RT russia today

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">820 primary on infiltrate (indirect) WH press; portland bible burn</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">see tucker</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">includes sputnik, also sep</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><div class="Z26q7c UK95Uc jGGQ5e" data-snf="x5WNvb" data-snhf="0" style="contain: layout paint; overflow: hidden; flex: 0 0 auto; color: rgb(32, 33, 36); font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="yuRUbf" style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.58;"> </div><div class="yuRUbf" style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.58;">
</div><div class="yuRUbf" style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.58;"><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/covid-19-disinformation-backfires-russian-deaths-climb-eu-says-2021-10-21/" jscontroller="M9mgyc" jsname="qOiK6e" jsaction="rcuQ6b:npT2md" data-ved="2ahUKEwinvs7u1Z2AAxWBRDABHcZxAjUQFnoECA8QAQ" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/covid-19-disinformation-backfires-russian-deaths-climb-eu-says-2021-10-21/&ved=2ahUKEwinvs7u1Z2AAxWBRDABHcZxAjUQFnoECA8QAQ" style="color: rgb(26, 13, 171); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); outline: 0px;" /><h3 class="LC20lb MBeuO DKV0Md" style="font-weight: 400; margin: 18px 0px 3px; padding: 5px 0px 0px; font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.3; display: inline-block;"><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/covid-19-disinformation-backfires-russian-deaths-climb-eu-says-2021-10-21/" jscontroller="M9mgyc" jsname="qOiK6e" jsaction="rcuQ6b:npT2md" data-ved="2ahUKEwinvs7u1Z2AAxWBRDABHcZxAjUQFnoECA8QAQ" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/covid-19-disinformation-backfires-russian-deaths-climb-eu-says-2021-10-21/&ved=2ahUKEwinvs7u1Z2AAxWBRDABHcZxAjUQFnoECA8QAQ" style="color: rgb(26, 13, 171); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); outline: 0px;">COVID-19 disinformation backfires as Russian deaths ...</a></h3><div class="TbwUpd NJjxre iUh30 apx8Vc ojE3Fb" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.3; padding: 0px; display: flex; text-size-adjust: none; position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; align-items: center;"><span class="H9lube" style="background-color: rgb(241, 243, 244); border: 1px solid rgb(236, 237, 239); border-radius: 50%; display: inline-flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center; height: 26px; width: 26px; margin-right: 12px;"><div class="eqA2re NjwKYd Vwoesf" aria-hidden="true" style="vertical-align: middle; margin-right: 0px; display: inline-block;"><img class="XNo5Ab" src="data:image/png;base64,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" alt="" data-atf="1" data-frt="0" style="display: block; height: 18px; width: 18px;" /></div></span><div><span class="VuuXrf" style="color: rgb(32, 33, 36); font-size: 14px; max-width: 200px; display: block; line-height: 20px; text-wrap: nowrap;">Reuters</span><div class="byrV5b" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; -webkit-box-direction: normal; flex-direction: row;"><cite class="apx8Vc qLRx3b tjvcx GvPZzd cHaqb" role="text" style="color: rgb(77, 81, 86); font-style: normal; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; text-wrap: nowrap; line-height: 18px; max-width: 330px;">https://www.reuters.com<span class="apx8Vc dyjrff ob9lvb" role="text"> › world › europe › covid-19-dis...</span></cite></div></div></div><div class="B6fmyf byrV5b Mg1HEd" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; -webkit-box-direction: normal; flex-direction: row; position: absolute; top: 0px; height: auto; visibility: hidden; text-wrap: nowrap;"><div class="TbwUpd iUh30 apx8Vc ojE3Fb" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.3; padding: 0px; display: flex; text-size-adjust: none; align-items: center;"><span class="H9lube" style="background-color: rgb(241, 243, 244); border: 1px solid rgb(236, 237, 239); border-radius: 50%; display: inline-flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center; height: 26px; width: 26px; margin-right: 12px;"><div class="eqA2re NjwKYd" style="margin-right: 0px; height: 18px; width: 18px;" /></span><div><span class="VuuXrf" style="font-size: 14px; max-width: 200px; display: block; line-height: 20px;" /><div class="byrV5b" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; -webkit-box-direction: normal; flex-direction: row;"><cite class="apx8Vc qLRx3b tjvcx GvPZzd cHaqb" role="text" style="color: rgb(77, 81, 86); font-style: normal; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; line-height: 18px; max-width: 330px;"><span class="apx8Vc dyjrff ob9lvb" role="text" /></cite></div></div></div><div class="csDOgf BCF2pd ezY6nb L48a4c" style="display: inline; visibility: visible; margin-left: 8px; position: relative; height: 18px; margin-top: 16px;"><div jscontroller="exgaYe" data-bsextraheight="0" data-frm="true" data-isdesktop="true" data-movewtractions="true" jsdata="l7Bhpb;;AZ1HoM cECq7c;;AZ1HoQ" data-ved="2ahUKEwinvs7u1Z2AAxWBRDABHcZxAjUQ2esEegQIDxAJ"><div role="button" tabindex="0" jsaction="RvIhPd" jsname="I3kE2c" class="iTPLzd rNSxBe lUn2nc" aria-label="About this result" style="cursor: pointer; top: 0px; line-height: 16px; left: 0px; width: 28px; z-index: 1; padding-bottom: 20px; padding-right: 12px; outline: 0px; position: absolute;"><span jsname="czHhOd" class="D6lY4c mBswFe" style="height: 22px; width: 22px; position: absolute; border-radius: 11px;"><span jsname="Bil8Ae" class="xTFaxe z1asCe" style="display: inline-block; fill: currentcolor; height: 18px; line-height: 18px; position: relative; width: 18px; top: 2px; color: rgb(77, 81, 86);"><svg focusable="false" viewbox="0 0 24 24" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><path d="M12 8c1.1 0 2-.9 2-2s-.9-2-2-2-2 .9-2 2 .9 2 2 2zm0 2c-1.1 0-2 .9-2 2s.9 2 2 2 2-.9 2-2-.9-2-2-2zm0 6c-1.1 0-2 .9-2 2s.9 2 2 2 2-.9 2-2-.9-2-2-2z" /></svg></span></span></div><span jsname="zOVa8" data-ved="2ahUKEwinvs7u1Z2AAxWBRDABHcZxAjUQh-4GegQIDxAK" /></div></div></div></div></div><div class="Z26q7c UK95Uc" data-sncf="1" data-snf="nke7rc" style="contain: layout paint; overflow: hidden; flex: 0 0 auto; color: rgb(32, 33, 36); font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="VwiC3b yXK7lf MUxGbd yDYNvb lyLwlc lEBKkf" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; color: rgb(77, 81, 86); display: -webkit-box; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; overflow: hidden; -webkit-line-clamp: 2;"><span class="MUxGbd wuQ4Ob WZ8Tjf" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; color: rgb(112, 117, 122);">Oct 21, 2021 — </span>A systematic <span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(95, 99, 104);">disinformation</span> campaign in Russian media to foster doubts and misgivings about COVID-19 <span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(95, 99, 104);">vaccines</span> in the West has backfired as ...</div></div></div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/rfk-jr-ally-and-campaign-speaker-sherri-tenpenny-forwarded-antisemitic" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/rfk-jr-ally-and-campaign-speaker-sherri-tenpenny-forwarded-antisemitic</a></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx vid 7 23</font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div>RFK Jr. ally and campaign speaker forwarded antisemitic COVID conspiracy theory and Holocaust denial</div><div>WRITTEN BY ERIC HANANOKI</div><div>
</div><div>PUBLISHED 07/19/23 10:26 AM EDT</div><div>
</div><div>RFK Jr. and Sherri Tenpenny</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has endorsed quack doctor Sherri Tenpenny as someone who’s “leading this movement” against vaccines and recently featured her at a “health policy roundtable.” <b>Tenpenny last year promoted the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 vaccine is a “bioweapon” that doesn’t affect Jewish people and has shared numerous antisemitic claims on social media, including Holocaust denial and praise for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. </b></span></div><div>
</div><div>Tenpenny’s promotion of the conspiracy theory about Jewish people and the COVID-19 vaccine is newly relevant as Kennedy recently made a similar claim, stating that there’s “an argument” that COVID-19 is “ethnically targeted,” adding: <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” </span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Kennedy is scheduled to speak at the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the weaponization of the federal government on Thursday. </b></div><div>
</div><div>Tenpenny is an anti-vaccine commentator who became well-known after she falsely claimed during a 2021 hearing in Ohio that the COVID-19 vaccine makes you “magnetized.” She predicted last year that “by the end of 2022,<b> every fully vaccinated person over the age of 30 may have the equivalent of full-blown vaccine-induced immune suppressed AIDS.</b>” She has become one of the leading online promoters (along with Kennedy) of false claims about vaccines. </div><div>
</div><div>Tenpenny has been a significant ally of Kennedy over the years. She participated in a Kennedy campaign “health policy roundtable” last month, where she was described by Kennedy as a “renowned” critic “of prevailing health policy.” She has numerous other connections to the presidential candidate: </div><div>
</div><div>Kennedy has endorsed her work, telling people in response to their concerns about vaccines: “There’s a couple of things that people should be doing … They need to join the organized resistance, which means joining Children’s Health Defense, supporting what you do, Polly, with vacs too, <b>supporting Dell, supporting Rashid Buttar and Sherri Tenpenny,</b> the people who are stalwarts, who are leading this movement.”</div><div>
</div><div>Tenpenny has said of Kennedy: “I've known Bobby personally for a long time. You know, we've had dinner together multiple times. We've shared the stage at various conferences. He's wicked smart.” </div><div>
</div><div>She was featured as an “expert” in a 2021 event with Kennedy “regarding the safety and effectiveness of the COVID vaccine.” </div><div>She was a guest in 2020 on Kennedy’s show Truth, where she was described as a “renowned physician.”</div><div>Children’s Health Defense, which was founded by Kennedy, has featured Tenpenny in videos as an expert and has published her writing. </div><div>
</div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">She appeared on the now-defunct Russian-funded network RT America with Kennedy about vaccines.</b></div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</b></div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</b></div><div>
</div><div>Kennedy has numerous connections to other extremists, including a fringe commentator who claimed that “Hitler was a Rothschild” and that he was “utterly set up.” His presidential campaign has been cheered on by right-wing media figures and — after floating his Jewish COVID conspiracy theory — anti-semites and neo-Nazis. Children’s Health Defense has also conducted outreach to neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and QAnon users on the far-right platform Gab. </div><div>
</div><div><b>Tenpenny has a history of promoting antisemitic material on social media. The following are numerous examples. </b></div><div>
</div><div>Tenpenny promoted Jewish “bioweapon” conspiracy theory. In January 2022, Tenpenny shared a video of conspiracy theorist Lee Merritt that has the title, “Ashkenazi Jews not affected by mass sterilization through covid vaccines.” Tenpenny wrote: “Ever hear of race-specific bioweapons? A race-specific bioweapon is a bioweapon designed to affect only certain races, or genetic profiles to which certain genes are common. #Sterilization #BioWeapon #Ashkenazi.”</div><div>
</div><div>Sherri Tenpenny bioweapon claim</div><div>Tenpenny shared a video featuring someone falsely claiming that “the historical evidence is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.” Tenpenny forwarded a post featuring Holocaust denier Bishop Richard Williamson stating: “I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler. I believe there were no gas chambers.” Tenpenny’s post was uncovered by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and provided to Insider. </div><div>
</div><div><b>Sherri Tenpenny Holocaust forward</b></div><div><b>Tenpenny has repeatedly criticized the removal of Holocaust denier material on social media</b>. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Tenpenny responded to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that he would ban Holocaust denier content by writing: “Thank you for your honesty on your censorship decisions which remove the right to Freedom of Speech.” She has also attacked UNESCO after it criticized Holocaust denier material, writing: “UNWSCO is Calling for massive censorship on Telegram & other platforms to be in effect by 2023. #NoCensorship #FreeSpeech #SocialMedia.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>Tenpenny forwarded a post which claimed: “<b>Since all the CEOs of the major vaccine manufacturers are Jews </b>my questions is do these Jews get the real vaccine or saline in the publicity staged vaccine shows?” Tenpenny’s post was uncovered by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and provided to The Jewish Chronicle. </div><div>
</div><div>Tenpenny praised a film promoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. She wrote in 2020: “THE PLAN EXPOSED: Janet Ossebaard's The Protocols of Zion.  An exact blueprint and illustration of how they took control!” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum wrote of that publication: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the most notorious and widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times. Its lies about Jews, which have been repeatedly discredited, continue to circulate today, especially on the internet. The individuals and groups who have used the Protocols are all linked by a common purpose: to spread hatred of Jews.” </div><div>
</div><div>The Tenpenny-endorsed video begins by stating: “The Protocols of Zion, dismissed as a hoax. But we can assure you, after months of in-depth research, that they are not. They were slightly ordered, yes, but they are not a hoax.”</div><div>
</div><div>Tenpenny forwarded a post that attacked “(((Ukraine)))” and “the (((<b>WHO</b>)))” and concluded: “Same tribe every time [Star of David emoji].” The triple parentheses is also known as an echo and is used by antisemites to identify Jewish people. Tenpenny’s post was previously reported by Mother Jones. </div><div>
</div><div>Sherri Tenpenny forwards "same tribe" antisemitism</div><div>Tenpenny promoted the conspiracy theory that the “Rothschilds patented the COVID-19” tests in 2015 and 2017. The claim about the Rothschilds, a Jewish family that is the subject of numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories, is false. </div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" font-size="font-size" px="px" style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/factor-gmo-fake-science-russia">https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/factor-gmo-fake-science-russia</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">REF BUZZ</font></font></font></font></div><div><div><b>The World’s Largest GMO Study Was Launched By Russians In 2014. Then It Disappeared.</b></div><div>“The basic idea is to create doubts in people’s minds, whether about Big Agriculture, or chemtrails, or anything else.”</div><div>
</div><div>Dan Vergano</div><div>BuzzFeed News Reporter</div><div>
</div><div>Posted on June 1, 2018 at 8:11 am</div><div>Be one of the first to comment</div><div>
</div><div>Rob Dobi for BuzzFeed News</div><div>In late 2014, an obscure Russian group called a press conference in London to announce the launch of the “world’s largest international study” — a three-year, $25 million experiment of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.</div><div>
</div><div>In the Factor GMO project, the panelists explained, thousands of rats would eat genetically modified corn that had been grown with Roundup, a controversial weed killer. Scientists would then watch the animals for three years, round the clock, to see if they developed cancer or fertility problems.</div><div>
</div><div>ADVERTISEMENT</div><div>“We hope this will be the definitive study that will establish whether or not these chemicals and these GMO products are safe and effective,” Bruce Blumberg, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, a longtime GMO critic and one of the three scientists originally on the project’s advisory board, told the crowd of reporters.</div><div>
</div><div>The event attracted wide news coverage in the British press, everyone from the Guardian to the Daily Mail. Then Blumberg flew home to California. And that’s the last he ever heard from the Russians.</div><div>
</div><div>"It is weird," Blumberg told BuzzFeed News.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Quest for Peace / YouTube / Via youtube.com</div><div>Bruce Blumberg</div><div>
</div><div>Now more than three years later, the Moscow-based Factor GMO is not answering emails from the press. Although the donation button is still active on its website, the effort hasn’t uttered a peep since 2015. So, how much money did it raise? Did scientists ever watch any rats?</div><div>
</div><div>Or was it all a ruse from the get-go, a grand Russian propaganda effort against GMOs and Western science?</div><div>
</div><div>"Factor GMO has many of the hallmark characteristics of Russian anti-GMO propaganda, though it gives itself a veneer of scientific objectivity," Iowa State sociologist Shawn Dorius told BuzzFeed News.</div><div>
</div><div>Russia, as it turns out, has pushed a lot of anti-GMO propaganda in this decade, the most recent a Russia Today documentary, The Peril on Your Plate. That’s partly because of the competition: Cheap GMO crops from the US could threaten Russia’s agricultural market, and particularly its recent boom in wheat exports.</div><div>
</div><div>But these messages serve another purpose, too: to sow distrust in Western innovations, whether agricultural science, fracking, or elections, said Nina Jankowicz, a scholar of Russian disinformation tactics. “The basic idea is to create doubts in people’s minds, whether about Big Agriculture, or chemtrails, or anything else.”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>youtube.com</div><div>ADVERTISEMENT</div><div>The agricultural behemoth Monsanto began selling Roundup in 1974. Unlike other herbicides, it killed just about any kind of weed and was a runaway seller. By the mid-1990s, the company had genetically engineered crops to resist Roundup, meaning that farmers could spray it with abandon. Its use grew fifteenfold.</div><div>
</div><div>In the two decades since, a subindustry of scientific studies has investigated the safety of these genetically modified crops and Roundup’s main ingredient, a chemical called glyphosate.</div><div>
</div><div>The most notorious of this oeuvre was a 2012 report by the French scientist Gilles-Éric Séralini finding tumors in rats fed GM corn and exposed to glyphosate. The study was widely criticized for its media rollout — journalists were asked to sign strange confidentiality agreements — and its conclusions, which the European Food Safety Commision found “inadequately designed, analyzed, and reported.” The study was retracted in January 2014 and then republished in a separate journal, without any more review, in June 2014. It’s been argued over ever since, with much of the criticism focused on its small sample size of 600 animals.</div><div>
</div><div>Factor GMO was designed to scale up the effort, tracking 6,000 rats for three years and measuring any fertility or hormonal changes. The project’s press conference on Nov. 11, 2014, was organized by the Russian nongovernmental organization National Association for Genetic Safety (NAGS), which has a history of hostility to GMOs. The group had organized “flash mob” events for a 2014 “March Against Monsanto” in Moscow, for example.</div><div>
</div><div>The London meeting began with two presentations in Russian, one by the head of NAGS, Elena Sharoykina, who had already called for a 10-year global ban of these products, and the next by Oxana Sinitsyn, an environmental health scientist at the Russian Ministry of Health. (Neither responded to a request for comment, nor did the listed contacts for the study.)</div><div>
</div><div>“The study will take place at undisclosed locations in Russia and Western Europe.”</div><div>Blumberg, the UC Irvine scientist, opened the English language portion of the event. An expert in chemicals that disrupt hormones, he said he was joining Factor GMO’s advisory board because he was “frustrated” by past safety studies failing to answer questions about how glyphosate exposure might alter the germline, affecting children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, or even great-great-grandchildren. “This is very important to know whether these chemicals and these genetically modified organisms can have effects that are seen in those generations,” he said.</div><div>
</div><div>The presenters did not say exactly which scientists would conduct the study, or where it would be conducted. “The study will take place at undisclosed locations in Russia and Western Europe,” the Factor GMO website explains. “The exact locations of the study must be kept secret for security reasons as we want to avoid any outside interference.”</div><div>
</div><div>“That’s a great touch if you’re writing a script for a thriller, but not so great if you want to build a broad base of credibility and trust,” Nathanael Johnson of Grist noted a few months afterward, criticizing the “air of cloak-and-dagger paranoia” surrounding the effort.</div><div>
</div><div>At the time, Blumberg said he agreed to serve on the study’s review panel to replace his friend, prominent neuroscientist and herbicide critic Andrés Carrasco, who had unexpectedly died. “I wanted to help out for a friend,” he said, on what sounded like a good study. Aside from his travel, he didn’t receive any money for his involvement, he said. He did not know the actual study scientists or how much money was collected.</div><div>
</div><div>When asked what he thought about the Factor GMO website still collecting donations, Blumberg told BuzzFeed News by email: “What the FactorGMO people do or do not do is not really my concern.”</div><div>
</div><div>A decade ago, Russian researchers created potatoes that borrowed a gene (“kindly provided by Monsanto”) from a harmless bacteria to make the spuds resistant to beetles. The GMO potatoes were approved by the state. But after Vladimir Putin returned as president in 2012, Russia’s anti-GMO efforts kicked off.</div><div>
</div><div>At first, Russian biotechnologists noted, a lack of rules for approving more modern genetically engineered crops meant "cultivation and breeding of GMOs, for example in agriculture, is ruled out."</div><div>
</div><div>Then in 2015, Putin announced plans to make Russia the world’s biggest exporter of non-GMO food. In an address to the Russian parliament, he said: “We are not only able to feed ourselves taking into account our lands, water resources — Russia is able to become the largest world supplier of healthy, ecologically clean and high-quality food which the Western producers have long lost.” Russia banned GMOs completely a year later. (Europe has imposed stringent rules on GMOs since 2010.)</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>Sputnik</div><div>@SputnikInt</div><div>Protests against #GMO, toxic #pesticides erupt in several countries (PHOTO) https://t.co/OZirWejbW6</div><div>
</div><div>12:10 PM - 22 May 2018</div><div>Reply Retweet Favorite</div><div>By 2016, RT and Sputnik, the two main Kremlin-owned outlets producing stories in English, were preoccupied by — and strongly negative toward — GMOs, according to a March study conducted by Dorius of Iowa State.</div><div>
</div><div>His team scraped the websites of RT, Sputnik, CNN, Fox News, Breitbart, and Huffington Post to find all stories in that year that mentioned GMOs. They found that RT and Sputnik produced 53% of all English-language stories in the study. And their stories were overwhelmingly opposed to GMOs — unlike the US outlets, which produced a mix of anti, pro, and neutral stories on the topic.</div><div>
</div><div>“Russian state news gives substantial attention to anti-GMO tropes involving rats, fertility, cancer, and GMOs,” Dorius told BuzzFeed News.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>S. Dorius / GM Food & Crop / Via tandfonline.com</div><div>Study findings on news shares of GMO stories.</div><div>
</div><div>ADVERTISEMENT</div><div>The survey found that RT’s stories often contained scaremongering myths about genetic engineering (such as the headline “GMO mosquitoes could be cause of Zika outbreak, critics say”). “It is typically designed to look like legitimate news,” Dorius said.</div><div>
</div><div>In that way, Factor GMO — with its press conference theatrics — seems similar. “Factor GMO seems like a marketing campaign that fizzled,” Dorius said, its presentation intended to raise questions about all previous safety studies and findings.</div><div>
</div><div>Polling experts told BuzzFeed News that it’s difficult to know whether these Russian efforts have swayed US opinion about GMOs — particularly because so many Americans are already skeptical of this technology.</div><div>
</div><div>Pew Research Center polling from 2016 suggested that 39% in the US thought GMO foods were worse than others. About 1 in 6 people said they cared a lot about GMOs, and most of that group were opposed to them.</div><div>
</div><div>Overall, the US scientific consensus is that GMOs don’t appear to be dangerous, a US National Academy of Sciences report concluded in 2016. (The real risk from Roundup was that its ubiquity has led to resistant weeds.) And although glyphosate is less toxic than caffeine, scientists are still investigating it for any health effects, without turning up much.</div><div>
</div><div>Nevertheless, people in the US trust scientists on GMOs even less than they do on vaccines, evolution, nuclear power, evolution, or climate science, according to studies by Lawrence Hamilton of the University of New Hampshire. Unlike climate change or evolution, GMOs have not become a matter of Republican versus Democrats politics, Hamilton noted.</div><div>
</div><div>But the US fight over GMOs, which has so far played out mostly online and in courtrooms, is about to get political attention. In July, the US Department of Agriculture is supposed to release mandatory disclosure rules for genetically modified food, leaving the decision for the Trump administration on how to proceed.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>youtube.com</div><div>
</div><div>Factor GMO may have fizzled out because it didn’t get any public traction, and the organizers “just cut their losses,” said Jankowicz of the Wilson Center. (The project’s outdated website states that its funding was “sourced from around the world” and that “a high percentage of the total needed has been secured, allowing us to start the experimental phase in Spring 2015.”)</div><div>
</div><div>Alternatively, Jankowicz said, the nebulous status of the project might be intentional. As long as a Potemkin “largest international” study is perpetually in the offing, critics can say that questions still remain about the safety of GMOs. It serves as a model for a kind of fake science meant to inspire cynicism about new technologies and institutions in general, she said. “They get people doubting something, without having to do any work and without any follow-up.”</div><div>
</div><div>The nebulous status of the project might be intentional.</div><div>Blumberg said he has made no effort to contact Factor GMO since the 2014 news conference.</div><div>
</div><div>“I already have plenty on my plate,” he said. He’s one of the handful of US researchers concerned about glyphosate, part of a group that published a “statement of concern” claiming possible hormonal effects from the herbicide in 2016.</div><div>
</div><div>Blumberg pointed out that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has designated glyphosate as a “probable human carcinogen,” a hotly contested designation amid a federal lawsuit brought by people who claim they developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from Roundup. (IARC has reserved the same cancer risk distinction for “very hot beverages” and “wood dust.”) Another court case in California right now revolves around a fight between Monsanto and the state’s environmental regulator over placing a carcinogen designation on Roundup.</div><div>
</div><div>That’s all despite numerous scientific societies endorsing the National Academy of Sciences report, which found animals “were not harmed” and that the herbicide brought no cancer risk.</div><div>
</div><div>The Factor GMO study may have gone to seed if not for Mary Mangan, a biologist affiliated with the pro-GMO advocacy group Cornell Alliance for Science. In April, Mangan blogged about the disappearance of the project (titling her post “Science Vaporware, From Russia, With a Bad Smell”).</div><div>
</div><div>Blumberg told BuzzFeed News that Mangan and other critics of the Russian effort are apologists for the herbicide industry. He compared them to deniers of climate science or the dangers of smoking.</div><div>
</div><div>"I wish someone would do this study," he said.</div><div>
</div><div>Mangan — who says she isn’t funded by industry — actually agreed. “I would love to see the Factor GMO data,” she told BuzzFeed News. “Whatever Blumberg thinks of me, it still doesn't exist and seems pretty dodgy.” ●</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Dan Vergano</div><div>BuzzFeed News Reporter</div><div>
</div><div>Contact Dan Vergano at dan.vergano@buzzfeed.com.</div></div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div></div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">gaetz and her smirk at zel sp?</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/trump/boebert-russian-tv-brave-zelensky/">https://www.alternet.org/trump/boebert-russian-tv-brave-zelensky/</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">an raw 12 22</font></div><div><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After months of pro-Kremlin state media prediction that the U.S. support for Ukraine would die out, Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov became enraged when he saw an image of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris as they accepted and proudly held up the Ukrainian flag, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-state-tv-flop-sends-vladimir-solovyov-raging-over-video-of-volodymyr-zelensky" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">The Daily Beast</a> reports.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As a guest was speaking, Solovyov reportedly was texting with producers, demanding that they remove the clip of Zelensky in the U.S. When the producers didn't react to his demands fast enough, he said, "Guys, get rid of this video, if you can’t read what is being written to you!”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>“Zelensky is already on his way to Washington. It’s perhaps a natural path for any traitor... He betrayed his entire Soviet past,” he said. “Our weapon-makers are more talented anyway. Our men are more ingenious because we’re Russians—of many different nationalities. God is with us! Either we will win, or humanity will cease to exist, because the Lord won’t stand for the triumph of warriors of the Antichrist. We are the Lord’s weapon, we are his avenging right hand.”</b></span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Watch the video below:</p></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/matt-walsh/right-wing-media-echo-russian-state-tv-attacks-brittney-griner" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">https://www.mediamatters.org/matt-walsh/right-wing-media-echo-russian-state-tv-attacks-brittney-griner</a></font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/steven-crowder/blazes-steven-crowder-launches-vile-personal-attacks-brittany-griner-shes-not-best">https://www.mediamatters.org/steven-crowder/blazes-steven-crowder-launches-vile-personal-attacks-brittany-griner-shes-not-best</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmaxs-benny-johnson-attacks-brittney-griner-drug-addict-america-hating-criminal-who">https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmaxs-benny-johnson-attacks-brittney-griner-drug-addict-america-hating-criminal-who</a></font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander claims he was “offered a job at Twitter in 2018”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/09/22 9:03 AM EST</font></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tucker Carlson claims Joe Biden wants Paul Whelan to remain imprisoned in Russia because he's white</font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 9:03 PM EST</font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fox News host says hostage exchange for Brittney Griner “should never have been made, ever”</font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 8:01 PM EST</font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Washington Post columnist criticizes hostage exchange that freed Brittney Griner, claims it will “create more hostage-taking”</font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 7:37 PM EST</font></span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Elon Musk reinstates Twitter accounts of proud Islamophobe Laura Loomer and bigoted conspiracy theorist Roger Stone</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 5:57 PM EST</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Matt Walsh: Brittney Griner will “return to us more committed to her own self-victimization and personal resentments than ever before”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 4:49 PM EST</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Timcast contributor gives full-throttle endorsement of Ye for president</font></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 3:29 PM EST</font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dana Loesch: If other American prisoners in Russia “were as anti-American as Brittney Griner” then “maybe they'd be released a hell of a lot quicker”</font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 3:24 PM EST</font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Charlie Kirk: “If you're a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States Marine?”</font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 2:40 PM EST</font></span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right-wing media praised Herschel Walker’s decision to double down on anti-trans attacks before he lost the Georgia Senate election</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 2:25 PM EST</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate deniers gain traction on Elon Musk's Twitter</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 2:15 PM EST</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Blaze's Steven Crowder launches vile personal attacks on Brittany Griner: “She's not the best among us”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12/08/22 </font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/russian-state-television-our-friend/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/russian-state-television-our-friend/</a> trump</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6 22</font></div><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>propagandists on Russian state television have announced a new objective in President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine – assassinating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Putin's genocidal "special military operation" has slogged on for nearly four months. After failing to capture the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, Moscow has begun intensifying its efforts in the Eastern Russian separatist-controlled regions of Luhansk and Donbas, where they are slowly advancing.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tens of thousands of Russian troops have died amid fierce resistance by the Ukrainians, who have in turn faced indiscriminate slaughter by Putin's forces. Mass graves outside the flattened Southern port city of Mariupol, for example, have been <a href="https://www.jpost.com/international/article-708058" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">reported to contain 16,000 victims</a>.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Kremlin, meanwhile, has pushed the false narrative that Ukraine is a fake country filled with Nazis and that the greater number of its citizens who are massacred, the better. In a recent segment on Russia 1, Putin's stooges expanded on that grim objective, claiming that the only path to victory is to push Russia's borders as far to the West as possible and kill Zelenskyy (who has already survived multiple attempts on his life).</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"How far away do we have to move Ukraine? How far away could you move a maniac, a ghoul, who wants to turn everything into dead meat?" propagandist Andrei Sidorchik asked his panel of Zelenskyy. "On which territory will this moment take place, when will this ghoul stop being a ghoul?"</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Putin started this war, and that has only emboldened his minions into viciously dehumanizing the Ukrainian population.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"I'm telling you, we're fighting<b> ghouls! They mystically </b>want to turn everything into dead meat, they announce that openly," Sidorchik continued, which is not true. <b>"We can only stop when they lose the opportunity to kill us.</b> That's why, I'll say it again, the <b>unclean</b> can be stopped only when you drive a stake through it. When a stake is driven through Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then there will be peace. There is no other way."</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Professor Vitaly Tretyakov, the Dean of the Higher School of Television at Moscow's Lomonosov State University, agreed.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The translation was provided by The Daily Beast's Julia Davis.</font></p></div></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">an 5 22</font></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The head of propaganda outlet Russia Today has proclaimed that there are only two possible outcomes in Ukraine: victory for Russia or the annihilation of the human race.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On Monday, <b>Margarita Simonyan, who has <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/russian-state-media-nuclear-war/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">previously expressed her willingness to die in a nuclear war</a> initiated by Russian President Vladimir Putin,</b> declared on Russia 1 that "things will end badly" for modern civilization if Russia loses its illegal war of aggression against Ukraine. Her bluster is an extension of rhetoric spewed by Putin's puppets on state television who dare not dissent from their leader's delusional imperial ambitions, even though Russia is undeniably losing.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The translation has been provided by<b> The Daily Beast'</b>s Juila Davis, the founder of the Russian Media Monitor.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"They all believe that we will lose and that the West will win," Simonyan said of the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Union allies, who are historically united in supporting Ukraine. "They don't understand that it's impossible. Either we win or this will end badly for all of humanity."</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Simonyan then said that Russian students are better off not being educated in Western institutions and predicted that the tensions between Russia and the West will continue indefinitely.</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">"When people ask how long this will go on, in terms of our alienation and confrontation with the West, I see only one version of events. People, this is forever. Get used to this new life. I can't stand the whining of 'feeling bad for the children</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.' </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Why are you feeling sorry for the children? Some feel bad their children can't study in the West. The brave new world will no longer be open to them. I tell them, 'people, you should be rejoicing,'" she said.<b> "The brave new world is racing straight to Hell. In ten years you'll say, 'thank you very much.' Thank you that my child never studied in the West, because your child will remain a normal person</b>. No matter what happens and how we behave, our confrontation with them is for the rest of our lives."</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1528745905381380096?s=20&t=1eMsGBHO9xdmsuUilkwFNw" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Watch here</a>.</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/tucker-carlson-2656827634/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/tucker-carlson-2656827634/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx vid</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tucker Carlson tries to gaslight his way out of having pushed Putin’s anti-Ukraine propaganda for a month</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div>David Neiwert and Daily Kos March 02, 2022</div><div>   </div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Tucker Carlson is utterly baffled that people would think he is rooting for Vladimir Putin and Russia in its war on Ukraine. “You know, it’s such an awful thing to say,” he said on his Fox News show Monday, after playing a clip of Congressman Eric Swalwell saying he and other Republicans were on Putin’s side. “We hesitated to play that, even—it’s very common, you hear it every day. The question is: Why are they saying that? It doesn’t make any sense.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Gaslighting, of course, has become Carlson’s specialty. </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In reality, Carlson spent most of the month prior to the invasion praising Putin and echoing Russian propaganda: running down Ukraine, deriding it as a “State Department client state”—not a democracy, but “a tyranny”—and claiming that Russia just wants to keep its borders secure, everything the fault of Joe Biden</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">. So much so that he became the hero of Russian state television, where his rants were translated and replayed, and he was praised as an astute American.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Now that the horror is hitting home, Carlson suddenly has realized that he backed the wrong horse and is scurrying hard to dig his way out. The first step in that, of course, is gaslighting his audience about what he had been saying just the week before, and blaming the war on Putin now—yet somehow it’s still all Joe Biden’s fault. Those clips have yet to appear on Russian TV.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The major tone shift occurred Friday, a day after the invasion: “It’s a tragedy, because war always is a tragedy, and the closer you get to it, the more horrifying it seems,” he said. He also squarely put the onus on Russia and Putin: “He is to blame for what we’re seeing tonight in Ukraine.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Vladimir Putin started this war,<b> so whatever the context of the decision that he made, he did it</b>,” [CYA?] he said. “He fired the first shots.”</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>It’s a sharp and complete reversal of his previous arguments. On Feb. 17, he spouted Russian propaganda in claiming that Ukraine is not a legitimate nation. He also attacked U.S. officials who provided military aid to Ukraine.</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“These people are so ghoulish,” Carlson said. “Of course they’re promoting war, not to maintain the democracy that is Ukraine. Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history, and it’s not now. It’s a client state of the Biden administration.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>This narrative became a staple of Carlson’s defense of Russia’s war<b>. On his Feb. 22 show, he again spouted Putin’s propaganda: “The point here is to defend democracy. Not that Ukraine is a democracy. It’s not a democracy. Ukraine’s president has arrested his main political opponent, he has shut down newspapers and television stations</b> that have dared to criticize him. So in American terms, you would call Ukraine a tyranny. But Joe Biden likes Ukraine, so Putin bad, war good.”</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>The next day, he again dismissed Ukraine as “a State Department client state,</b>” claiming that<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Democrats wanted Americans to “wholeheartedly support jumping with both feet into a highly complicated conflict in a part of Eastern Europe where we have no national interests.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>The most noteworthy part of that Feb. 22 episode, however, was<b> how Carlson defended Putin against his “haters” by comparing him to American liberals, who he clearly saw as far more nefarious:</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, ‘What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?’ These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that. So do why does permanent Washington hate him so much?</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>The day after the invasion began, on Feb. 24, it was more of the same. The invasion, he claimed, demonstrated that Biden was a foreign-policy failure who had promised he would keep it from happening, making Putin’s war a “humiliating defeat for Joe Biden.</b>”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Russian state media promptly began re-airing Carlson’s rants with translated subtitles, particularly the Putin-didn’t-call-me-a-racist episode. </span>His attacks on Ukraine’s legitimacy also received heavy play. They also replayed Carlson’s Feb. 24 interview with ex-Congresswoman<b> Tulsi Gabbard,</b> who told him: "Sanctions don't work. This is the whole problem with the Biden administration: They are so focused on how do we punish Putin."</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The clips became the topic of Russian TV news talk shows,</span> where Carlson was uniformly praised. “Excellent performance,” the editor of a Russian national defense journal commented. “We can only have solidarity with this view.”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Of course, Carlson is hardly alone in spreading pro-Russian propaganda on Fox News. On Feb. 24, just before bombs began falling on Ukraine, host Laura Ingraham interviewed ex-president Donald Trump by phone, who praised Putin—“I do know him very well. We’ve had many, uh, times together. I got along with him fantastically”—and ranted at length that the invasion was Biden’s fault, and the war never would have happened if the election hadn’t been stolen from him.</span></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Near the end of the interview, Ingraham asked Trump about the speech given earlier that day by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, describing it as “a kind of really pathetic display” and described Ukraine’s United Nations ambassador as “looking like a defeated man.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>And despite the seeming change in tone, Carlson’s “pivot” still found him ardently defending Russian propaganda, and serving as its useful tool.</b> Angry that authorities and platform owners in the U.S., Canada, and in Europe are taking action against the Kremlin-owned American news outlet Russia Today and other agitprop producers like Sputnik—both of whom also heavily replayed his pro-Russia rants—Carlson fumed that it all constituted “moral blackmail,” gaslighting away his previous remarks: “No one in America takes pride at the sight, feels anything but revulsion at the sight, of Russian troops within Ukraine.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Sure enough<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">, RT</span> promptly retweeted Carlson’s clip: “Tucker Carlson defends media freedom as Senators use their power to shut down free speech on social media—especially so-called ‘Russian propaganda.’”</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As Lis Wahl, a former anchor at Russia Today, explained to The Daily Beast, the distinction between a propaganda operation like RT and what’s aired on Fox News has essentially vanished:</span></div><div>
</div><div>While the American voices Russian media uses to influence Western audiences hail from the far-left and the far-right, the poison of disinformation asymmetrically originates on the ideological right. Research has demonstrated that followers of the former president stick to hyper-partisan and conspiracy-laden sources such as Breitbart, Info Wars, and Fox News. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">During Trump’s election and throughout his presidency, the rightwing ecosystem grew more conspiratorial, extreme, and anti-democratic. It is during this time that Russian media and right-wing media became indistinguishable.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Today, the chief purveyors of pro-Russian disinformation in the U.S. are now on Fox News. I have warned that quite often the pro-Putin claims on Fox and RT essentially mimic each other. But much of the American public, and even many in the mainstream media, fail to realize the extent to which this disinformation has become part of the fabric of the new media landscape, and therefore, American political discourse.</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>toxic ten</b></font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ccdh</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>RT.com is part of a Russian state-controlled news network. Founded in April 2005 as Russia Today, RT is “publicly</div><div>financed from the budget of the Russian Federation”, with additional revenue from advertising and sponsored</div><div>content.93 Sputnik.com was founded in November 2014 “by the Russian media group Rossiya Segodnya”, another</div><div>state-funded broadcaster.94</div><div>According to a 2020 report from the Oxford Internet Institute, RT.com “is one of the most important organizations</div><div>in the global political economy of disinformation.”95 A 2016 NATO report alleged that Sputnik spread a “fake story”</div><div>regarding asylum seekers in Germany.96</div><div>
</div><div>Disinformation campaigns waged by RT.com include coverage ahead of the US 2020 election that “amplified voices</div><div>of chaos” with headlines such as “The term ‘American democracy’ needs to be retired” and “election teeters on</div><div>the verge of chaos”.97 RT has also propagated so much vaccine misinformation that YouTube took the rare step of</div><div>suspending RT’s German account following its posting of anti-vaccine misinformation.98 According to King’s College</div><div>London research, both RT and Sputnik played an instrumental role in spreading misinformation about the poisoning</div><div>of Sergei Skripal, incorporating the views of a “parallel commentariat” and amplifying Russian government sources.99[screengrab]</div><div>
</div><div>This Russia Today article claims that the pandemic provided a convenient</div><div>opportunity for professional “<b>doom-mongers</b>” to spread fear by linking the</div><div>virus to climate change and overpopulation. It calls on people to not pay</div><div>attention to the “alarmist predictions for the planet.”100 <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Articles on RT.com</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">carry digital ads from Taboola, a “discovery platform” that typically promotes</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">content at the bottom of news articles and that states it has a commitment</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">to “minimizing [its] environmental impact”.101</span></div></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p></div></div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/how-did-russia-meddle-in-the-election/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/how-did-russia-meddle-in-the-election/</a></font></div><div>
</div><div>ME oddly text does not match headline</div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div><b>Trump's supporters appear to have surpassed Russians' spread of misinformation as election vote counting continues in multiple states.</b></div><div>
</div><div>Back in September, U.S. intelligence officials raised awareness about the possibility of the pandemic delaying the results of the 2020 presidential election and that foreign operatives might seize the delay as an opportunity to spew misinformation. However, it appears foreign adversaries have taken a backseat and are now opting to report on misleading claims made by Trump and his allies, according to NBC News.</div><div>
</div><div>In fact, one example of misinformation circulating on social media focuses on a report from the Russian-affiliated media outlet Sputnik.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"US President Donald Trump said that every vote that came in after Election Day will not be counted,"<b> Sputnik</b> reported shortly after Trump tweeted, "Stop the count," Thursday morning.</span></div><div>
</div><div>#URGENT | 'Stop the count', Donald Trump urges on Twitter amid election results uncertainty https://t.co/1G6Ec5JabH… https://t.co/FYPYb48C5Q</div><div>— Sputnik (@Sputnik)1604585861.0</div><div>
</div><div><b>Other Russian-controlled media outlets have also shared misleading claims from the president with headlines like: "Trump calls results 'big WIN' & accuses opponents of 'trying to STEAL' election, gets 'misleading' label from Twitter," said RT, another Russian media operation, on Wednesday.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In addition to Trump's claims, his allies have also taken to Twitter under hashtags like #StoptheSteal as they spread more misinformation about the election results. Newt Gingrich has also echoed Trump's baseless claims.</span></div><div>
</div><div>On Thursday morning, he tweeted, "It is increasingly clear that Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are all being stolen by Democrats and the research is almost certainly going to yield far more votes stolen than Biden's current margins."</div><div>
</div><div>All of the misleading tweets have been flagged on Twitter with a label that reads: "Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process."</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>Dan Rather Hammers Trump and His Enablers in Facebook Screed ... ›</div><div>Donald Trump Jr. Has Destroyed Kellyanne Conway's Favorite ... ›</div><div>Top election security official who briefed lawmakers on latest ... ›</div><div>Russian state hackers are accused of trying to infiltrate Biden's ... ›</div><div>Noam Chomsky: The real election meddling isn't coming from Russia ›</div><div>
</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump | The New Yorker ›</div><div>Here's What We Know So Far About Russia's 2016 Meddling | Time ›</div><div>Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections - Wikipedia ›</div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mma 1020</font></div><div><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; clear: both; list-style: none; padding: 0px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">A new study found that the president was the main source for misinformation in voting:</strong> A <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/5/21499009/harvard-berkman-klein-center-paper-voting-misinformation-trump-tweets-media-framing" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Harvard study</a> published on <a href="https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2020/Mail-in-Voter-Fraud-Disinformation-2020" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">October 1</a> found that most misinformation on voter fraud comes from social media promoting information from “political and media elites,” especially <a href="https://www.cjr.org/analysis/trump-twitter-disinformation-voter-fraud-election.php" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Trump</a>.</font></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Russia is using American conservative news sites to spread propaganda: </strong>The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-russia-today-skirts-high-tech-blockade-to-reach-u-s-readers-11602078094" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Wall Street Journal</a> published an October 7 report that found Russian news outlet RT was still getting a lot of traffic in the United States. RT is part of the Mixi.Media traffic-swapping network along with multiple major conservative outlets, including RealClearPolitics, National Review, The Daily Caller, and others.</span> This allows members to display their content on the other network members’ home pages, giving RT the ability to put Russian narratives in front of the eyes of American conservatives.</font></li></ul></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span class="mw-headline"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></span></p></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/russian-propaganda-and-far-right-media-wildly-exaggerated-story-about-bible-burnings">https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/russian-propaganda-and-far-right-media-wildly-exaggerated-story-about-bible-burnings</a></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx vid many</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div><b>russian propaganda and far-right media wildly exaggerated a story about Bible-burnings in Portland — and Fox News ran with it</b></div><div><b>There was no “stack of Bibles” being burned</b></div><div>
</div><div>WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD</div><div>
</div><div>PUBLISHED 08/12/20 10:39 AM EDT</div><div>
</div><div>screen grab]</div><div>
</div><div><b>Fox News and other right-wing media were aghast last week about a story from the ongoing protests and civil unrest in Portland, Oregon, in which a crowd supposedly burned a stack of Bibles as a widely seen political statement — which now turns out to have been a vastly exaggerated event, further enlarged and distributed by Russian propaganda.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The New York Times reported Tuesday that what actually occurred was that just a few individuals out of thousands present seemed to have used a single Bible, or possibly two Bibles, among other pieces of kindling to start a fire: “None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.”</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The story about a supposed mass fire of Bibles originated, however, from the Kremlin-financed news channel RT, and was spread by its online video service Ruptly with a<b>deceptively edited video.</b></span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Apart from the Ruptly videographer, only one other journalist — a local television reporter — heard about the Bible burning, and noted it with a single sentence in a lengthy report on that night’s protests. The story, by KOIN, the local CBS News affiliate, also reported that a group of women calling themselves Moms United for Black Lives Matter attempted to put out the fire — a detail not included in the Ruptly vide</span>o, which was edited to string together a number of clips from the night. (A New York Times reporter had observed a truck offering free Bibles at the protests earlier that night, though it was not clear whether it provided the book that was burned.)</div><div>
</div><div><b>The Ruptly video was further tweeted by Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing Twitter personality based in Malaysia</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">, who wrote: “Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland.”</span> As the Times notes, Cheong was “wildly exaggerating what the Ruptly video showed.” There was no actual stack of Bibles being burned, let along a crowd of people bringing them to a bonfire for a public burning.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Nevertheless, his tweet was in turn picked up by American conservatives including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Donald Trump Jr.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The Portland video represents the Russian disinformation strategy at its most successful,” the Times wrote. “Take a small but potentially inflammatory incident, blow it out of proportion and let others on the political fringes in the United States or Canada or Europe spread i</span>t.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>For example, The Federalist ran an article on August 1, headlined “As They Turn To Burning Bibles, Portland Rioters Show Their True Colors.” The New York Post ran a piece headlined “Protesters burn Bible, American flag as tensions rise in Portland.”</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">And the story got plenty of pickup on Fox News.</span></div><div>
</div><div>On the August 2 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Pete Hegseth discussed the Bible-burning story with a Republican congressional candidate in Oregon, and even tried to grill House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) after he compared police brutality against demonstrators to what was done to the civil rights marchers he remembered from the 1960s.</div></div><div><p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" font-size="font-size" px="px" style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" font-size="font-size" px="px" style="margin: 1em 0px;"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/08/15/white-house-plants-pro-trump-conspiracy-theorists-among-reporters-briefing-room/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://theintercept.com/2020/08/15/white-house-plants-pro-trump-conspiracy-theorists-among-reporters-briefing-room/</font></a></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; box-shadow: none; text-transform: uppercase; line-height: 30px;">IN  AN APPARENT</span> effort to make his daily news conferences even more like campaign events than they already are, the White House press office has been packing the briefing room with supporters of President Donald Trump from far-right media outlets who can be relied on to toss him softball questions and initiate attacks on his political rivals.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Clearly in on the plot, Trump solicited a question each day this week from one of the guests invited by his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to stand at the back of the room — where representatives of One America News, The Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit compromised the health of reporters by violating social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Monday, Trump called on Chanel Rion, a far-right Republican operative and <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/seth-rich-conspiracy-theory/one-america-news-network-hires-seth-rich-conspiracy-theorist-chanel" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">conspiracy theorist</a> now working as a correspondent for One America News,<b> a San Diego cable channel dedicated to spreading lies <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/12/18/impeachment-alone-wont-stop-trump-inflicting-lasting-damage-ukraine/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">about Joe Biden</a> and <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/16/trumps-new-favorite-channel-oan-keeps-lying-buffalo-protester-assaulted-police/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">elderly protesters battered by the police</a>.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Rion gave Trump the opportunity to unleash a familiar riff from his pre-pandemic rallies by <a href="https://twitter.com/M2Madness/status/1292957600364077056" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">suggesting to him</a> that Biden might have been considering President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, as his running mate because, “she can best cover up a lot of the Obamagate surveillance crimes that have taken place during your campaign.” Trump responded by accusing Obama and Biden of “probably treason.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The next day, Rion triggered another familiar Trump diatribe by <a href="https://twitter.com/C_L_I_C_K/status/1293311161153269766" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">asking for his take</a> on the resignation of Carmen Best, the first Black woman to lead Seattle’s police force, after the city council voted to cut her department’s budget. “What does this say about our country?” Rion asked Trump. “And what does this say about the Defund Police movement?” The president replied by repeating the lie that Seattle’s Democratic mayor had let “a radical left group, Antifa and others, take over a big portion of the city.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>On Wednesday, Rion <a href="https://twitter.com/Woj_Pawelczyk/status/1293681114238910467" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">drew Trump’s attention to</a> what looked like a fairly lame conservative prank — the fact that the obscure website antifa.com was suddenly <a href="https://twitter.com/GrahamAllen_1/status/1293674194753003520" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">redirecting traffic</a> to Biden’s campaign site.</b> Suggesting that this stunt might somehow indicate support for Biden from the loose network of antifascist groups Trump has falsely portrayed as a shadow army, Rion asked if the president thought Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, should “publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[twt]</font></p><div data-reactid="227" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They should,” Trump replied. “I think they’re afraid to. In my book, it’s virtually a part of their campaign: Antifa.” There was nothing remotely surprising in Trump making the absurd argument that Biden, a centrist Democrat, is secretly part of an antifascist subculture, but Rion’s play-acting as a White House correspondent is not intended to elicit any new information from the president. <b>The point of these exchanges is to shield Trump from what tough questions about his failure to lead a coordinated federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic and to give him an opportunity to repeat lines he has already rehearsed, delivered as if they were answers to questions of vital importance.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Rion, who has been attending briefings as a guest of the White House press secretary since April, previously <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/12/18/impeachment-alone-wont-stop-trump-inflicting-lasting-damage-ukraine/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">traveled to Ukraine</a> with the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, <a href="https://www.oann.com/one-america-news-to-debut-special-featuring-exclusive-interviews-with-former-ukrainian-officials-and-rudy-giuliani-debunking-schiffs-impeachment-narrative/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">to promote false accusations about Biden</a> spread by the pro-Russian lawmaker <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-giuliani-and-russia-pay-close-attention-to-ukrainian-conspiracy-peddler-andriy-derkach" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Andriy Derkach</a>. </span><b>An American <a href="https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2139-statement-by-ncsc-director-william-evanina-election-threat-update-for-the-american-public" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">intelligence assessment</a> released last week concluded that Derkach was involved in a Russian plot to undermine Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party by “spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls” from 2016 between the former vice president and Ukraine’s president.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On Thursday, shortly after Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1294033658068770820" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">praised the crackpot legal scholar</a> who invented a racist conspiracy theory that Harris was not eligible to be vice president, even though she was born to immigrant parents in Oakland, he turned again to Rion. <b>This time, however, she asked if he would, instead, take a question from Emel Akan of The Epoch Times,</b> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/two-sites-that-amplify-hoaxes-given-special-treatment-at-trumps-briefings-despite-restrictions/2020/08/14/8579032e-de6e-11ea-809e-b8be57ba616e_story.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">another of his press secretary’s guests</a> from an equally rabid pro-Trump media outlet.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Trump agreed, Akan asked him how the U.S. would respond to “the recent attack on press freedom in Hong Kong,” specifically <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/chinas-arrest-of-a-free-speech-icon-backfires-in-hong-kong" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">the arrest</a> of the publisher of the popular Apple Daily tabloid news site, Jimmy Lai, who has been an outspoken critic of the pro-Beijing leadership in the semiautonomous Chinese city. Lai could be charged with “collusion” with the United States for meeting Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington last summer to discuss Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest movement.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Although Trump began by saying, “Well, I think it’s a terrible thing,” he appeared to have little familiarity or interest in the subject of press freedom, or democracy in Hong Kong, pivoting quickly into his stock complaints about China’s trade policie</b>s.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> He even seemed to gloat a bit when he said that, as a result of the U.S. withdrawing the “tremendous financial incentives” for businesses based in Hong Kong, American companies might profit from the crackdown on the territory.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“We’ve now withdrawn all of those incentives. It’s going to be very hard for Hong Kong to compete,” Trump said. “And I will tell you that the United States… will end up making a lot more money because of it, because we lost a lot of business to Hong Kong,” he added. “We made it very convenient for people to go there, for companies to go there. We’ve withdrawn all of that and the United States will be a big beneficiary from an economic standpoint.</span>”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>While Trump’s answer was not the kind of stirring endorsement of press freedom Akan might have expected from an American president, inciting an attack on China’s government was probably gratifying to the owners of The Epoch Times. The paper is owned by members of the dissident Chinese Falun Gong spiritual movement who have spent heavily to promote Trump as a useful battering ram against their ultimate enemy: the Chinese Communist Party</b> that considers the banned sect a cult. An Epoch Times <a href="https://youtu.be/uchUFah2dBQ" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">coronavirus explainer video</a> echoes Trump’s rhetoric that China is to blame for the global pandemic, but urges people to call it not “the China Virus,” as Trump does, but the “CCP Virus.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The White House press secretary’s invitation to the Epoch Times writer to participate in the briefing alongside reporters and photographers from some of America’s leading news organizations is remarkably brazen given that last year, when <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The Epoch Times was <a href="https://youtu.be/uchUFah2dBQ" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">the largest buyer of pro-Trump ads on Facebook</a> outside of the president’s own campaign, the site <a href="https://twitter.com/RonaldKlain/status/1124378944952729603" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">spent heavily</a> to promote <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/05/10/rumors-joe-biden-scandal-ukraine-absolute-nonsense-reformer-says/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">the baseless conspiracy theory</a> that Biden had abused his power as vice president in 2016 to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Since then, the site has been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/technology/facebook-ads-epoch-times.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">banned from advertising on Facebook</a>, after <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/behind-the-facebook-fueled-rise-of-the-epoch-times.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">NBC reported</a> that the newspaper had secretly placed Facebook ads promoting President Trump. </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Last week, Facebook also <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-removes-troll-farm-posing-african-american-support-donald-trump-n1236056?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">removed 303 fake accounts</a> linked to The Epoch Times for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and pro-Trump conspiracy theories about supposedly shadowy figures behind the ongoing racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Friday, after Trump <a href="https://apnews.com/c972b0201ba3eab039daecefe44ecc92" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">twice refused to answer</a> a question from The Associated Press about whether he believes the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/technology/qanon-tea-party.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">QAnon conspiracy theory</a> in which he is a central figure,<b> he <a href="https://youtu.be/MU7Ehnz79BI?t=1046" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">solicited one</a> from Alicia Powe, <a href="https://youtu.be/u0e0DAieGxA?t=4295" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">a proponent of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory</a> who writes for the far-right Gateway Pundit blog.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Powe, who has claimed that the Clinton Foundation controls the FBI and is stifling investigations of child sex-trafficking rings and the murder of Seth Rich, asked Trump to comment on the accusation that Biden had claimed credit for the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[vid]</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;">powe’s question was based on</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span><a href="https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/08/lies-joe-biden-praises-israel-uae-peace-deal-takes-credit-deal-nothing-cant-remember/" style="letter-spacing: 0.01em; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">a blog post</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;">by the founder of Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, which amplified</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span><a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/497961-biden-uae-israel-trump/" style="letter-spacing: 0.01em; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">an attack on Biden</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span></b><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><b>from the Kremlin-owned site <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Russia Today.</span></b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Hoft’s post also quotes the analysis of Heshmat Alavi, a supporter of a militant Iranian cult called the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who, as my colleague</span></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span><a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/heshmat-alavi-fake-iran-mek/" style="letter-spacing: 0.01em; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Murtaza Hussain revealed last year</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;">, is a fictional character.</span></span></font></p></div><div data-reactid="232" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">McEnany did not respond to a question about whether she or someone else in her office invited Powe to the briefing on Friday, but Powe is a former blogger for WorldNetDaily, the far-right website that helped create the racist “birther” conspiracy theory to undermine President Barack Obama. Alyssa Farah, the White House director of strategic communications, is <a href="https://www.wnd.com/2019/08/top-pence-aide-alyssa-farah-moves-to-defense/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">the daughter of Joseph Farah</a>, who founded WorldNetDaily. In the 1990s, Joseph Farah was <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/joseph-francis-farah" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">a leading proponent</a> of the conspiracy theory that deputy White House counsel Vince Foster might have been murdered.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The presence of Rion, Akan and Powe also infuriated the White House Correspondents Association, whose members have agreed to send only 14 reporters a day during the pandemic, to maintain safe social distance.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The WHCA, which normally decides which accredited journalists are allowed in to the briefing room on a given day, also wants the aisles at the sides and the back of the room to be open for photographers and video crews to operate safely. “It is outrageous that the White House continues to invite ‘guests’ to press briefings, putting the health and safety of everyone in that workspace at greater risk,”</span> the WHCA president, Zeke Miller, said in an email. “The WHCA’s social distancing guidelines were crafted in consultation with the White House based on the recommendations of the CDC and the nation’s leading public health professionals. Trampling on those guidelines endangers the critical work of reporters who have maintained independent press coverage of the presidency throughout the pandemic.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Until April, OAN was a member of the correspondents’ association but the cable channel was expelled after Rion kept showing up at briefings when it was not her turn. Since then, she has attended press events as a guest of the White House press secretary.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unlike the original, freewheeling coronavirus task force briefings — which came to a sudden halt in April <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/04/24/quack-chief-donald-trump-asks-bleach-injections-tanning-cure-covid-19/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">when Trump mused</a> that doctors should “check” to see if injecting patients suffering from Covid-19 with bleach or isopropyl alcohol, or exposing them to ultraviolet light, might cure them — <b>the president’s current news conferences are much shorter and seem designed mainly to get his lengthy, written opening statements on the air and get him out of the briefing room after taking just a handful of questions.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Trump’s opening statements at the latest briefings are often <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/08/14/trump_biden_continues_to_politicize_pandemic_shows_appalling_lack_of_respect_for_the_american_people.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">nakedly political</a> in nature, featuring crude, jarring attacks on Biden and other Democrats</b>. “Today, we saw Joe Biden continue to politicize a pandemic and to show his appalling lack of respect for the American people. That’s what it is,” Trump said at the start of Thursday’s briefing. “<b>At every turn, Biden has been wrong about the virus, ignoring the scientific evidence and putting left-wing politics before facts and evidence.”</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After then blatantly lying about Biden’s suggested response to the pandemic in the most idiotic terms — “<b>Sleepy Joe rejects the scientific approach in favor of locking all Americans in their basements for months on end</b>” — Trump concluded, with a stunning lack of self-awareness: “To Joe, I would say: Stop playing politics with a virus. Too serious. Partisan politics has no place here. It’s a shameful situation for anybody to try and score political points while we’re working to save lives and defeat the pandemic.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s prepared remarks at these briefings almost always feature highly misleading health and economic statistics intended to convey the false impression that the federal government’s pandemic response is the envy of the world.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At Tuesday’s briefing, for example, Trump said in his opening statement: “Since the end of July, the seven-day average for cases in the United States has fallen by nearly 20 percent, but the virus continues to increase in nations across the globe. Last week, France and Germany both recorded their highest daily number of new cases in three months — not that I want to bring that up, but might as well explain it to the media.” <b>While those statistical measures of the increase by percentage of new cases in Europe and decrease by percentage in the U.S. were accurate, what they hid was the fact that, in raw numbers, the pandemic is obviously far less under control here than there.[shillenberger pat m cherrypick]</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The day Trump made those remarks, 53,315 new Covid-19 infections were confirmed by testing in the U.S. Germany’s highest number of daily infections in three months, recorded this week, was 1,445. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Cases are down more in the U.S. but from a very high level to a slightly less high level. In much of Europe, cases are rising but from very low baseline. Adjusted for population, the U.S. recorded 154 new cases per million <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-covid-cases-per-million?tab=chart&country=DEU_FRAUSA" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">on Friday</a>, while France had 41 and Germany 17.</span>[graf]</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the pandemic is resurgent in many parts of the world, Trump has been unable so far to brow-beat the public into accepting his obviously false claims that things are better in the United States than in Europe or Asia. A new poll released by Monmouth University on Thursday <a href="https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_081320/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">showed</a> that 52 percent of Americans “think the United States’ handling of the pandemic is worse than other countries,” while just 15 percent feel the U.S. is doing a better job than others and 29 percent say it is doing about the same.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Having complained on Wednesday about what <a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1293680879466950658" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">he called</a> “a wiseguy question” from a reporter who noted that <a href="https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2020/08/12/boston-federal-reserve-chief-says-states-that-rushed-to-reopen-slowed-the-u-s-recovery" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">two top Federal Reserve officials</a> “said that the economy hasn’t recovered strong enough because the country hasn’t contained the virus,” Trump devoted part of his opening remarks <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-press-briefing-august-13-2020/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">at Thursday’s briefing</a> to falsely complaining that Biden, who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSjdb2W4Tw" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">held a news conference two weeks ago</a>, “never takes questions.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“I take questions; he never takes questions,” Trump continued. “And you sort of wonder what’s going on, because they’re not that difficult. Some can be nasty, but they’re not that difficult.”</b></font></p></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">also mike flynn</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">db</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">./..<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"> </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px">top Trump campaign adviser recently appeared on the Russian-government funded TV network RT, which U.S. intelligence agencies have said plays a role in the Kremlin’s plans to undermine American democracy.</span></font><p style="line-height: 31px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; padding: 0px calc(32px + ((100% - 176px) / 12) * 2);" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trump campaign senior legal adviser <a class="TrackingLink LinkWrapper" href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-new-legal-adviser-jenna-ellis-is-an-anti-lgbt-fox-news-ready-bomb-thrower" style="background-color: transparent; transition: color 0.15s ease 0s;">Jenna Ellis</a></b>’ appearance on RT’s The Alex Salmond Show <a class="LinkWrapper LinkWrapper--external" href="https://www.rt.com/shows/alex-salmond-show/494121-trump-trouble-covid19-economy/" style="background-color: transparent; transition: color 0.15s ease 0s;">aired</a> on July 9. She appears to be the first Trump campaign official to go on the Russian-funded network since the 2016 election.</font></p><p style="line-height: 31px; margin: 0px 0px 16px; padding: 0px calc(32px + ((100% - 176px) / 12) * 2);" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">during her interview, Ellis defended Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and bashed the American media as “propagandist activist media.” Ellis also accused Fox News—the cable news network most friendly to the president—of having an anti-Trump bias....</font></p><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">an 1119</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Russian state media</span> is outing the alleged whistleblower after Rand Paul’s reckless outbursts: report</b></div><div>
</div><div>Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story November 6, 2019</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">President Donald Trump’s allies are trying to retaliate against the whistleblower whose complaint triggered the Ukraine scandal. And no one is doing so more enthusiastically than Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who tweeted out a link to a right-wing article in Real Clear Investigations that purported to reveal the whistleblower’s name, occupation at the CIA, and photograph.</span></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Thus far, although that article has been live for several days, the mainstream media has ignored it, resisting any effort to spread information about the whistleblower that would compromise their federal legal protections and open them up to reprisal or threats.</b></div><div>
</div><div>But according to The Daily Beast, there is one group of media outlets that is eagerly promoting Paul’s reckless attempt to out the whistleblower: Russian state media.</div><div>
</div><div>Not only did sites like Russia Today, TASS, and Rossiya-1 disseminate this same information shortly after Paul did, one of the sites falsely claimed that the original source was the Washington Post rather than Real Clear Investigations, apparently to give the information more legitimacy.</div><div>
</div><div>This, notes The Daily Beast, marks the latest in a long string of efforts by Russian propaganda networks to boost Trump and attack the impeachment investigation — which in addition to attempting to remove a president Russian officials broadly think is strategically useful to them, also centers on his apparent efforts to extort the government of Ukraine, a nation which Russia is violently occupying and from which they are annexing land.</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">facebook took down more than 500 pages?</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">copwatch, RT reporter "political spam"</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the Now got put back w/ RT header?</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-march-22-2019/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-march-22-2019/</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">cf nyt 8 russian (memes?)</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><a href="https://mashable.com/2017/05/04/pro-trump-fake-news-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://mashable.com/2017/05/04/pro-trump-fake-news-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen/</font></a></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fake news was very much a part of U.S. elections last year and now it's trickled into the French elections as well. </font></b></p><div class="see-also" style="text-transform: uppercase;"><p class="see-also-link" style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[SEE ALSO: <a href="https://mashable.com/2017/04/17/john-oliver-french-elections-le-pen-trump/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; text-transform: none;">John Oliver says the French elections are looking Trump-esque</a></font></p></div><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the presidential debate Wednesday night, Front National candidate Marine Le Pen, who runs on an anti-EU, far-right agenda, <a href="http://www.bfmtv.com/politique/le-camp-macron-deconstruit-point-par-point-l-insinuation-de-le-pen-sur-le-compte-aux-bahamas-1156799.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">raised the allegation</a> that the election's frontrunner, the centrist Emmanuel Macron, was engaging in tax evasion with an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. </font></span></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I hope that we will not find out that you have an offshore account in the Bahamas," Le Pen said during the heated debate.</font></span></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Le Pen later backed down on her accusations, saying she <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newssearch&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjhlcfkptbTAhUqDsAKHbzbDOsQqQIIMSgAMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bfmtv.com%2Fpolitique%2Fmarine-le-pen-n-a-pas-de-preuve-qu-emmanuel-macron-a-un-compte-aux-bahamas-1156803.html&usg=AFQjCNETc9Ga-MRZtwzhUKziIjxDP6vI4g&sig2=OUexYQe7PsgEE1IzmxbchQ" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">doesn't have any proof</a>. Macron filed a <a href="http://www.leparisien.fr/elections/presidentielle/comment-le-camp-macron-riposte-aux-rumeurs-sur-un-compte-bancaire-aux-bahamas-04-05-2017-6915801.php" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">defamation</a> complaint. "We will not hesitate to prosecute for defamation anyone who repeats this false information," a member of his team said, adding that the candidate was victim of a "cyber information campaign."</font></span></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As pointed out by the Macron campaign in a <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/347263273/2017-05-03-Fake-news-EM-1" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">press release</a> to the French media, the "fake news" claims originated on<b> <a href="http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/123933076#123933076" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none;">4chan</a> /pol/ just ahead of the debate:</b></font></span></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An anonymous user alleged that two leaked documents, posted in the thread, were proof that Macron, a former investment banker, had a professional relationship with a bank involved in tax evasion in the Cayman Islands. </font></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"People have known for a while that Macron underreported his income and assets to the government, but nobody knew where it was stored," the user said, "Here's where his money is stored<b>. See what you can do with this, anon. Let's get grinding. If we can get #MacronCacheCash trending in France for the debates tonight, it might discourage French voters from voting Macron."</b></font></span></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The attempt to spread the story by getting a hashtag, <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23macroncachecash&src=typd" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">#MacronCacheCash,</a> to trend is a tactic seen in the U.S. election. </font></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The hashtag was tweeted by apparently U.S.-based, right-wing accounts in an attempt to make the story viral: </font></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Nicolas Vanderbiest, a Belgian commentator for Radio France Culture, the <b style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Twitter accounts were linked, in France, to <em>Sputnik</em> and <em>Russia Today</em>. </b></font></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He tweeted: “So the fake news story on Macron’s account in the Bahamas, we can say without being misleading, that it was by the Russians.”</font></span></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Disobedient Media, a U.S. right-wing media organisation, published an article accusing Macron of setting up a tax evasion mechanism:</font></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The two leaked documents allegedly show the "incorporation of a shell company in Nevis, a country that doesn't keep ownership records of corporation" and the proof "of a banking relationship with a bank involved in tax evasion in the Cayman Islands." </font></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">However, the <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/347263273/2017-05-03-Fake-news-EM-1" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Macron campaign</a> in their press release was quick to debunk those claims. First of all, his signature looks counterfeited: </font></p><p style="margin: 0.75em 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[pix sigs]</font></p></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><a href="https://fair.org/home/facebook-wants-you-to-know-if-youre-getting-your-news-from-the-wrong-government/">https://fair.org/home/facebook-wants-you-to-know-if-youre-getting-your-news-from-the-wrong-government/</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There’s a famous <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=MWSsCwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT102&dq=Polling%20order%20questions%20should%20%22Russian%22%20journalists%20be%20allowed&pg=PT100#v=onepage&q=Communist%20newspaper%20reporters&f=false" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">polling experiment</a> that asked people in the Cold War–era US:</font></div><blockquote style="border-radius: 3px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-width: 0px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); margin: 5px 5px 20px 30px; padding: 25px 30px 5px;"><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px 10px; max-width: 550px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Do you think the United States should let Communist newspaper reporters from other countries come in here and send back to their papers the news as they see it?</font></p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When this question was posed on its own, only 36 percent of respondents said yes. But a separate sample was first asked:</font></p><blockquote style="border-radius: 3px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-width: 0px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); margin: 5px 5px 20px 30px; padding: 25px 30px 5px;"><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px 10px; max-width: 550px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Do you think a Communist country like Russia should let American newspaper reporters come in and send back to America the news as they see it?</font></p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the questions were asked together—reminding people that restrictions on press freedom could be placed on their own country’s journalists, as well as on those of an official enemy—support for allowing access to Communist reporters doubled to 73 percent. (Ninety percent said that US reporters should be allowed to report freely from Russia—suggesting that only a relatively narrow slice of the population openly subscribed to the principle of free speech for me but not for thee.)</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I thought of this experiment when</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Rania Khalek (who’s <a href="https://fair.org/author/Rania-Khalek/" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">written for FAIR</a>) told me that the viral video company she works for, <b style="">In the Now</b>, was taken off <b style="">Facebook</b> because of its indirect connection to the Russian government</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. (A majority stake in </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the Now</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">’s parent company, </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Maffick Media</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, is owned by a subsidiary of </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">RT</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">—a Moscow-based media group that, although organized as a private entity, is funded by the Russian government.)</span></font></p><div id="attachment_8931062" class="wp-caption alignright" style="float: right; margin: 0px 101.188px 10px 15px; background: rgb(236, 240, 245); border: 1px solid rgb(187, 195, 232); max-width: 100%; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 360px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><p class="wp-caption-text" style="margin: 5px 0px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><strong style="">CNN</strong> (<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/15/tech/russia-facebook-viral-videos/index.html" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">2/28/19</a>) reported on <strong style="">Maffick</strong>‘s Russian backing, noting “<strong style="">Maffick</strong>‘s videos are generally critical of US foreign policy and the mainstream American media.”</font></p></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b style="">Facebook</b> suspended the page of <b style="">In the Now</b>, along with three other pages run by <b style="">Maffick</b>—the current affairs channel <b style="">Soapbox</b>, the environment-oriented <b style="">Waste-Ed</b> and the history-focused <b style="">BackThen</b>—after the social media giant was asked about the <b style="">RT</b>-connected pages by <b style="">CNN</b>.</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> CNN</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> (</span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/15/tech/russia-facebook-viral-videos/index.html" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">2/18/19</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">), in turn, reported it was tipped off to the</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> <b style="">In the Now</b>/<b style="">RT</b> connection by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a group based at <a href="http://www.gmfus.org/sites/default/files/GMF_18%20FS_Final.pdf" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">US government–funded</a> German Marshall Fund.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In the Now</b> is back on <b>Facebook</b> again—after a ten-day suspension—and returned with this rather user-unfriendly description:</font></p><blockquote style="border-radius: 3px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-width: 0px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); margin: 5px 5px 20px 30px; padding: 25px 30px 5px;"><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px 10px; max-width: 550px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In the Now</b> is a brand of <b>Maffick</b> which is owned and operated by Anissa Naouai and <b>Ruptly GmbH</b>, a subsidiary of <b>RT</b>.</font></p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s not particularly helpful if you want to know what <b>In the Now </b>does, of course, but disclosure is good, right? For the goose but not the gander, apparently: Among the US-funded institutions with <b>Facebook</b> pages are, well, the German Marshall Fund. Its <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pg/gmfus/about/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">description</a> just reads, “Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation.” Will that page be taken down until the Fund acknowledges where its money comes from?</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How about the <b>PBS NewsHour</b>, also <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">funded</a> by the US government? No mention of that on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pg/newshour/about/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;"><b>Facebook</b></a>: Just, “On air and online, the <b>PBS NewsHour</b> provides in-depth analysis of the issues that matter to you.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>NPR</b>’s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pg/NPR/about/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;"><b>Facebook</b> page</a> seems to go out of its way to conceal the fact that it’s US government–supported, calling itself “a privately supported, not-for-profit membership organization.” Maybe the P stands for “Private”?</font></p><div id="attachment_8931065" class="wp-caption alignright" style="float: right; margin: 0px 101.188px 10px 15px; background: rgb(236, 240, 245); border: 1px solid rgb(187, 195, 232); max-width: 100%; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 317px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><p class="wp-caption-text" style="margin: 5px 0px; padding: 0px; font-style: italic; max-width: 750px;"><em><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Full-fledged propaganda services are not required by <strong>Facebook</strong> to reveal their government connections—if it’s a <strong>Facebook</strong>-approved government.</font></em></p></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even straightforward propaganda outlets of the US government don’t have to identify themselves as such on <b>Facebook</b>. Take <b>Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty</b>, set up at the height of the Cold War to broadcast the US government’s version of reality behind the Iron Curtain—and still going strong almost 70 years later. Its “About” on <b>Facebook</b> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pg/rferl/about/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">reads</a>:</font></p><blockquote style="border-radius: 3px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-width: 0px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); margin: 5px 5px 20px 30px; padding: 25px 30px 5px;"><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px 10px; max-width: 550px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Uncensored news. Responsible and open debate. Specialized coverage of Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, Caucasus, Iran, Balkans, South Asia, Eastern Europe.[img]</font></p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For those who go the extra mile and click on “See More” under “Who We Are,” you do get this misleading semi-acknowledgement:</font></p><blockquote style="border-radius: 3px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-width: 0px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); margin: 5px 5px 20px 30px; padding: 25px 30px 5px;"><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px 10px; max-width: 550px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>RFE/RL</b> is registered with the IRS as a private, nonprofit Sec. 501(c)3 corporation, and is funded by a grant from the US Congress through the <a href="https://www.usagm.gov/?fbclid=IwAR0vye73NhfgtUVwtFHNQszgqhcWaOnj-zJgbYT4qCKKstbExy-fm6BYR5Q" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">United States Agency for Global Media</a>(USAGM) as a private grantee. <a href="https://pressroom.rferl.org/p/6118.html?fbclid=IwAR31lvqFREVJnni7egcP4q227Q1Q0yY_XvgytukV_ydFdQVT1DinZK9-cJs#firewall" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;"><b>RFE/RL</b>‘s editorial independence is protected by US law.</a></font></p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yes, <b>RFE/RL</b> is organized as a private entity—just like <b>RT</b> is. But just as the head of <b>RT</b> is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarita_Simonyan" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">also the head</a> of the Russian state international news agency, the head of <b>RFE/RL</b> is <a href="https://pressroom.rferl.org/management-and-governance" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">appointed</a> by the head of the USAGM—a government official picked by the president. That’s a funny kind of “independence.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pg/voiceofamerica/about/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;"><b>Facebook</b> page</a> of <b>Voice of America</b>, the US government’s main broadcast outlet, is even squirrellier. There doesn’t seem to be any acknowledgement at all that <b>VoA</b> is connected to the US government—just the slogan, “The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth”; the claim that it has “the world’s most interesting stories”; and information on how you can “have the best of <b>VoA News</b> delivered directly to your inbox each day.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If you’re thinking that <b>Facebook</b>—90 percent of whose customers are not in the United States—should treat Russian-backed outlets differently than US-backed outlets because the US supports <a href="https://fair.org/home/nyt-laments-forever-wars-its-editorials-helped-create/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">peace</a> and <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/30/your-complete-guide-ny-times-support-us-backed-coups-latin-america" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">democracy</a>, or doesn’t <a href="https://fair.org/home/reporting-on-russias-troll-army-western-media-forget-wests-much-bigger-sophisticated-troll-army/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">use social media</a> to try to manipulate other nations…. Well, this is why it’s important to get your information from a variety of sources.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But it’s not just US outlets that get to conceal their government funding on <b>Facebook</b>. The <b>BBC </b>doesn’t <a href="https://www.facebook.com/bbc/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">mention</a> that it’s controlled and funded by the British government—only that its “mission is to enrich your life. To inform, educate and entertain.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At <b>Al Jazeera English</b>’s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pg/aljazeera/about/?" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;"><b>Facebook</b> page</a>, you learn, “We are the voice of the voiceless”—not that they are owned by the monarchy of Qatar.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; max-width: 750px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Facebook</b> needs to have one rule for whether government-funded outlets need to disclose their connections. And it needs to apply that rule consistently.</font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><div><a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rachel-maddow-unravels-mike-pences-overlooked-role-mike-flynn-scandal"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rachel-maddow-unravels-mike-pences-overlooked-role-mike-flynn-scandal</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/revealed-mike-flynn-hid-russian-state-media-payments-us-government"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/revealed-mike-flynn-hid-russian-state-media-payments-us-government</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2015/07/23/who-benefits-from-doubt-online-manipulation-and-the-russian-and-us-internet/">http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2015/07/23/who-benefits-from-doubt-online-manipulation-and-the-russian-and-us-internet/</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><h1 class="entry-title" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; clear: both; line-height: 1.3em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Who benefits from doubt? Online manipulation and the Russian – and US – internet</font></h1><div class="entry-meta" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-size-adjust: 120%;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="meta-prep meta-prep-author" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Posted on</span> <a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2015/07/23/who-benefits-from-doubt-online-manipulation-and-the-russian-and-us-internet/" title="1:10 pm" rel="bookmark" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="2" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="entry-date" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">July 23, 2015</span></a> <span class="meta-sep" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">by</span> <span class="author vcard" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a class="url fn n" href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/author/ethan/" title="View all posts by Ethan" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="2" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ethan</a></span></font></div><div class="entry-content" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 12px 0px 0px; vertical-align: baseline; clear: both;"><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I was asked by an editor at <a href="http://www.rbc.ru/" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">RBC</a>, one of Russia’s best respected independent news organizations, to offer my thoughts on the Russian/US infowar. It was a great chance to think about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Adrian Chen’s provocative tale about Russia’s Internet Research Agency</a> (a topic that Global Voices <a href="http://globalvoicesonline.org/-/special/runet-echo/" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">RuNet Echo</a> has done a terrific job of covering) and broader questions about skepticism, mistrust and who benefits from doubt. <a href="http://daily.rbc.ru/opinions/politics/23/07/2015/559be8f99a794763a48918e8/?tw" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The piece ran on RBC today in Russian</a>, but my English language text follows below.</font></p><hr style="background-color: rgb(231, 231, 231); border: 0px; clear: both; height: 1px; margin-bottom: 24px;" /><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In early June, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a story by investigative reporter Adrian Chen about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">a Russian “troll factory” in St. Petersburg</a>, linked to Evgeny Prigozhin, reported to have close ties with Vladimir Putin. </span>In the article, Chen interviewed <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/06/04/a-whistleblower-is-trying-to-bring-down-russias-secret-internet-troll-army/" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lyudmila Savchuk, a whistle blower who is suing</a> the Internet Research Agency, her former employer, in hopes of shutting down their operations of posting pro-Kremlin comments on social media sites in English and Russian.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Until Chen’s story, many American readers had never heard of paid Russian propagandists writing online. But followers of the RuNet, Russia’s online spaces, have seen the Russian internet as one of the world’s most fiercely contested online spaces. In 2011, internet researchers in the US and Canada published a book, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/index.php?q=books/access-contested" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“Access Contested”</a>, which suggested that <b>battles over online spaces were progressing from censorship – preventing the posting of controversial content or preventing a nation’s citizens from reading that content – to a more complex model of contestation, </b>where governments used a wide range of methods to disrupt dialog online: harassing users with frivolous lawsuits, rendering sites unavailable via denial of service attacks, and flooding comment threads. While these tactics have become popular worldwide, anywhere governments wish to disrupt online speech, many of them were pioneered in Russian cyberspace. </span>My coauthors and I documented some of these early attacks, including attacks on Novaya Gazeta, in <a href="https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/2010_DDoS_Attacks_Human_Rights_and_Media.pdf" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">a 2010 study published by the Berkman Center at Harvard University</a>.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What was surprising about Chen’s story was not that people were producing pro-government comments in Russian, but that this same Internet Research Agency appeared to be responsible for a set of fabricated news stories, released in English and intended to mislead US audiences. These stories <a href="https://medium.com/in-beta/media-hacking-3b1e350d619c" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">have fascinated and baffled American media scholars</a>. They are complex hoaxes, involving dozens of social media accounts, fake websites and fake YouTube videos, all towards the apparent goal of making American social media users believe that a <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">chemical plant in Louisiana had been attacked by ISIS terrorists, or that there had been an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. These hoaxes were not successful in fooling many people for very long – they were quickly dismissed after mainstream news reports made clear that these tragedies had not occurred</span>.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>These hoaxes suggest an interesting new chapter in the ongoing infowar between the US and Russia. The goal of the infowar may no longer be to promote or discredit either the Kremlin or the White House. The goal may be to destroy trust in the internet, in social media and in news.</b></font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For decades, nations have worked to produce news that reflects their specific point of view. The United States Broadcasting Board of Governors oversees Voice of America, Radio and TV Marti (for Cuban audiences), Al-Hurra TV and Radio Sawa (for Arabic-speaking audiences), Radio Free Asia, and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, which includes Radio Svoboda, aimed at Russian audiences. Defenders of these projects see them as providing objective news reporting in countries where press freedom is constrained. Others – including some US legislators – see these stations as pro-US propaganda. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><a href="https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-14160-us-repeals-ban-broadcasting-voice-america-other-government-funded-news-american-audien" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Until 2013, Voice of America was banned from broadcasting in the US</a> because Congress believed that these broadcasts, played in the US, would function as pro-government propaganda.</span> In recent years, BBG has broadened its remit beyond broadcasting, and <a href="http://www.bbg.gov/blog/2015/03/10/bbg-2016-budget-request-calls-for-expansion-in-key-markets-and-technologies/" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">proposed spending $12.5 million in 2016 to support internet anti-censorship technologies</a>, intended to allow citizens of countries that censor the internet to access blocked content.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It should not have been a surprise that Russia would take to international broadcasting to promote a national agenda, joining stated sponsored channels France24 (France), CCTV (China), and Al Jazeera (Qatar). These channels have experimented with different mixes of news reporting and public diplomacy, sometimes <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/sep/30/al-jazeera-independence-questioned-qatar" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">coming under fire for compromising journalistic standards</a> in favor of national interests.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Russia Today (RT) has taken some unusual and surprising approaches in deploying this tool of soft power.</b> The network promotes a view of Russia as defender of the principle of international sovereignty in the face of relentless US-led globalization, a viewpoint that turns not only protests in Armenia into a US-led grab for power, but the arrest of FIFA officials for corruption into a plot to strip Russia of the 2018 World Cup. While Al Jazeera, in particular, has worked hard to gain respect as a journalistic outlet rather than a government mouthpiece, Russia Today seems content to take an explicitly pro-Russian, anti-US stance.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And then there’s the weird stuff. As Ilya Yablokov of the University of Leeds has observed, <b>Russia Today seems to be trying to cultivate a US audience of conspiracy theorists. </b>Yablokov notes that one of the first stories RT ran after launching RT America in 2010 was titled <a href="http://rt.com/usa/911-attack-job/" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“911 Reasons Why 9/11 Was (Probably) an Inside Job”</a>. The idea that the US government killed over 3000 of its own citizens, including 500 police officers and firefighters, as a pretext to invade Iraq, is deeply offensive to most Americans, and unlikely to win RT a broad US audience. But as Yablokov notes, that may not be the point.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">There’s a long history in American politics of conspiracy theories gaining wide audiences. Historian Richard Hofstadter identified this in 1964 as <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/4/" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“The Paranoid Style in American Politics”</a>, a tendency for those who feel alienated and dispossessed to see America as controlled by a secret cabal. Knowing that it is unlikely to persuade the majority of Americans to see their government as a global hegemon and Russia as the tireless defender of sovereign nations, perhaps RT is appealing to those who are predisposed to “Question More”, as the network’s slogan suggests. While that approach won’t work for most Americans, it may work for the <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/06/04/318733298/more-americans-than-you-might-think-believe-in-conspiracy-theories" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">19% of Americans who believe the government was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.</a></font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev suggests that a Russian focus on conspiracy theories, especially about outside agitation in creating “color revolutions” is consistent with Russia’s preferred framing of the world – sovereignty versus agitation – rather than the US’s preferred framing – democracy versus authoritarianism. Brian Whitmore, a senior correspondent for RL/RFE, <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/paranoia-as-policy/27081212.html" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">argues that conspiracy theories suggest a government incapable of taking citizen movements seriously</a> documented attempts by the government of Azerbaijan to portray the internet as a dangerous and lawless space, linking internet usage to sexual abuse of children, trafficking of women, breakdowns of marriages and mental illness. The campaign has been quite successful, keeping 86% of Azeri women offline, and helping ensure that internet penetration in Azerbaijan has stayed far behind of its neighbors, Georgia and Armenia. Turkish media scholar Zeynep Tufekci suggests that <a href="https://medium.com/message/everyone-is-getting-turkeys-twitter-block-wrong-cb596ce5f27" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Erdogan’s government has deployed similar tactics in Turkey</a>, working to demonize social media in the hopes of keeping his large support base off these networks, which are heavily used by opposition organizers.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Raising doubt in online media as a whole might help explain why a Russian firm would start easily dismissed rumors on American social networks. The net effect of these rumors has been to remind American Internet users that everything they read online should be doubted before being vetted and verified. And RT’s main brand message is that Americans shouldn’t trust their government or their media, as both are hiding the “other side” of the narrative, and the secrets behind far-reaching conspiracies.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But the question remains: who benefits from doubt?</b></font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have a possible answer. Their book <a href="http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/" data-slimstat-clicked="false" data-slimstat-type="0" data-slimstat-tracking="true" data-slimstat-callback="true" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“Merchants of Doubt”</a> looks at techniques used by energy industry lobbyists in the US to create uncertainty and doubt about climate change. They trace these techniques back to the tobacco industry, which used similar tactics for decades to prevent tobacco from being regulated as a drug. Their key weapon was doubt. Tobacco companies sponsored legitimate medical research on other causes for cancer and heart disease. The net result was that they kept alive the appearance of a debate about whether tobacco use was the primary cause of lung cancer for far longer than there was an actual scientific debate. Similarly, climate scientists sponsored by energy companies insist that there is a diversity of opinion about humans’ role in creating climate change, relying on the media’s tendency to tell both sides of a story and keep a “debate” alive years beyond when it would otherwise be settled.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Who benefits from doubt? Ask instead who benefits from stasis.</b> So long as there was doubt that cigarettes caused cancer, regulators were less willing to label packages, restrict their sales or ban them altogether. So long as there is doubt about humanity’s role in climate change, governments are less likely to pass carbon taxes, ban the burning of coal or subsidize the shift to renewable energy. It’s not necessary to persuade people that cigarettes are safe to smoke or that we can burn coal indefinitely without raising global temperatures – it’s enough to raise sufficient doubt to lead to paralysis.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stasis benefits the Russian state. People baffled by claims and counterclaims over whether Russian troops are in Ukraine or whether the US toppled the Yanukovych government are less likely to demand NATO military intervention in Crimea. Russian citizens who wonder whether Alexei Navalny is an embezzeler are less likely to support his candidacy. Internet users who doubt whatever they see online are less likely to use social media to organize and topple those who are currently in power.</font></p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>It’s expensive to persuade someone to believe something that isn’t true. Persuading someone that nothing is true, that every “fact” represents a hidden agenda, is a far more efficient way to paralyze citizens and keep them from acting. It’s a dark art, one with a long past in Russia and in the US, and one we’re now living with online.</b></font></p></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; widows: 1; border: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 24px; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">=</strong></font></p></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div></div></div></div></div>