked him a flight from Michigan to Baltimore. From there, they drove to Burkman’s home in Arlington where Wohl showed him a draft of a statement detailing the bogus accusations against Buttigieg.

Kelly said he expressed concerns about the scheme but Wohl told him to sleep on it. When Kelly woke at around 11 in the morning, Wohl “was already dressed in a suit because he ‘can’t do a Monday if he isn’t in a suit’” and—of more significance—the fabricated statement had been posted to Medium, along with fake Twitter and Gmail accounts in Kelly’s name.

According to Kelly, Burkman tried to calm his nerves by claiming that he was a “‘star’ and people are eating me up.”

The trio, according to Kelly, ate Subway sandwiches, during which Kelly continued to express his regrets. Burkman and Wohl tried to calm him down by promising to purchase “any house I wanted” and insisting that his family would “get over it.”

Wohl has a history of pushing false claims and hoaxes. He told USA Today in February that he aimed to interfere in the Democratic presidential primaries, including with the use of fake social media accounts, and he previously spread a false claim about Democratic candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA). The lie about Buttigieg also resembles a similar scheme by Wohl and Burkman involving a fake intelligence service used to fabricate a false sexual assault allegation against special counsel Robert Mueller.

In addition to OANN, other figures and outlets that pushed Wohl and Burkman’s false claim about Buttigieg include:

Conspiracy theory outlet Infowars and its writer Paul Joseph Watson

PJ Media, though the original link has since been updated to note that the story is false

Error-prone far-right outlet The Gateway Pundit and its founder Jim Hoft

Fellow Gateway Pundit writer Cassandra Fairbanks (who has also since deleted her tweet, which was captured via CrowdTangle)

Conspiracy theorist and Newsmax TV host Wayne Allyn Root

Far-right outlet Big League Politics

Wohl’s father and frequent Fox guest David Wohl

Radio host Bill Mitchell

Reddit’s “r/The_Donald” subreddit and 4chan’s “politically incorrect” message board known as “/pol/”

According to social media analytics website BuzzSumo, links to articles that pushed the false claim received more than 31,000 Facebook and Twitter shares combined. The original Medium post also received at least 60,000 Facebook engagements.

Update (5/1/19): OANN has since aired a segment acknowledging that the allegation against Buttigieg was a hoax from Wohl. On the April 30 edition of The Daily Ledger, guest host Alex Salvi talked about Wohl’s “smear effort” without noting that his own network had pushed the same allegation a day earlier, mocklingly saying, “I mean, we were supposed to believe that Buttigieg announced his candidacy and then immediately went and sexually assaulted someone? It makes no sense.”

Short Link

http://mm4a.org/4R3

copy link

Network/Outlet

One America News Network, Gateway Pundit, Reddit, 4chan

Person

Paul Joseph Watson, Cassandra Fairbanks, Jim Hoft, Wayne Allyn Root, David Wohl, Bill Mitchell

Show/Publication

Infowars, Big League Politics

Stories/Interests

Fake News, Alt-right and pro-Trump trolls

==

sandmann

Charlie Kirk

?

@charliekirk11

 How could anyone still trust the media after this weekend?

Fake “bombshell” built on lies with anonymous sources that was debunked by the special counsel [buzzfeed?]

The attempted public lynching of high school kids on lies just because they wrote Trump hats

:{

}:

Journalism is dead.

43.9K

7:07 PM - Jan 21, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

16.9K people are talking about this

The president’s adult son, Donald Trump Jr., leaned into the campaign on Twitter, citing Posobiec, Kirk and others to question why major accounts had not been banned:

Donald Trump Jr.

?

@DonaldJTrumpJr

:{

}:

 Waiting for you to do the right thing and retract this... oh who am I kidding? You couldn’t care less about what’s right or true, just your leftist narrative.

:{

}:

==

fail:

The “MAGA Movement” comprises bunches of pro-Trump pundits and social media personalities who use their followings to gin up support for the president in the face of all criticism. Last week, they attempted to rile up their supporters at a conference in the nation’s capital city.

The event, calling itself the American Priority Conference, appeared to be well-financed with its stage setup, conference space rental and speakers lineup, but it still reportedly drew less than 100 attendees at its peak. Attendance was so low that one of the event’s headline speakers, Stefan Molyneux, canceled his talk after arriving at the conference and witnessing the dismal turnout. In photos from the event, rows of seats remained empty, even as newsworthy speakers like GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone spoke at the conference.

:{View image on Twitter:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:

:{:{Reuters Pictures:(style="font-weight:700;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;padding-right:4px"):}::{ > :{✔:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}::(style="position:static;-webkit-box-flex:0;flex:0 0 auto;padding-right:4px"):}::(style="display:flex;-webkit-box-align:center;align-items:center;min-width:0px"):}::{@reuterspictures:(style="overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;flex-shrink:1"):}:

Political operative Roger Stone, a long-time ally of President Donald Trump, speaks at the American Priority conference in Washington. More photos of the day: :{https://:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:reut.rs/2StiKHU:{ :(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}: @jimurquhartpixs

10

6:22 AM - Dec 7, 2018

See Reuters Pictures's other Tweets

:{Twitter Ads info and privacy:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:

The conference lost other headline speakers, including Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth and Heritage Foundation Distinguished Visiting Fellow Stephen Moore, after Right Wing Watch reported that the event was slated to host a panel and speakers supportive of the bizarre “QAnon” conspiracy theory, which alleges that President Donald Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller are secretly working in tandem to unravel a global network of satanic pedophiles who traffic children so that top Democrats like Hillary Clinton can do unspeakable things to them in secret. QAnon supporters still attended the conference, reportedly brushing shoulders with erstwhile White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, whose tenure in the job is counted in days.

Right Wing Watch was denied press access by conference organizers despite the fact they touted the event on their website as “A Home for Free Speech and Free Association.” Curiously enough, the event also denied press access to The Gateway Pundit’s Cassandra Fairbanks, despite Gateway Pundit’s aggressively pro-Trump tone. Fairbanks told us that after inquiring into her denied request, she learned that organizers had taken issue with the fact she had invited Chelsea Manning to an event hosted by Mike Cernovich in New York City earlier this year.

The American Priority Conference sought to be a rallying point for the MAGA movement, but instead the conference was another demonstration of a fundamental issue within the pro-Trump effort: an inability to translate their social media prominence into meaningful activism. Last year, some of the same figures attempted to solidify their influence in Washington by starting a pro-Trump super PAC, but the effort ultimately failed after they failed to convince donors to contribute funds. Other events, dating back as far as 2017, have also proved themselves to be fractious, as larger MAGA pundits hoping to land gigs in mainstream conservative circles try to publicly eliminate the less PR-friendly radical elements from their orbit. Those past alliances, which gave them power in the 2016 election, are now proving to be barriers to their efforts to enter into realms of consequential influence.

Whether it be a charade or naiveté, prominent figures in the MAGA universe are still adamant that they have the potential to be a political force of nature on the ground. One America News pundit Jack Posobiec, despite the fact that he granted airtime to advertise the underwhelming conference on the network at which he works, during a rambling live audio stream that the movement was not over, asserting that “God has our backs on this.”

There was perhaps no more telling moment for the state of the MAGA movement than when anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer last month handcuffed herself to a door at Twitter’s New York City offices, demanding she be un-suspended from the platform. She lasted approximately two hours before police helped her cut herself from the door. She has since seemed to fade into obscurity, proving that without their large social media followings, MAGA movement members like Loomer can’t seem to accomplish much beyond the occasional stunt.

Tags: Jack PosobiecLaura LoomerNew Right

==

rww

Two neo-Nazis who filmed One America News Network personality Jack Posobiec while he roamed the streets of a Washington, D.C., to create propaganda for the Seth Rich conspiracy theory on behalf of Rebel Media are suspected to have schemed violence in relation to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 murdered, court documents show.

Jeffrey Clark, who police arrested on November 9, was active on Gab, where he used his profile honoring white supremacist mass murderer Dylann Roof to connect with the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. Prior to his arrest, he had attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he was photographed alongside the young man who killed counter-protester Heather Heyer. Clark’s relatives told the FBI that he sought to “expedite” a race war.

Clark’s brother, a fellow neo-Nazi named Edward, committed suicide after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting when it was revealed that Gab, a Twitter spin-off overrun with violent extremists, had provided the shooter’s profile information to law enforcement. Apparently concerned that he’d soon be receiving a visit from the FBI, he shot himself in a park.

The tie-ins don’t stop at Gab. The neo-Nazi Clark brothers were connected to a web of white nationalists who ushered in the “alt-right,” including Posobiec.

The brothers were photographed filming Posobiec while he worked on footage about the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, which served as rich fodder for pro-Trump conspiracy theorists online in 2016. Posobiec also notably traveled to Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizza restaurant and bar that was at the center of wild internet conspiracy theories about satanic pedophile rings, to “infiltrate” the scene. When a believer in the conspiracy theory took matters into his own hands and entered the restaurant with a firearm, Posobiec deleted evidence of his visit and began lying about his role in spreading the hoax.

In the images and reporting published by HuffPost, the Clark brothers are seen filming Posobiec. Jeffrey Clark reportedly told Laura Sennett of One People’s Project that “Posobiec absolutely was” aware of their neo-Nazi beliefs and had told his brother “that he was sympathetic to those beliefs.” HuffPost reports:

In May 2017, the Clark brothers teamed up with far-right “Pizzagate” propagandist Jack Posobiec, who was then the D.C. bureau chief for the far-right website Rebel Media, to shoot footage for a film Posobiec was working on about Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer whose murder near the Clarks’ home in Bloomingdale has spawned numerous far-right conspiracy theories.

Laura Sennett, an anti-fascist researcher who works with One People’s Project, spoke with Jeffrey Clark a few weeks after he and his brother were spotted in Bloomingdale with Posobiec, who by then had been fired from Rebel under mysterious circumstances after plagiarizing Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized the Unite the Right rally.

“[Clark] told me that Jack Posobiec hired him and his brother to follow him with a camera to take video of his investigation of Seth Rich,” Sennett told HuffPost. “Not sure if it was a documentary or a news story, but [Posobiec] was doing some kind of reporting for Rebel Media. I asked him if Posobiec was aware of his Nazi beliefs. He told me that Posobiec absolutely was and had told Jeff that he was sympathetic to those beliefs.”

TheClark brothers would stand Posobiec again at a rally he led alongside white nationalist Richard Spencer,of whom the brothers and Posobiec were both seeming fans. Alexander Reid Ross, the author of the book “Against the Fascist Creep,” tweeted that the Clark brothers had infiltrated a book talk he gave last year. According to Ross, a Daily Caller reporter was filming the incident. Later that night, Posobiec published the PDF of Ross’ book.

:{:{(((Alexander Reid Ross))):(style="font-weight:700;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;padding-right:4px"):}::(style="display:flex;-webkit-box-align:center;align-items:center;min-width:0px;width:auto;flex-shrink:0;max-width:100%"):}::{@areidross:(style="overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;flex-shrink:1"):}:

· Nov 13, 2018

Whoa, these are the guys who tried to bust up my book talk in DC. There was a Daily Caller journo waiting in a cab outside livestreaming in case something went down. Instead, dozens of antifascists came and ensured the security of the space. Fash couldn't even catch a ride home.

:{:{(((Alexander Reid Ross))):(style="font-weight:700;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;padding-right:4px"):}::(style="display:flex;-webkit-box-align:center;align-items:center;min-width:0px"):}::{@areidross:(style="overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;flex-shrink:1"):}:

That evening, Jack Posobiec posted a pirated copy of the PDF of my book online -- total coincidence, i know. Here's an article that was published about the evening's affairs...:{https://:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:itsgoingdown.org/nazis-fail-att:{empt-shut-fascist-creep-author-talk-potters-house/ :(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:… pic.twitter.com/ww7RrDO09K

Twitter Ads info and privacy

:{Twitter Ads info and privacy:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:

In a video interview recorded by One People’s Project, Spencer detailed his relationship with Posobiec going back to the Republican National Convention in 2016.

[pix]

“He introduced himself as, ‘Oh, I work for Roger Stone, I’m Roger Stone’s man, kind of thing.’ He definitely introduced himself as really tightly connected with the campaign—the Trump campaign—and he was maybe two degrees of separation from Trump himself, that kind of thing,” Spencer says in the video, adding that Posobiec expressed gratitude to the alt-right for joining a pro-Trump “coalition” in a tone Spencer described as “a smoke-blown-up-ass kind of way.”

Spencer alleged that while Posobiec was at The Rebel, the outlet had edited him out of rally footage while feeding his talking points to Posobiec to reiterate as if they were Posobiec’s opinions.

“It was highly dishonest, to put it mildly,” Spencer said.

Spencer said he had an “ongoing connection” with Posobiec over the years, but that the relationship was “not intimate.” Spencer described Posobiec as being “highly complimentary” to him “in a way that no conservative would be.”

Posobiec has documented ties to the alt-right dating back to his formative years at Rebel Media. In the most public example, he was fired for plagiarizing a video published by the organizer of the “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Posobiec was also spotted sitting with Marcus Epstein, who was once charged with assault after karate-chopping a black woman and calling her a racial slur, during this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. He’s also tweeted anti-Semitic tropes (and since deleted those tweets).

Posobiec’s tie-ins to the alt-right are not entirely severed. In September, Posobiec released a book that Theodore Beale, an “alt-right” writer using the pseudonym “Vox Day,” edited and published. Beale has been openly as “alt-right” as recently as August 9, 2018.

Tags: Jack PosobiecRichard SpencerAlt-Rightwhite nationalismNational Policy InstituteOne America NewsRebel Media

==

big in pizzagate

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/dec/05/how-pizzagate-went-fake-news-real-problem-dc-busin/

--wapo

Down the block, at Politics and Prose Bookstore, employees noticed tweets and other online posts that included them on a list of stores linked by underground tunnels that do not exist.

:{

}:

The fact that one of the shop’s co-owners, Lissa Muscatine, had worked as Clinton’s speechwriter and adviser for two decades quickly became one more data point in the Pizzagate activists’ conspiracy theory.

:{

}:

The shop’s phone rang off the hook with profane, abusive calls from across the country. Employees simply hung up, over and over.

:{

}:

Frustrated and frightened, merchants along the block talked to the police. They called the FBI, which said the threats were a local matter.

:{

}:

On Nov. 16, Jack Posobiec, a former Navy Reserve intelligence officer who had spent much of the previous year as a leader of a pro-Trump grass-roots organization, decided he’d had enough of just reading tweets and blog posts about the pizza place in his city.

:{

}:

Posobiec, 31, had never eaten at Comet; he had never even heard of the place until he started reading about it on conservative, antigovernment media sites. “I didn’t pay much attention to it before Election Day because I was focused on the campaign,” he said. “With that going on, who wants to talk about pizza?”

:{

}:

Now, with Trump elected, he read the posts more closely. Any story that accused Clinton, John Podesta and Brock of nefarious deeds deserved some investigation, he thought. He believed the Clinton campaign was “full of secrecy and deception.”

:{

}:

It seemed reasonable to Posobiec that Podesta might have organized a sex ring in cahoots with Brock.But the only part of the scenario that was real was that Podesta had been known to eat pizza at Comet. This part is false: pictures purporting to show that symbols, such as butterflies and spirals, in signs at Comet and other shops were statements about pedophilia.

:{

}:

Posobiec said he was curious and confused. He and a friend decided to go have some pizza. They walked into Comet eight days after the election, sat down and ordered. Posobiec got the garlic knots. His friend got a beer. But they were not just hanging out. Posobiec was using his phone to broadcast his evening at Comet on Periscope, an app that allows users to stream video live.

:{

}:

“Part of the experience of living in 2016 is live, on-the-scene broadcasts,” he said. “People have lost faith with government and the mainstream media being any real authority. After the Iraq War, after Benghazi, people are searching for other sources of information. If I can do something with Periscope and show what I’m seeing with my own two eyes, that’s helpful.”

:{

}:

Posobiec said he never made any disturbance inside Comet, but the restaurant’s managers saw him take his camera into a back room where a child’s birthday party was underway. It did not seem appropriate for a child’s party to be broadcast on a stranger’s Periscope feed. The manager asked two D.C. police officers who happened to be across the street to assist.

:{

}:

Posobiec and his friend “were gently refused service and asked to leave,” said a person familiar with the restaurant’s decision.

:{

}:

Posobiec offered to pay for what he had ordered. The manager said it was on the house.

:{

}:

Posobiec said he was not there to make a scene. “I didn’t have any preconceived notions,” he said. “I wasn’t sure. I thought I could just show it was a regular pizza place.”

:{

}:

That evening, after Posobiec was ushered out of Comet, Pettibone tweeted: “You’re my hero for doing this, Jack. Never let go.”

:{

}:

On Twitter, the hashtag #pizzagate peaked in the hours after Posobiec’s video appeared.

:{

}:

On Nov. 22, Reddit closed its “r/pizzagate” subreddit, a site forum focused on a particular topic. The site said it was concerned that Pizzagate posts were revealing private information about people at Comet and nearby stores. “We don’t want witch-hunts on our site,” it said. The decision sparked allegations of censorship from some people who were spreading the Pizzagate rumors. They moved their discussion to a similar site, Voat.

:{

}:

On Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, two men carrying protest signs showed up outside Comet.

==

flynn jr

https://www.alternet.org/michael-flynn-jr-issues-cryptic-and-disturbing-warning-youre-all-going-down

==

frum bk:

press: hannity and new say no indep media eg CNN

local fox crew said gianforte guilty, but not asked to be on nat'l; rush applaid, 116K$ ON election day 113

russian dis-info400 ppl, 20m ri8bles (400K$ per mo; 40 rooms0 russian version of FB, made fake ppl on US soc media 115; 100K ads; target 10 m ppl in slected districts and states; msg reached 126M FB users 116.

russia ~ Fr Macron, so vidfeo ell cut hand wash inverted; rebel media posobiec got adv notice of email dump; big overlap betw anti-marcon and pro djt, 18K bots; 118

cernovich pizzagate guy got WH leaks (susan rice unmasked)

trad media tried to be balaced, so any crumb or djt normalcy touted 120

media restriction 1st sign of decline of democ 122

...to Newsweek. To this day, the Seth Rich conspiracy theories, which have been dismantled by many major news organizations, persist.

Just this morning, Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and leading Seth Rich conspiracy theorist Matt Couch both claimed they had been in touch with one of the defendants in the case. Couch, who dismissed the suit as “nonsensical,” is exploiting the lawsuit to solicit donations for his media group, which is purportedly conducting an “investigation” into his death.

Now, nearly two years after Rich’s tragic death, his family is suing Fox News for damages because the network "aided and abetted the intentional infliction of emotional distress" and served as a national platform for a “sham story.” From a March 13 ABC News article:

...

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-media-are-already-spinning-vile-new-conspiracy-theory-about-texas

Michael Edison Hayden

Posted with permission from Newsweek

no link pix/doc

For anyone monitoring America’s far-right, it was only a matter of time before Devin Patrick Kelley, the man identified as the Sutherland Springs, Texas, shooter, became “antifa.”

Antifa, a leftist protest movement with no organizational hierarchy whatsoever, was blamed for the mass shooting in Las Vegas by Alex Jones’ conspiracy website Info Wars. They were responsible for allegedly  plotting a civil war involving supersoldiers Saturday—one that utterly failed to manifest. And on Sunday, after a man murdered at least 26 people in a Texas church, the right’s conspiracy peddlers waited only a matter of hours to try to blame the violence on leftists.

Police did not immediately announce Kelley's motive in the mass shooting. But Mike Cernovich, a self-described “American nationalist,” posted about the motive shortly after news of it broke. “Mass shooting at The First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, which has a largely white denomination,” Cernovich wrote. “Antifa terrorist attack?”

Cernovich pushed the same idea further Sunday evening, citing only “photos.” “Photos of Texas shooter is consistent with profile of Antifa member,” Cernovich posted. “This is looking more and more like Antifa terror.”

Alex Jones, who devoted his entire Saturday to doing live coverage on his web-show Info Wars on a second American civil war that absolutely never happened, also pushed the idea that the shooter could somehow be an antifa activist.“Was this part of the Antifa revolution against Christians and conservatives or a Isis op? [ sic],” Jones tweeted Sunday afternoon to promote his show. “Live from the church.”

Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump figure with a large following on social media, who has a reputation for creating and pushing fake news stories about leftists, posted a screen shot of something that looked like a direct message conversation on Twitter. The conversation was between a man named Dave Pollack and It’s Going Down (IGD), a self-described “digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements” frequently associated with “antifa” protests.

The Dave Pollack figure says in the screenshot: “Go after the heart of the far-right: conservative churches.” A spokesperson for Its Going Down, who asked not to be named, told Newsweek through a direct message that the screenshot was entirely fabricated, but noted that many people on social media have seized onto the picture and shared it anyway. On ZeroHedge, a libertarian blog, one of the commenters on a post about the mass shooting summed it up this way: “ He's Antifa, but you'll never see that confirmed because the FBI is a bunch of leftist commie sympathizing traitors,” a user named Gaius Frakkin’ wrote.

“Today we learned that Jack Posobiec was sharing a manufactured and fictitious conversation that was created to look like our account speaking with several others,” the spokesperson for IGD wrote to Newsweek. “The conversation implied that anarchists and antifa organizers are somehow supportive of church shootings. Nothing could be further from the truth, and our hearts go out to people across the U.S. who have lost, and continue lose loved ones in these horrific mass shootings.”

The spokesperson accused Posobiec and others of using the “pain and misery of working-class people” for profit.

“Posobiec wants to attack social movements to further his own reactionary political ends while growing his fame and career along the way,” the spokesperson wrote. “For the sake of not only the truth but people's lives, it's imperative that people recognize these phonies for what they are and denounce them.”

==

tag

https://www.mediamatters.org/people/jack-posobiec

https://www.mediamatters.org/search/index?qstring=rebel%20media

poso ex rebel?

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/05/31/alt-right-troll-files:{-civil-rights-complaint:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:-after-today-show-mocks-him/216723

...

During the May 31 edition of NBC’s Today show, Daly reported on the internet backlash that Posobiec was receiving on Twitter by proposing “men only screenings of Star Wars” for “the entire first week” as a response to some theaters offering all-female screenings of Wonder Woman.

[vid]

Posobiec announced he had filed a complaint against Daly and one of the movie theaters holding such screeners. The complaint is just the latest stunt in Posobiec’s career as a far-right internet troll, which includes promoting emails and forged documents with the purpose of smearing French President Emmanuel Macron, pushing the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories, as well as screaming about the baseless Seth Rich conspiracy theory after a press conference on the White House lawn. As reported by BuzzFeed, Posobiec was also “the brainchild behind a ‘rape Melania’ sign that appeared at an anti-Trump rally in an effort to make the protesters look bad.”

It’s tempting to discount Posobiec’s stunt as another absurd prank levied by a pro-Trump, "alt-right" internet personality with the purpose of advancing a political point. But the effects of these acts of trolling could have negative real-life consequences as they distort the true purpose of civil rights legislation and undermine legitimate institutions, like the press. His complaint could be diverting attention and resources -- a real issue when the Trump administration has vowed to defund government programs that protect civil rights -- from the serious discrimination that many people face. Other "alt-right" figures have publicly acknowledged their intent in trolling democratic institutions including the free press. Institutions protecting civil rights are clearly also not safe from becoming targets.

==

==

2x

no link

https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/08/30/hannity-gets-his-stories-internet-fever-swamps-ana-navarro-story/217810

Hannity gets his stories from the internet fever swamps: The Ana Navarro story

Research ››› August 30, 2017 6:14 PM EDT ››› CRISTINA LóPEZ G.

During his Fox News show on August 29, host Sean Hannity elevated a smear campaign targeting Republican CNN contributor Ana Navarro. Hannity’s smears came from a report citing publicly available information showing Navarro has donated to Democratic candidates, which pro-Trump troll Jack Posobiec distributed on Twitter under the hashtag #AnaGate to rally his followers to harass the contributor. This is not the first time Hannity has elevated a narrative that comes from pro-Trump trolls and fringe far-right message boards.

Right-wing trolls are harassing Republican CNN contributor Ana Navarro for donating to Democrats

Right-wing trolls are waging a harassment campaign against CNN contributor Ana Navarro. Using the #AnaGate hashtag, right-wing trolls and other Twitter users are harassing Republican CNN contributor Ana Navarro, criticizing her for having donated to Democrats, including Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). [Twitter, #AnaGate, accessed 8/30/17]

Pro-Trump troll Jack Posobiec introduced the #AnaGate narrative. On August 24, pro-Trump troll Jack Posobiec -- who formerly identified as a member of the “alt-right” -- reported in a Medium post that Navarro had donated to Democrats and organized fundraisers, citing publicly available campaign documents. Posobiec also took to Periscope to brainstorm potential hashtags for what he deemed a “scandal,” coming up with #AnaGate. Posobiec recently bragged that a retweet of his defense of President Donald Trump's outrageous Charlottesville comments by Trump amounted to an "endorsement," telling the The Boston Globe that "Trump’s 'retweet of me was almost like an endorsement … in a very broad sense,' Posobiec said during an interview with the Globe at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where he requested to meet. 'It was almost like he was validating what we, the alt-media, are doing.'" [Media Matters, 5/11/17; Medium, 8/24/17; Periscope, 8/24/17; The Boston Globe, 8/28/17]

Follow

Jack Posobiec ? @JackPosobiec

BUSTED: Ana Navarro Bankrolled Indicted Democrat Bob Menendez! Will CNN denounce? https://medium.com/@JackPosobiec/busted-ana-navarro-bankrolled-indicted-democrat-bob-menendez-c5dc48ce40db …

6:25 PM - Aug 24, 2017

Photo published for BUSTED: Ana Navarro Bankrolled Indicted Democrat Bob Menendez

BUSTED: Ana Navarro Bankrolled Indicted Democrat Bob Menendez

“CNN should be sued for false advertising” — Roger Stone, on Ana Navarro

medium.com

990 990 Replies   8,178 8,178 Retweets   9,844 9,844 likes

Posobiec cited Roger Stone, who has a record of making misogynistic and racist remarks about Navarro. In his Medium post, Posobiec turned to Infowars regular Roger Stone for comment on Navarro. Stone has a history of making racist and misogynistic remarks about the CNN contributor, calling her “Entitled Diva Bitch” on Twitter and referring to her Latino background by saying “black beans and rice didn’t miss her.” [Medium, 8/24/17; Media Matters, 2/22/16]

Conservative media amplified Posobiec’s narrative. Both Laura Ingraham’s online outlet LifeZette and Breitbart.com amplified the story Posobiec had reported, criticizing Navarro’s anti-Trump stance. [LifeZette, 8/28/17; Breitbart, 8/29/17]

Navarro has been a consistently critical voice against Trump among conservatives.Navarro has consistently been critical of President Donald Trump while continuing to support the Republican party.[Media Matters, 1/29/17, 5/15/17, 6/29/17, 7/2/17]

Sean Hannity elevated Posobiec’s narrative on his Fox show

Fox host Sean Hannity gave Posobiec’s smear narrative against Navarro a platform during his show.During the August 29 monologue of his show Hannity, Fox host Sean Hannity parroted “a report” that “so-called Republican Eva (sic) Navarro donated a lot of money to prominent Democrats”. From the August 29 edition of Fox News’ Hannity:

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): And CNN's so-called Republican commentator Eva (sic) Navarro responded to a tweet from President Trump about leaving for Texas and writing, quote, “As if the people of Texas aren’t already enduring enough suffering… .” Now, what’s interesting about that, we learned today from a report that CNN’s so-called Republican Navarro, well, she’s donated a lot of money to prominent Democrats. What Republican would donate to the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other left-wingers that are out there and people on the left? It sounds like a fake Republican at the fake news network. More proof that the left is completely unhinged. And it is  why we have now actually diagnosed them, considering they want to diagnose everybody else, and we call it the Trump derangement syndrome. [Fox News, Hannity, 8/29/17]

Posobiec gleefully tweeted about his narrative receiving prime-time validation.

Follow

Jack Posobiec ? @JackPosobiec

Hannity is on too #AnaGate

4:33 AM - Aug 30, 2017 · Washington, DC

12 12 Replies   73 73 Retweets   257 257 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

[Twitter, 8/30/17]

Follow

Jack Posobiec ? @JackPosobiec

We primetime now https://twitter.com/woodruffbets/status/902714104703578112 …

3:06 AM - Aug 30, 2017

13 13 Replies   102 102 Retweets   305 305 likes

Hannity has increasingly become a mouthpiece for the pro-Trump fever swamps on the internet

Hannity consistently used his platform to elevate the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.In late May, Hannity devoted considerable airtime to the conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich, who was murdered in the summer of 2016, had provided WikiLeaks with the DNC emails that many experts have concluded were hacked by Russian authorities. Despite his own network retracting the story and the Rich family pleading for the gross exploitation of their son’s murder to stop, Hannity relentlessly pushed the story -- which was born in pro-Trump message boards and did not stand up to scrutiny -- in an effort to quash reports of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election. [Media Matters, 5/30/17]

Hannity has pushed false claims from pro-Trump outlets. Hannity pushed on Twitter a false Gateway Pundit story that claimed Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) had requested campaign donations from Russia. After the misleading story was debunked by McCain’s Senate office, Hannity deleted his tweet and got defensive over criticisms that he was spreading false information. [Media Matters, 2/23/17]

Hannity has parroted claims originating from the message boards that the counterprotestors opposing neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, VA, were paid actors. Hannity used his radio show to promote the conspiracy theory that “antifa agitators” who opposed the neo-Nazi and white supremacist protesters in Charlottesville, VA, were actually actors hired by a publicity firm. [Media Matters, 8/17/17]

==

During his Fox News show on August 29, host Sean Hannity elevated a smear campaign targeting Republican CNN contributor Ana Navarro. Hannity’s smears came from a report citing publicly available information showing Navarro has donated to Democratic candidates, which pro-Trump troll Jack Posobiec distributed on Twitter under the hashtag #AnaGate to rally his followers to harass the contributor. This is not the first time Hannity has elevated a narrative that comes from pro-Trump trolls and fringe far-right message boards.

Right-wing trolls are waging a harassment campaign against CNN contributor Ana Navarro. Using the #AnaGate hashtag, right-wing trolls and other Twitter users are harassing Republican CNN contributor Ana Navarro, criticizing her for having donated to Democrats, including Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). Twitter, #AnaGate, accessed [8/30/17]

Pro-Trump troll Jack Posobiec introduced the #AnaGate narrative. On August 24, pro-Trump troll Jack Posobiec -- who formerly identified as a member of the “alt-right” -- reported in a Medium post that Navarro had donated to Democrats and organized fundraisers, citing publicly available campaign documents. Posobiec also took to Periscope to brainstorm potential hashtags for what he deemed a “scandal,” coming up with #AnaGate. Posobiec recently bragged that a retweet of his defense of President Donald Trump's outrageous Charlottesville comments by Trump amounted to an "endorsement," telling the The Boston Globe that "Trump’s 'retweet of me was almost like an endorsement … in a very broad sense,' Posobiec said during an interview with the Globe at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where he requested to meet. 'It was almost like he was validating what we, the alt-media, are doing.'" *Media Matters*, [5/11/17; Medium, 8/24/17; Periscope, 8/24/17; The Boston Globe, 8/28/17]

BUSTED: Ana Navarro Bankrolled Indicted Democrat Bob Menendez! Will CNN denounce? https://t.co/fx5RTNxnUc

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) August 25, 2017

We primetime now https://t.co/OY9E30qCRp

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) August 30, 2017

Twitter, [8/24/17]

Posobiec cited Roger Stone, who has a record of making misogynistic and racist remarks about Navarro. In his Medium post, Posobiec turned to Infowars regular Roger Stone for comment on Navarro. Stone has a history of making racist and misogynistic remarks about the CNN contributor, calling her “Entitled Diva Bitch” on Twitter and referring to her Latino background by saying “black beans and rice didn’t miss her.” Medium, [8/24/17; Media Matters, 2/22/16]

Conservative media amplified Posobiec’s narrative. Both Laura Ingraham’s online outlet LifeZette and Breitbart.com amplified the story Posobiec had reported, criticizing Navarro’s anti-Trump stance. LifeZette, [8/28/17; Breitbart, 8/29/17]

Navarro has been a consistently critical voice against Trump among conservatives. Navarro has consistently been critical of President Donald Trump while continuing to support the Republican party. *Media Matters*, [1/29/17, 5/15/17, 6/29/17, 7/2/17]

Sean Hannity elevated Posobiec’s narrative on his Fox show

Fox host Sean Hannity gave Posobiec’s smear narrative against Navarro a platform during his show.During the August 29 monologue of his show Hannity, Fox host Sean Hannity parroted “a report” that “so-called Republican Eva (sic) Navarro donated a lot of money to prominent Democrats”. From the August 29 edition of Fox News’ Hannity:

[vid]

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): And CNN's so-called Republican commentator Eva (sic) Navarro responded to a tweet from President Trump about leaving for Texas and writing, quote, “As if the people of Texas aren’t already enduring enough suffering… .” Now, what’s interesting about that, we learned today from a report that CNN’s so-called Republican Navarro, well, she’s donated a lot of money to prominent Democrats. What Republican would donate to the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other left-wingers that are out there and people on the left? It sounds like a fake Republican at the fake news network. More proof that the left is completely unhinged. And it is  why we have now actually diagnosed them, considering they want to diagnose everybody else, and we call it the Trump derangement syndrome. Fox News, *Hannity*, [8/29/17]

Posobiec gleefully tweeted about his narrative receiving prime-time validation.

 Twitter, [8/30/17]Hannity is on too #AnaGate

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) August 30, 2017

Hannity has increasingly become a mouthpiece for the pro-Trump fever swamps on the internet

Hannity consistently used his platform to elevate the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. In late May, Hannity devoted considerable airtime to the conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich, who was murdered in the summer of 2016, had provided WikiLeaks with the DNC emails that many experts have concluded were hacked by Russian authorities. Despite his own network retracting the story and the Rich family pleading for the gross exploitation of their son’s murder to stop, Hannity relentlessly pushed the story -- which was born in pro-Trump message boards and did not stand up to scrutiny -- in an effort to quash reports of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election. *Media Matters*, [5/30/17]

Hannity has pushed false claims from pro-Trump outlets. Hannity pushed on Twitter a false Gateway Pundit story that claimed Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) had requested campaign donations from Russia. After the misleading story was debunked by McCain’s Senate office, Hannity deleted his tweet and got defensive over criticisms that he was spreading false information. *Media Matters*, [2/23/17]

Hannity has parroted claims originating from the message boards that the counterprotestors opposing neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, VA, were paid actors. Hannity used his radio show to promote the conspiracy theory that “antifa agitators” who opposed the neo-Nazi and white supremacist protesters in Charlottesville, VA, were actually actors hired by a publicity firm. *Media Matters*, [8/17/17]

Cristina López G. is a senior researcher at Media Matters with a focus in Hispanic media and Latino representation

AN

==

8/19

Jack Posobiec—the right-wing provocateur known for advancing the lie that DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered, faking a transcript of testimony given by former FBI Director James Comey, helping push the dangerous Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and holding up a “Rape Melania” sign and making it seem that it was brought by anti-Trump activists—attempted to set up a multi-city protest against Google on August 19th.

Posobiec wanted to protest the firing of a Google employee who, as the Washington Post reported, “argued that biological differences helped explain why women are underrepresented at the company.” The protests were set to occur in Atlanta; Austin; Boston; Los Angeles; Mountain View, California; New York; Pittsburgh; Seattle; and Washington, D.C. but in at least two locations no permits were requested.

Although march organizers would not elaborate on the threats they allegedly received, Posobiec wrote on August 16: “The Peaceful March on Google has been postponed due to credible Alt Left terrorist threats for the safety of our citizen participants. Despite our clear and straightfoward statements denouncing bigotry and hatred, CNN and other mainstream media made malicious and false statements that our peaceful march was being organized by Nazi sympathizers.”

Melinda Warner is a senior investigative researcher for Right Wing Watch

==

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trumps-racist-fans-turn-each-other-over-pathetic-weekend-rally

==

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/there-are-real-paid-protesters-theyre-all-right-wingers

==

mma

rnc

The Republican National Committee (RNC) pushed a false talking point that originated from the “alt-right”/fake news ecosystem to try to discredit former FBI Director James Comey’s June 8 testimony to the Senate intelligence committee.

During his testimony, Comey said that he believed President Donald Trump fired him due to the FBI’s Russia probe, saying, “I know I was fired because of something about the way I was conducting the Russia investigation was in some way putting pressure on him, in some way irritating him, and he decided to fire me because of that.” He discussed a number of other issues as well, including saying that Trump directed him to end an investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and that he wrote memos on his one-on-one interactions with the president because he feared Trump might lie about the exchanges.

Responding to the testimony, the RNC tweeted, “#BigLeagueTruth: Comey testified under oath that @POTUS never asked him or anyone else to end any investigation. #ComeyHearing.” The tweet included a video of Comey’s previous testimony before the Senate intelligence committee -- on May 3 -- in which Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) asked him if “the attorney general or senior officials at the Department of Justice” tried to block an FBI investigation, to which Comey replied, “Not in my experience.”

Contrary to the RNC’s implication, Comey did not contradict himself. On May 3, he was talking specifically about the Department of Justice, not the president. The RNC’s false claim was pushed early on by “alt-right” trolls Jack Posobiec and Nick Short, and was then repeated by fake news purveyors and other “alt-right” outlets before more traditional right-wing media figures and outlets, such as Fox & Friends and Rush Limbaugh, picked it up. Since then, Republican politicians such as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have also repeated the false assertion. The false claim even impacted the stock market.

In a statement to Media Matters, Sen. Hirono criticized the RNC for taking “a far-right conspiracy theory as fact,” and noted that she “only asked former Director Comey about pressure from officials at the Department of Justice”:

“If you listen to the exchange, it’s clear that I only asked former Director Comey about pressure from officials at the Department of Justice, but the RNC chose to move forward and take a far-right conspiracy theory as fact. This sends a clear message that Republicans are willing to share fake news and dangerous narratives in their quest to deny Russian interference in our elections. Unfortunately, we’ve come to expect no less from the mouthpiece of an Administration that deals in alternative facts.”

The RNC’s incorrect claim is yet another example of how the “alt-right”/fake news ecosystem has been able to amplify its misinformation out of the fringe, pushing forged documents, baseless conspiracy theories, and smear campaigns into more of the mainstream.

https://www.mediamatters.org/people/jack-posobiec

no link img

Tags ››› Jack Posobiec

RNC's false talking point about Comey came from “alt-right” trolls

Lie that Comey said Trump didn't pressure him on Russia-related investigations came from an “alt-right” troll and then was picked up by fake news purveyors

Blog ››› June 9, 2017 12:09 PM EDT ››› ALEX KAPLAN

Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

The Republican National Committee (RNC) pushed a false talking point that originated from the “alt-right”/fake news ecosystem to try to discredit former FBI Director James Comey’s June 8 testimony to the Senate intelligence committee.

During his testimony, Comey said that he believed President Donald Trump fired him due to the FBI’s Russia probe, saying, “I know I was fired because of something about the way I was conducting the Russia investigation was in some way putting pressure on him, in some way irritating him, and he decided to fire me because of that.” He discussed a number of other issues as well, including saying that Trump directed him to end an investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and that he wrote memos on his one-on-one interactions with the president because he feared Trump might lie about the exchanges.

Responding to the testimony, the RNC tweeted, “#BigLeagueTruth: Comey testified under oath that @POTUS never asked him or anyone else to end any investigation. #ComeyHearing.” The tweet included a video of Comey’s previous testimony before the Senate intelligence committee -- on May 3 -- in which Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) asked him if “the attorney general or senior officials at the Department of Justice” tried to block an FBI investigation, to which Comey replied, “Not in my experience.”

Contrary to the RNC’s implication, Comey did not contradict himself. On May 3, he was talking specifically about the Department of Justice, not the president. The RNC’s false claim was pushed early on by “alt-right” trolls Jack Posobiec and Nick Short, and was then repeated by fake news purveyors and other “alt-right” outlets before more traditional right-wing media figures and outlets, such as Fox & Friends and Rush Limbaugh, picked it up. Since then, Republican politicians such as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have also repeated the false assertion. The false claim even impacted the stock market.

In a statement to Media Matters, Sen. Hirono criticized the RNC for taking “a far-right conspiracy theory as fact,” and noted that she “only asked former Director Comey about pressure from officials at the Department of Justice”:

“If you listen to the exchange, it’s clear that I only asked former Director Comey about pressure from officials at the Department of Justice, but the RNC chose to move forward and take a far-right conspiracy theory as fact. This sends a clear message that Republicans are willing to share fake news and dangerous narratives in their quest to deny Russian interference in our elections. Unfortunately, we’ve come to expect no less from the mouthpiece of an Administration that deals in alternative facts.”

The RNC’s incorrect claim is yet another example of how the “alt-right”/fake news ecosystem has been able to amplify its misinformation out of the fringe, pushing forged documents, baseless conspiracy theories, and smear campaigns into more of the mainstream.

Conservative media deflect from James Comey's testimony by attacking his sexuality and gender

Research ››› June 8, 2017 7:09 PM EDT ››› BOBBY LEWIS

Several right-wing media figures attempted to deflect from the substance of former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony about President Donald Trump’s alleged interference in the investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn by attacking his gender and sexuality, saying of his written statement that “men don’t write like this” and claiming that he needed to “cowboy up” and tell someone about Trump’s actions when they happened.

Fox guest cites misleading talking point from "alt-right" affiliated trolls to discredit Comey's accusations

Video ››› June 2, 2017 1:34 PM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

“Alt-right” troll files civil rights complaint after the Today show mocks him

All Jack Posobiec wants is to go watch an all-female screening of Wonder Woman

Blog ››› May 31, 2017 5:17 PM EDT ››› CRISTINA LóPEZ G.

Dayanita Ramesh / Media Matters

“Alt-right” personality Jack Posobiec has taken his trolling to the New York City human rights commission by filing a complaint against a movie theater and NBC Today show host Carson Daly. In his complaint, Posobiec -- formerly employed by The Rebel media -- alleges that the theater is discriminating against him by not allowing him to purchase a ticket to watch an all-female screening of Wonder Woman, and that during his show, Daly advocated for “the business” -- a “clear violation” of his civil rights.

View image on Twitter

View image on Twitter

Follow

Jack Posobiec ???? ? @JackPosobiec

I have filed a formal Civil Rights Complaint against @CarsonDaly and @AlamoNYC

10:24 AM - 31 May 2017

312 312 Retweets   766 766 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

During the May 31 edition of NBC’s Today show, Daly reported on the internet backlash that Posobiec was receiving on Twitter by proposing “men only screenings of Star Wars” for “the entire first week” as a response to some theaters offering all-female screenings of Wonder Woman.

Posobiec announced he had filed a complaint against Daly and one of the movie theaters holding such screeners. The complaint is just the latest stunt in Posobiec’s career as a far-right internet troll, which includes promoting emails and forged documents with the purpose of smearing French President Emmanuel Macron, pushing the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories, as well as screaming about the baseless Seth Rich conspiracy theory after a press conference on the White House lawn. As reported by BuzzFeed, Posobiec was also “the brainchild behind a ‘rape Melania’ sign that appeared at an anti-Trump rally in an effort to make the protesters look bad.”

It’s tempting to discount Posobiec’s stunt as another absurd prank levied by a pro-Trump, "alt-right" internet personality with the purpose of advancing a political point. But the effects of these acts of trolling could have negative real-life consequences as they distort the true purpose of civil rights legislation and undermine legitimate institutions, like the press. His complaint could be diverting attention and resources -- a real issue when the Trump administration has vowed to defund government programs that protect civil rights -- from the serious discrimination that many people face. Other "alt-right" figures have publicly acknowledged their intent in trolling democratic institutions including the free press. Institutions protecting civil rights are clearly also not safe from becoming targets.

Pro-Trump and fringe media are smearing Ariana Grande after a terror attack killed her fans

Research ››› May 23, 2017 2:28 PM EDT ››› JARED HOLT

After a suicide bomber killed 22 people, including children, who were leaving an Ariana Grande concert in England, pro-Trump social media accounts and personalities attacked the pop star for liberal and “anti-American” statements that she made while reacting to a tray of donuts two years ago.

Did "alt-right" hoaxster and troll Jack Posobiec plant fake protest signs at a net neutrality protest?

It wouldn't be the first time Posobiec infiltrated a protest.

Blog ››› May 19, 2017 8:55 AM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

Noted "alt-right" troll and hoaxster Jack Posobiectook to Periscope on May 18 to highlight a group of supposed “protesters” at a net neutrality event in Washington, D.C. who were “holding signs calling for bans on Breitbart, Drudge, and Infowars.” Posobiec has previously been caught staging protests in attempt to characterize his political opponents as extreme.

On May 18, Posobiec tweeted a video and link to a report about a net neutrality protest in Washington, D.C., specifically highlighting a group of masked protesters who recognized Posobiec and appeared to be “holding signs calling for bans on Breitbart, Drudge, and Infowars.” The claim was quickly picked up by right-wing outlets such as Infowars, Gateway Pundit, and Washington Free Beacon.

Follow

Jack Posobiec ???? ? @JackPosobiec

#NetNeutrality Protesters - Ban Drudge, Infowars, Breitbart https://www.pscp.tv/w/a-xVHTF4ZUtXeEdWcnJhalB8MUJkR1l2VmpRQnlKWMnYoTFcPCaeWKYHQ1INF44SOgIwq9K5Mo4uTWiIUk1E …

7:26 AM - 18 May 2017

JackPosobiec @JackPosobiec

#NetNeutrality Protesters - Ban Drudge, Infowars, Breitbart — Washington, DC, United States

pscp.tv

353 353 Retweets   361 361 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Follow

Jack Posobiec ???? ? @JackPosobiec

Hysterical Net Neutrality Protesters Want to Ban Drudge, Infowars, and Breitbart https://milo.yiannopoulos.net/2017/05/posobiec-hysterical-net-neutrality-protesters-want-to-ban-drudge-infowars-breitbart/ …

10:47 AM - 18 May 2017 · Washington, DC

152 152 Retweets   196 196 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Posobiec, known for pushing conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, also has a history of arranging inflammatory chants and signage that are meant to paint progressives as extremists. In January, BuzzFeed’s Joseph Bernstein reported that a “Rape Melania” sign seen at an anti-Trump rally was “the culmination of a disinformation campaign by Posobiec and others intended to paint the anti-Trump rallies as violent and out of control,” and “according to a source, it is Posobiec himself holding the ‘Rape Melania’ sign in the photographs.” Bernstein added that Posobiec “claimed that he’d started an ‘assassinate Trump’ chant to goad protesters into copying him, with the intention of filming them.”

UPDATE: In a conversation with Media Matters on May 19, Matt Wood, the policy director for Free Press, one of the nation's leading independent net neutrality advocacy organizations and a convener of the rally, described his interaction with the supposed protesters.

As explained by Wood, the masked protesters who were holding signs advocating for the "banning" of right-wing sites immediately raised the alarm of rally goers who have been involved in the struggle for net neutrality. Not only were the protesters "wooden" and seemingly playing caricatures that served as "dog whistles for conservative media," as detailed by Wood, but the messages and chants they used -- especially their focus on banning conservative websites -- have nothing to do with the actual goals of net neutrality. Instead, as recounted by Wood, who both interacted with the supposed protesters and observed their interviews with The Daily Caller and Rebel Media, they offered nonsensical justifications for their signs calling for Infowars and similar right-wing sites to be banned. And they countered some who questioned their off-message signage with the following claim: "I oppose the fascists. If you don't agree, you're a fascist."

When Wood attempted to question the protesters in order to determine who they were and to explain that their calls to ban conservative sites were not aligned with net neutrality, they mostly refused to identify themselves or their organization, although one did respond to Wood's question about "who sent" them by saying it was "a woman."

When staffers from Media Matters who were present at the rally attempted to interview four of the other supposed protesters, they declined. Two of the protesters said they "were waiting for someone." At another point, Media Matters filmed a staffer for Rebel Media (wearing a Rebel shirt and carrying other Rebel paraphernalia) following the fake protesters and taking pictures. You can see that in the background of this first video, and in the second video we also filmed as one of the fake protesters was confronted:

UPDATE #2: After publication, Harold Feld, Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge, another of the rally's participants, contacted Media Matters and stated that he too approached the supposed protesters and they refused to identify themselves. When Feld asked if he could interview them, they said "we don't give interviews," and when he asked for their names the same protester said "we don't give names." Feld asked who the protesters were with, and the reply was "we don't talk to press." Below, watch video of Feld call out the "trolls" in a speech at the rally and point out that their bizarre calls for censorship of right-wing sites were not only antithetical to the goals of the net neutrality movement, but were also part of a pattern of suspicious behavior meant to discredit efforts to keep the internet open to all:

HAROLD FELD: First, I got to point out, and I hope everybody will take a look and get some airtime to the guys with the "ban Drudge" and the "ban hate speech online." If trolls could cosplay, this would be -- God, they got it all, they've got the bandanas, they've got the angry looks, but guys, you are all confused. If you want to ban speech, you need the pro-[FCC Chairman Ajit] Pai rally. Because, when you get rid of Title II, then anyone can discriminate. God knows, I hates me all the racism on 4chan and all that stuff, but I think it's a damn good thing that nobody can cut it off, because I know everybody here, especially those who have worked in civil rights, who have worked for the betterment of people, understand that it would be like that to get big companies -- "responsible" companies -- to cut us off as hate speech or disruptive.

But here's the funny thing: We've had, for a couple of weeks now, an ID-stealing spambot filing forged comments -- pro-Pai, forged comments -- to the FCC. If you look on your Twitter feeds, you can see Pai's staff are tweeting up a storm about our trolls over here. Where the hell is action on an actual illegal hack of the FCC? I'm telling you, what did Trump do when Putin came to hack our democracy? He said, "well, I certainly hope they found Hillary's emails," and when he's in trouble for hacking our democracy, Trump's like, "no one has been treated worse than me."

So, I've got to say to Chairman Pai and his staff, who are real busy and deeply, deeply concerned that the trolls showed up at the wrong rally, because, of course, there is no pro-Pai rally, because nobody else likes that plan. But, word one about an actual federal crime? Word one about pro-Pai supporters hacking, according to Pai, the comments system so that people opposed to his giveaway of the internet to the companies instead of to us, letting us say what we want to say, that, he doesn't have any time to pursue? That's a crime, man. That's a hack.

Pro-Trump Media Are Citing Internet Trolls To Try To Discredit Comey’s Memo

Research ››› May 18, 2017 4:34 PM EDT ››› DINA RADTKE

Right-wing media and fake news purveyors that routinely defend President Donald Trump are falsely claiming that in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3, former FBI Director James Comey contradicted his memo that Trump had asked him to stop investigating former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s ties to Russian officials.

Fake News Purveyors Promote “Alt-Right” Claims That Susan Rice And James Comey Imperiled By Supposed FBI Investigation

Research ››› May 15, 2017 2:49 PM EDT ››› ALEX KAPLAN

Fake news purveyors are promoting dubious claims from “alt-right” figures Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec that former FBI Director James Comey dropped an FBI investigation into former national security advisor Susan Rice because it would have implicated him. They are also claiming that Rice is in legal jeopardy for unmasking aides of President Donald Trump who were caught on incidental FBI surveillance. There have been no mainstream media reports that Rice or Comey committed any wrongdoing, and both Cernovich and Posobiec have a history of pushing misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Meet Jack Posobiec: The "Alt-Right" Troll With A Press Pass In White House

Research ››› May 11, 2017 3:06 PM EDT ››› JARED HOLT & BRENDAN KARET

The Rebel Media’s Jack Posobiec is the latest member of a community of far-right and “alt-right” internet trolls to gain access to the White House press briefings under the guise of journalism.Posobiec has promoted emails and forged documents allegedly related to French President-elect Emmanuel Macron, the baseless “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, false pro-Trump smear campaigns, and has worked with other “alt-right” media figures and outlets.

Fake News And The "Alt-Right" Are Pushing Forged Documents To Aid Marine Le Pen In France's Election

Blog ››› May 5, 2017 2:00 PM EDT ››› ALEX KAPLAN

Forged documents originating on 4chan alleging that French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron was evading taxes spread online thanks to an ecosystem that includes social media, “alt-right” outlets, and fake news purveyors. The campaign was seemingly aided by Russian-linked entities, and it subsequently reached Macron’s opponent, who aired the claim in a public debate.

Macron is competing in a May 7 runoff against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. On May 3, hours before a scheduled debate between Macron and Le Pen, an anonymous user on 4chan posted documents purporting to show that Macron used a shell company to dodge taxes. Users on the forum responded that the documents should be sent to “independent journalists” and “the alternative media” like “Cernovic (sic), Breitbart, and so on,” and encouraged each other to “spam” the documents “on social media” such as Twitter to get “it trending.” They also said to “send it to Le Pen.” The documents soon spread on Twitter, with many of the Twitter accounts promoting them appearing to have connections to Russia, according to a Belgian researcher. The claim was promoted by “alt-right” media figures such as Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec.

That these figures would attempt to smear Le Pen’s opponent is not surprising given that Le Pen is widely admired by much of the “alt-right” and closely tied with Russia.

Along with Twitter, 4chan’s campaign was picked up by forums on 8chan and Reddit; “alt-right” fringe outlets The Gateway Pundit, Got News, Zero Hedge, and Daily Stormer; and fake news purveyor Before It’s News.

The 4chan-based documents eventually reached Le Pen herself. During her debate with Macron, she said, “I hope that we will not find out that you have an offshore account in the Bahamas.” Le Pen later backed down on her claim, and Macron filed a legal complaint against her for the statement. Multiple outlets have reported that the documents were fake, with The Telegraph noting that they were “widely denounced as crude forgeries.” Additionally, following Le Pen's accusation, the French prosecutor's office has opened an investigation regarding “suspicions of fake news being spread to influence Sunday's presidential vote.”

The case is yet another example of the way the misinformation ecosystem involving the “alt-right” and fake news purveyors amplifies fringe falsities and lies (and even Kremlin-connected conspiracy theories). The network has often succeeded in pushing those false claims into more traditional conservative and mainstream outlets and, thus, the public realm.

Image by Dayanita Ramesh

A Look At The Incestuous Alternative-Media Echo Chamber Winning Over Online Audiences

Blog ››› April 26, 2017 2:06 PM EDT ››› JARED HOLT

On the coattails of President Donald Trump’s successful election campaign and an anti-"political correctness" wave, an alternative right-wing media echo chamber successfully reverberated itself into virtual relevance on social media, where it now reaches millions of people every day. This new-media ecosystem exists outside of traditional newspapers and cable news networks, instead taking to social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, Reddit, and YouTube to promote its far-right nationalist politics and conspiracy-laden worldviews to an audience it has isolated and now dominates as its preferred news source.

Key players in this circular far-right alt-media echo chamber, such as online troll Mike Cernovich and Infowars’ Alex Jones, have successfully crafted a false impression of credibility. They have synthesized a “new right” echo chamber from “alt-right” ideologies and orchestrated a media machine that disseminates content across multiple media platforms with extreme efficiency.

Key voices in this ecosystem often work a redundant media circuit across allied platforms to reinforce each other’s worldviews and concepts of reality, cast doubt on mainstream media, and suggest widespread conspiracies along the way. Cernovich demonstrated this tactic as he circulated a faux scandal story that suggested Susan Rice, who served as national security adviser to former President Barack Obama, was responsible for improper unmasking of Trump officials caught in surveillance of foreign officials.

Cernovich toured the Rice story around the alternative media sphere he occupies until it eventually broke into mainstream media. On April 2, Cernovich first tweeted the “breaking news” that Rice had ordered the unmasking. Later that day, Cernovich published his full story about the explosive allegations. On April 3, Cernovich promoted the story in a livestream broadcast to his tens of thousands of Periscope followers. The same day, “alt-right” thought leader Richard Spencer publicly slammed Cernovich in his own broadcast, granting the story a direct platform into the "alt-right" fanbase. On April 4, Cernovich took his story through the alternative media circuit, appearing on Infowars and Free Domain Radio and earning shoutouts from Stefan Molyneux, Lee Stranahan, and Donald Trump Jr. After riding the wave, Cernovich continued his self-promotion in a Reddit AMA thread and a post-story interview with Rebel Media.

Members of the echo chamber attract and maintain a fan base by developing an abusive relationship with their audience members -- a process they label “redpilling.” They gaslight their audiences until readers and viewers feel unable to trust any media other than those particular outlets to deliver them “the truth.” As a result, these new-media companies have groomed rabid fan bases that turn to them as beacons of honesty in a media world that they believe is orchestrated to distract the public from this echo chamber’s version of “the truth.”

Many media outlets disregard this new-media echo chamber, continuing to speak about the movement with the same blanket terms and condescension they used before the so-called “new right” distanced itself from “alt-right” leaders. But now, months later, this far-right alternative media apparatus is encroaching on its mainstream competition online. For example, Infowars recently surpassed CNN in its number of subscribers on YouTube, which marked a major milestone in far-right alternative media's encroachment on the video site’s news ecosystem.

According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early 2016, about half of people age 49 and under said they get their news online. And as cable news viewership declines and as Americans’ trust in news media sinks to an all-time low, alternative new-media stars have leveraged a unique opportunity to redefine right-wing media and reach mass audiences once loyal to established journalism outlets. The alternative media ecosystem has also benefited from attention from top government officials and those close to them; presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway recently elevated Cernovich on Twitter, Donald Trump Jr. pushed an Infowars conspiracy theory, and Michael Flynn Jr., the son of Trump’s former national security advisor, has promoted Infowars and conspiracy theories like “Pizzagate” sourced from the alternative media sphere.

Graphics by Sarah Wasko

Conservatives Baselessly Blame Attack On Black Lives Matter Movement With “#BLMKidnapping” Hashtag

Blog ››› January 5, 2017 3:23 PM EST ››› OLIVER WILLIS

3735

Conservatives are baselessly blaming the Black Lives Matter movement after a white man was kidnapped and attacked in Chicago. Four black people were arrested on January 4 after a Facebook Live video surfaced of a young white man with special needs being tied up, assaulted, and threatened. In the video, one of the assailants said, “Fuck Donald Trump, fuck white people.”

Chicago police have filed hate crime and battery charges against the four suspects.

Several conservatives and “alt-right” figures blamed the attack on the Black Lives Matter movement and used the social media hashtag #BLMKidnapping in discussions about the event. Yet the video does not reference Black Lives Matter and thus far, no connection between the assailants and Black Lives Matter has been established. CNN reported “police said they have not been able to make any connection to the Black Lives Matter activist group, contrary to some reports circulating on social media.”

Paul Joseph Watson, editor-at-large for conspiracy theorist and Donald Trump ally Alex Jones’ website Infowars, was among the first to tie the attack to Black Lives Matter, with a Twitter post instructing others, “#BLMKidnapping is the hashtag to get this story trending.” Watson’s own write-up of the story on Infowars, which he linked to in his tweet, makes no mention of Black Lives Matter or a connection between the attack and the movement.

Follow

Paul Joseph Watson ? @PrisonPlanet

#BLMKidnapping is the hashtag to get this story trending. http://www.infowars.com/shock-video-white-man-kidnapped-gagged-beaten-by-racist-black-anti-trump-gang/ …

4:45 PM - 4 Jan 2017

Photo published for Shock Video: White Man Kidnapped, Gagged, Beaten By Racist Black Anti-Trump Gang » Alex Jones'...

Shock Video: White Man Kidnapped, Gagged, Beaten By Racist Black Anti-Trump Gang » Alex Jones'...

Forced to say "f**k Donald Trump," "f**k white people".

infowars.com

3,083 3,083 Retweets   3,094 3,094 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Watson later described the victim of the attack as “the BLM torture victim” on Twitter.

Rape apologist and “alt-right” figure Mike Cernovich wrote, “#BlackLivesMatter activists in custody after filming kidnapping video,” then used Watson’s hashtag to write, “#BLMKidnapping suspects are in custody.” He also described one of the suspects as a “#BLMKidnapping ring leader.” On his blog, Cernovich made the same assertion, without evidence to back it up.

Follow

Mike Cernovich ? @Cernovich

Chicago #BlackLivesMatter Supporters Kidnap, Torture Trump Supporter on Facebook Live Videohttps://www.dangerandplay.com/2017/01/04/chicago-blacklivesmatter-supporters-kidnap-torture-trump-supporter-on-facebook-live-video/ …

3:59 PM - 4 Jan 2017

Photo published for #BlackLivesMatter Supporters Kidnap, Torture Trump Supporter on Facebook Live Video

#BlackLivesMatter Supporters Kidnap, Torture Trump Supporter on Facebook Live Video

Four Chicago #BlackLivesMatter supporters are in custody after kidnapping and torturing a white Donald Trump supporter. In the video originally streamed live on Brittany Herring’s Facebook pa…

dangerandplay.com

1,755 1,755 Retweets   1,457 1,457 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Lee Stranahan, a Breitbart contributor, questioned Cernovich’s assertions, particularly his claim that the attackers were Black Lives Matters supporters. Stranahan also pointed out that mainstream media reports on the attack had not mentioned Cernovich’s claims.

Follow

Lee Stranahan ? @stranahan

Hey Mike - is there backup from claims of 1) attackers BLM supporters 2) victim drinking toilet water 3) victim voted for Trump @Cernovich

5:44 PM - 4 Jan 2017

11 11 Retweets   25 25 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Follow

Lee Stranahan ? @stranahan

I haven't watched the whole 30 minute video, but not seeing those claims elsewhere in any MSM @Cernovich

5:45 PM - 4 Jan 2017

2 2 Retweets   5 5 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

In contrast to Stranahan, fellow Breitbart contributor Katie McHugh referenced “the victim of the Chicago #BLMkidnapping.”

Fake news promoter and “alt-right” figure Jack Posobiec recorded a Periscope video about the attack with the #BLMKidnapping hashtag and claimed that the attackers were “members of Black Lives Matter in Chicago.”

Trump supporter Bill Mitchell described the attack as a “#BLM atrocity” that “proves that given enough time, evil always shows its true nature.”

Follow

Bill Mitchell ? @mitchellvii

This #BLM atrocity proves that given enough time, evil always shows its true nature.

7:31 PM - 4 Jan 2017

615 615 Retweets   1,309 1,309 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Michael Flynn Jr., son of incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, also labeled the event with the #BLMKidnapping in several tweets. Flynn was removed from the presidential transition team after it was reported that he helped to spread several fake news stories and conspiracy theories.

Follow

Michael Flynn Jr???? @mflynnJR

Will outgoing @POTUS say anything to condemn #BLMKidnapping ?? my guess is heeeeeeellll nooo...

6:25 PM - 4 Jan 2017

1,092 1,092 Retweets   1,776 1,776 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

View image on Twitter

View image on Twitter

Follow

Michael Flynn Jr???? @mflynnJR

Not one mention of #BLMKidnapping on front page @nytimes @washingtonpost @USATODAY @WSJ @politico Surprised? I'm not...

8:16 AM - 5 Jan 2017

707 707 Retweets   728 728 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Gavin McInnes, who has a history of making racist commentary, also used the hashtag.

Follow

Gavin McInnes ? @Gavin_McInnes

Really @TwitterMoments ? Bernie's Tweet poster? #BLMKidnapping

6:41 PM - 4 Jan 2017

100 100 Retweets   300 300 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Conservative Steven Crowder wrote, “#BLMKidnapping and the media's reaction is proof positive that the left doesn't care about racism.”

Follow

Steven Crowder ? @scrowder

#BLMKidnapping and the media's reaction is proof positive that the left doesn't care about racism. Only when it's a political tool.

5:37 AM - 5 Jan 2017

2,210 2,210 Retweets   3,759 3,759 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Conservatives have frequently, without evidence, blamed the Black Lives Matter movement for violence. Radio host Rush Limbaugh called them “a terrorist group committing hate crimes,” while frequent Fox News guest David Clarke called them a “subversive movement” attempting to “overthrow” the government. Fox host Sean Hannity compared Black Lives Matter to the Ku Klux Klan, Bill O’Reilly compared them to Nazis, and a Fox News graphic described it as a “murder movement.”

1 - 12 / 12

search

Search OptionsSearch

LATEST ›››

CNN's Jim Acosta: Trump's retaliation tactics will "not deter us" from reporting on him

Video June 9, 2017 7:58 PM EDT

Fox anchor refuses to accept Fox News' independent assessment that Comey's disclosure wasn't a leak

Video June 9, 2017 4:22 PM EDT

Top legal scholar: Trump Twitter attack on Comey could be "witness intimidation"

Blog June 9, 2017 4:14 PM EDT

NRATV host suggests Kim Kardashian West's "PTSD" from robbery at gunpoint makes her too mentally ill to own gun

Blog June 9, 2017 4:09 PM EDT

Trump’s “infrastructure week” scheme was another media fake out, not a serious policy proposal

Blog June 9, 2017 2:57 PM EDT

A “bogus distraction”: Former Watergate prosecutor calls out Trump's legal team for threatening to file a complaint against Comey

Video June 9, 2017 1:51 PM EDT

RNC's false talking point about Comey came from “alt-right” trolls

Blog June 9, 2017 12:09 PM EDT

Fox affiliate in Texas hosted a hate group representative seven times in 10 days

Blog June 9, 2017 11:40 AM EDT

After Comey’s “extremely damning” testimony, Fox & Friends focuses on distractions

Blog June 9, 2017 11:21 AM EDT

Pro-Trump media falsely claim accused leaker Reality Winner had "plans to join the Taliban"

Video June 9, 2017 10:13 AM EDT

Why Fox News and the rest of Trump's loyalist media won't be able to contain the sprawling Russia story

Blog June 9, 2017 9:23 AM EDT

CNN's Gregory slams Trump's apologists: "There is no excuse for this kind of behavior, even if it is not illegal"

Video June 9, 2017 8:56 AM EDT

Fox & Friends cites “one of the online blogs” to claim James Comey might be behind "deep-state leaks”

Video June 9, 2017 8:32 AM EDT

Legal experts debunk right-wing media’s desperate lies about James Comey’s memo

Following James Comey’s public testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, right-wing media figures erroneously accused James Comey of illegally leaking details about his private conversations with President Donald Trump.

Research June 8, 2017 9:11 PM EDT

Conservative media deflect from James Comey's testimony by attacking his sexuality and gender

Several right-wing media figures attempted to deflect from the substance of former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony about President Donald Trump’s alleged interference in the investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn by attacking his gender and sexuality, saying of his written statement that “men don’t write like this” and claiming that he needed to “cowboy up” and tell someone about Trump’s actions when they happened.

Research June 8, 2017 7:09 PM EDT