ESCAL 3 echo

5/20 trigger by plandemic

NEGLECTED NATURALIZED?

i left ECHO off the label here, but always a factor

this cat = alt fact post- truth?

SEE 2024 ELECTION TRUMP 18 SEE MANOSPHERE 4

see bartiromo fox CRM

see polarization 2 america/realities Earth2

see hoft gateway

note tucker top of food chain

merri ok

see hype fear anger

see soc media algorithm // monetize --> boost?

see amplify

see permission structure

see pink pill entry to radicalization; ANAND FUNNEL --> RADICALIZATION

SEE CONSPIRACY

active measures uses escalator to amplify, WT examiner key?

facebook and xitter eat pets haiti

see rogan tiktok viral

note xitter small group can echo each other , thus amplify

aha note how some fever swamp BS sets of AG jihad eg 10 yo rape victim

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ROGan boost benz to musk usaid woodchipper JO 3 26

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X DIRTY TRICK FEVER SWAMNP CONSPIR DISINFO

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NEGLECTED?

MMA

Angelo Carusone tells MS NOW's On The Line with Alicia Menendez: Where there used to be a Fox-Trump feedback loop, Trump is now “building his own feedback loop of really intense loyalists and AI slop”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 10/01/26

Video

Citation

From the October 1, 2026, edition of MS NOW's On The Line with Alicia Menendez

ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): This is the danger, Angelo. Right? It's not just that he doesn't believe the polling and that he's going to a bunch of red states. It is about the fact that he is inoculating himself from the pain that Americans are feeling, even the pain his own supporters are feeling and articulating to someone like Jason. What is the danger, the substantive danger, not the political danger to Republicans, but the danger to us all of a president who lives in a different reality?

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): So, we have two more years of him being president. So, you know, I think there's this idea, this to many people, I know my friends and others feel relief. Oh, it's just November. That's the finish line. No. That's not the finish line. That's just the halfway mark. We have two more years.

And why that matters is your question. Because one of the things that he's done is not just insulate himself and sort of, you know, avoid all this stuff, but create this sort of cycle that Ruth Ben-Ghiat describes as autocratic backfire, which is that you actually lean in and intensify all of the most destructive impulses, not just to the politics, and that's the smallest ball, but to all of the larger policy issues. And you — there's nothing to stop you or even to dissuade you or disconnect you from that.

And we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that when he is not using AI to manufacture a visual or video reality for himself, he's surrounding himself— these campaign things, I think of them more like a production schedule than a campaign rally, because what he's basically doing is creating content that he's then going to post on Truth Social and on socials and possibly in these ads and distribute and reinforce the narrative that he's telling himself. And who is with him on this? Not just his own people, but Steve Bannon's production team is following him around for behind the scenes stuff and clipping.

So, he is really creating that own — what used to be the Fox News feedback loop. At least there was some filter. Now he's just building his own feedback loop of really intense loyalists and AI slop, which is going to intensify the autocratic backfire that we're all going to have to suffer over the next two years.

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AN 9 26

President Donald Trump has behaved so erratically and flip-flopped on important issues like war and affordability so often that experts often wonder why millions of Americans continue to support him regardless.

Now Sarah Longwell, a political consultant at the conservative website The Bulwark, shed light on that by exploring why millions of Trump supporters continued to back him even after he attempted a coup after losing the 2020 presidential election.

After explaining how an alternate right-wing media ecosystem existed for roughly two decades before Trump became president, and based on the presumption that there is a pervasive liberal media bias, Longwell described how she tried to explore the influence of this ecosystem in her own research.

"At first, Trump voters—even ones who’d supported him twice—were genuinely shaken," Longwell wrote. "I did a couple of focus groups six days after January 6, 2021, in the aftermath of Trump supporters violently storming the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which Trump told them had been rigged."

"One group was with women who voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and another was with women who’d voted for Trump in 2016 and then switched to Biden. In the two-time-Trump-voter group, Jamie from Pennsylvania said she was 'appalled' and 'shocked' by what she saw," Longwell wrote. “I realized, but yet I didn’t, if that makes any sense, that there are people out there that could do that.”

Longwell proceeded to quote various survey subjects.

"Audra from Arizona said, 'I think the reason he should be impeached is really just so that he can’t run ever again,'" Longwell reported. "Trump was impeached the next day. The Trump-to-Biden group was similarly harsh. Like Tina from Pennsylvania: 'The windows were being cracked, people were being killed, I don’t understand how this happened like this. And if he’s behind it, they really should impeach him, get rid of it and that’s it.' For a brief moment, reality was undeniable, and people’s opinions of Trump became soft and changeable."

But from there, Longwell had bad news.

"Then the Republican Triangle of Doom kicked in—the toxic and symbiotic relationship between Republican voters, elected officials, and the right-wing infotainment media," Longwell wrote. "The voters who were horrified got bombarded with whitewashing spin almost instantly."

She described how everyone from conservative influencers to former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) sold out the truth about Trump's insurrection in order to validate the biases of Trump supporters.

"Now, some Trump voters understood what happened and never came back," Longwell observed. "But the majority of them had spent four years defending Trump—online, at the dinner table, at work. They’d lost friendships over him. So when right-wing media offered them an alternative explanation, they took it. And then their opinions started to harden. Like cement."

She added, "Six months later, the narrative had completely shifted. I did focus groups in July, and Republicans had flipped completely from where they’d been on January 12. Annette, a 2020 Trump voter from Arizona, told me it was '100 percent orchestrated from Antifa.' Robert, a two-time Trump voter from Alaska, said, 'It’s been shown that they purposely let those people in the building.' He added that January 6th was 'all set up by the Democrat Party to make those people look bad.'"

Longwell concluded, "Without trusted messengers to help them make sense of what’s happening, voters are vulnerable to whoever gets there first with a compelling story. In our communications environment, public opinion can harden in days or even hours. If you don’t know where or how to talk to people, then you are going to miss every one of those persuasion opportunities."

Speaking to AlterNet in August, Dr. Steven Hassan — cult expert and author of "Combating Cult Mind Control" and "The Cult of Trump" — also argued, as did Longwell, that Trump supporters choose a biased information ecosystem to validate their cult-like support for the president.

"I talk about cults being spread across the entire continuum," Hassan told AlterNet. "There are a lot of cultish groups, but they give informed consent and encourage people to follow their conscience — they don't tell people what they can and can't read, et cetera — all the way to authoritarianism. And I see the people following Trump as largely being mind-controlled through information: through their social media posts, whether on Facebook, Telegram or WhatsApp, or through Fox News."

Hassan added, "So, going back to your initial question about how people are voting against their self-interest — it really comes down to what information sources they're relying on and who their network is that they identify with. So if they really love Joe Rogan, they're going to follow a lot of his views. And consequently, when he turns against Trump, Trump loses a lot of followers. What I'm trying to convey is that we're living in an age of digital manipulation that's never been seen before, with people's personal data being used to silo information — to drive them further left if they're already progressive-leaning, or further right if they're already Republican or conservative-leaning. And it's quite strategic in its use of algorithms. So it's not simply about looking at personality type, Matthew — the disposition of a person who becomes a Trump follower — but the social and information environment people are being subjected to."

In August, Hassan even described why so many Trump supporters receive the specific plastic surgery practice known as "Mar-a-Lago face" in order to show their loyalty to the aforementioned cult.

"My work is to really try to illuminate the mind and how undue influence can be exerted and the whole idea of cults all along the continuum from ethical tight-knit groups where there's freedom to think and question and leave without fear or harassment," Dr. Hassan argued at the time.

"... [W]e were talking about how so many MAGA people are getting plastic surgery, and they all look alike," he said, adding that if an individual is "in a mind control cult, you want to look the right way to fit in [with] that idyllic image of Christian white nationalists."

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RWW

Mark Meckler, Medical Ships, And The MAGA Media Bubble

03/11/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Mark Meckler is a Christian nationalist political activistand right-wing commentator, the sort who brags about being "a radical, right-wing, Tea Party, Bible-thumping, gun-toting conservative" and praises President Donald Trump for supposedly having rescued the word "retard" from the woke thought police.

Meckler is also the co-founder and president of the Convention of States Foundation, a conservative organization that seeks to get state legislatures to call for an Article V convention to propose constitutional amendments that will dramatically limit the power of the federal government. It was in this capacity that Meckler appeared on his organization's monthly "COS At Home" program last week and demonstrated the perils of living in the MAGA media bubble.

During the program, Meckler and host Jonathan Viaud discussed Trump's ongoing obsession with acquiring Greenland. Meckler praised Trump's efforts to acquire the nation, particularly his decision to deploy a hospital ship to the region.

"There was a really interesting thing that happened recently [that] most people didn't pay attention to in the news," Meckler said. "He sent a mercy ship, a surgical ship to Greenland to provide medical care for Greenlanders, because apparently the medical system there is a disaster and they are not provided that kind of support from Europe. So I think now what he's going to do is use the candy part of the [negotiation]—like we can help you out, we're going to make you guys wealthier, we're going to make you healthier—and ultimately, I think that means he gets to whatever agreement he wants on Greenland.

"Amazing how the mainstream media doesn't cover that type of story," Viaud replied contemptuously. "It's unbelievable."

Video URL

IFrame Content

Perhaps the reason that people weren't aware of this news is because it never happened. Like so much else with Trump, this was nothing more than a confusing announcement made by the president via social media. The entire idea was completely divorced from reality, rejected by Greenland, and never occurred, as the Wall Street Journal reported:

The Pentagon has received no orders to deploy any U.S. Navy vessels to Greenland, according to U.S. officials, despite President Trump’s claim that a hospital ship is ‘on its way’ to the self-governing Danish territory.

The U.S. has two hospital ships, the East Coast-based USNS Comfort and the West Coast-based USNS Mercy, which are designed as floating medical-treatment facilities. Both vessels are in a shipyard in Mobile, Ala., according to maritime tracking information. The Comfort is undergoing repairs that are expected to be completed in April, while the Mercy is in the middle of a one-year maintenance period that began last July.

The "mainstream media" covered the story extensively, pointing out that the supposed mercy operation was nothing more than a figment of Trump's imagination. But Meckler and Viaud were completely unaware of that because they apparently live in a MAGA media bubble where they can remain insulated from things like facts and reality.

On the Watchlist

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aha not me LA fires conspIr a way of dealing w fear/ world being out of control

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NYT columnist David Brooks didn't mean any of it

New York Times columnist David Brooks sits next to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, in this image from the U.S. Justice Department’s file of late financier Jeffrey Epstein, released by the House Oversight Committee Democrats in Washington, D.C., U.S., on December 18, 2025. House Oversight Committee Democrats/Handout

:{John Stoehr December 24, 2025

David Brooks, the conservative columnist who is beloved by liberals, wrote last month that the Democrats make too much of the Epstein story. He said they’re acting as conspiratorially as the Republicans.

Brooks said he was “especially startled” to see leading progressives characterizing all elites as part of “the Epstein class.” If he were a Democrat, he said, he’d be focused on “the truth”: “the elites didn’t betray you, but they did ignore you. They didn’t mean to harm you.”

Brooks went on to say: “If I were a Democratic politician … I’d add that America can’t get itself back on track if the culture is awash in distrust, cynicism, catastrophizing lies and conspiracymongering. No governing majority will ever form if we’re locked in a permanent class war.”

Sounds noble, but he didn’t mean any of it.

Last week, it was discovered that David Brooks had palled around with Jeffrey Epstein. Pictures of him were part of a trove released by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. It was deduced that they were taken at a 2011 “billionaires dinner.” A 2019 report by Buzzfeed identified Brooks, among others, along with Epstein, who had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for sex just three years prior.

Buzzfeed: “In 2011, after Epstein had been released from a Florida jail, it was an exclusive gathering, dominated by tech industry leadership. A gallery of photos taken at the event by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly Microsoft’s chief technology officer, named 20 guests, including just one media representative: New York Times columnist David Brooks.”

While defending Brooks, the Times inadvertently confirmed Epstein's presence at the dinner. “Mr. Brooks had no contact with [Epstein] before or after his single attendance at a widely-attended dinner.”

Sure, but Brooks knew Epstein was there. If he didn’t know about his crimes, which is doubtful, he still chose to write a column warning the Democrats against waging “permanent class war” without disclosing his non-trivial association with the namesake of “the Epstein class.”

It’s bad faith, up and down.

“I think that's what we get when (very) wealthy people are shaping opinion,” said Denny Carter, publisher of Bad Faith Times, a newsletter. “We can never really know the depths of their conflicts of interest, whether it's covering for a known pedophile ringleader or promoting a cause or politician or company that will benefit them financially.”

In 2023, Denny wrote a piece highlighting the importance of bad faith, which is to say, if you don’t put it at the center of your thinking about rightwing politics, you’re going to be very, very confused. He wrote:

“Republicans today support women’s sports (if it means barring trans folks from participating). They love a member of the Kennedy family. They’re skeptical of Big Pharma. They hate banks. None of it – not a single part of it – makes any sense unless you understand bad faith.”

They never mean what they say.

Denny brought my attention to that two-year-old piece by reposting it. I immediately thought of Brooks. Scolding the Democrats about demonizing “the Epstein class” while fraternizing with “the Epstein class” (it was a “billionaires dinner,” for Christ’s sake) – that’s the kind of behavior you might expect from a man who’s ready to betray you.

“You see these op-eds about supporting the fossil fuel industry and continuing to accelerate climate collapse in the guise of electoral advice for Democrats without having any idea if the writer means what they're saying or has some financial stake in promoting Big Oil and its various subsidiaries,” Denny told me in a brief interview. “You assume good faith among these writers and influencers at your own peril.”

In a 2023 piece you recently reposted, you said the world is upside down. The right loves Russia. The left hates Russia. This is confusing for those of us who remember 20 years ago. What happened?

This one, I think, is pretty straightforward. The right despised the collectivism inherent in Soviet ideology and the left was curious about how it might look in action. The fall of the USSR (eventually) led to a totalitarian fascist Russian state ruled by a vicious dictator who used religion and "traditional values" as a weapon against his many enemies, or anyone who dared promote democracy in Russia.

Listen to Putin and you'll hear a Republican babbling about “woke” this and “woke” that and positioning himself as the last barrier between so-called traditional society and some kind of far-left hellscape.

It's the same script every modern fascist leader uses, and it appeals very much to Republican lawmakers and their voters. You sometimes read stories about Americans fleeing to Russia to escape the “woke” scourge, only to deeply regret it. That's always funny or tragic, depending on how you look at it.

You say bad faith explains the upside-downness, but you also suggest the center has not held -- that social fragmentation brought us here. You even cite David Bowie. How did you come to that insight?

I've been a Bowie superfan for a while now, and like a lot of folks who spend too much time online, I've seen the viral clip of Bowie explaining the world-changing potential of the internet way back in 1999.

He was right on a few levels, but most of all he identified the internet's potential for destroying any sense of commonly held reality. Here we are today, a quarter century later, trying to operate in a political world in which there are a handful of different realities at any one time.

A traitorous right-wing mob tried to overthrow the US government in 2021. We all saw the footage. We all know what happened. Yet there are tens of millions of Americans who believe January 6 did not happen or was in fact a walking tour of the US Capitol.

We can't even agree that there was a coup attempt orchestrated by the outgoing president because social media took that event, broke it into a million pieces, and allowed bad actors to piece it back together to fit a politically convenient narrative. I wrote about it here.

You suggest that simply telling the truth won't fix things. Why?

I don't mean to sound cynical but if we've learned anything over the past decade of small-d democratic backsliding, it's that the truth doesn't mean anything anymore because of the societal fragmentation created by social media. There is no truth. We can choose our own adventure now because our phones will confirm our priors about what happened and why.

Pro-democracy folks in the US can't rely on facts and figures to win the day. They won't. The Harris campaign reached a highwater mark in August 2024 when they were ignoring facts and figures and coasting on vibes. It was a heady time because it seemed like Democrats had finally learned their lesson: good-faith “Leslie Knope” politics [facts will win the day] has no place in the modern world, if it ever did.

The right has a gigantic media complex and it's getting bigger. Twitter, CBS News and soon perhaps CNN -- all are right-coded or soon could be. Are you seeing recognition among liberals and leftists that this imbalance is unsustainable? If so, what's the plan?

Look, there are plenty of pro-democracy folks in the world with more money than they could spend in 50 lifetimes. A little bit of that money could go a long way in establishing pro-democracy media outlets that operate as propaganda outlets for the kind of liberalism that has been washed away by the right's capture of the media. Democracy needs to be sold to Americans just as fascism was sold to them, first in the seedy corners of the internet, then on Elon Musk's hub for international fascism, then in mainstream outlets run by people cooking their brains daily on Musk's site.

I'm not sure of a specific plan. I'm just a blogger. But people are awash in fascist propaganda 24 hours a day on every major social media site. It has ruined a lot of relationships and radicalized Americans who spent most of their lives ignoring politics as the domain of nerds.

There has to be a flood of pro-democracy messaging in the media and that can't happen without billions being invested in a massive network of outlets that can effectively push back on the right's unreality.

I wrote about the selling of democracy here.

The meaning of "elites" is central to the fascist project. As defined by David Brooks, they are educated liberal-ish people who drive Teslas, or used to. With an affordability crisis underway, liberals and leftists have a chance to redefine "elites" for the long haul. Thoughts?

I think engaging the right on the meaning of "elites" is probably a road to nowhere. They will label as "elite" anyone who has ever read a book or graduated from college. I would say the left can and should point out the vast gulf between real populism and fake right-wing populism. Media outlets, of course, have conflated these two because the media assumes everyone in politics is operating in pristine good faith.

But pointing out that Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are real populists while Trump and his lackeys talk a big populist game while selling the country for parts to their golf buddies and business associates could offer people real insight into what it means to be on the side of the working person. Barack Obama has toyed with the idea of rejecting Trump as a populist; I think every pro-democracy American needs to push back harder on that label because it's disingenuous and a powerful tool for fascist politicians who have nothing if they don't have at least some working-class support.

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Who’s afraid of Candace Owens?

A movement built to support Donald Trump can’t cordon off conspiracy theories

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 12/11/25

Long-simmering feuds among right-wing influencers reached a boiling point this week when Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika used an appearance on Fox News to denounce people she said were “making hundreds of thousands of dollars” by pushing conspiracy theories about her husband’s killing. Her plea for those individuals “to stop,” obviously intended for her husband's former colleague, the popular streamer Candace Owens, triggered an outpouring of criticism on the right against “extremists” promoting “hateful conspiracy theories” who had somehow been allowed into the movement.

But in a sign of the durable position such conspiracy theorists hold within the movement — and the immense demand for their work — many of the high-level pundits trying to lay down guardrails did not mention by name either Owens or her primary ally in the MAGA schism, Tucker Carlson.

“The Right’s media apparatus is how the Right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts,” The Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo said in one such salvo. “If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a Third World click farm.”

Can you imagine?

It is patently absurd to claim that right-wing media figures injecting deranged lies into their audience is somehow a new phenomenon. The right is dominated by President Donald Trump, the poster child for “conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts.” And Rufo’s ilk were happy to foster such insanity as long as it was pointed at the left in the service of electing Republicans.

But now the same tools are being turned inward, against other right-wingers, and while they’re furious that this is happening, the apparatus they helped build is so powerful that they are unable to name their foes.

A fight over Charlie Kirk’s legacy — and the Jews

Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel caused a split in a right-wing commentariat otherwise united around Trump. One side includes conservative Jews like Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer, who supported Israel’s subsequent brutal campaign in Gaza and traffic in anti-Muslim invective. On the other side are “America First” figures like Owens and Carlson who both opposed the campaign and used it as an opportunity to revive noxious antisemitic conspiracism. The divide has repeatedly made headlines, particularly in November when Carlson gave a friendly interview to Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist streamer who regularly rails against “the Jews,” who he has claimed “are destroying this country.”

Owens has been claiming since Charlie Kirk’s tragic killing in September that at the time of his death, he was coming around to her view of Israel. Based on that premise (which Kirk allies deny), she has speculated that Kirk may have been assassinated by pro-Israel henchmen worried that he was turning on them, perhaps with help from elements within TPUSA and the U.S. military. These sorts of wild claims are typical of Owens’ oeuvre: She is currently being sued for claiming that the first lady of France is secretly a transgender woman, and has told her followers that she has been targeted for death by an assassination squad composed of French law enforcement and “at least one Israeli.” Her claims have been denounced by the likes of Shapiro and Loomer, but cheered on by Carlson and fellow traveler Alex Jones.

Erika Kirk appeared on Fox’s Outnumbered on Wednesday to address in part what host Harris Faulker described as “hate” and “conspiracies” in the wake of her husband’s death.

“Come after me, call me names, I don't care,” she said. “Call me what you want, go down that rabbit hole, whatever. But…when you go after the people that I love and you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars every single episode going after the people that I love because somehow they're in on this? No.”

“My message to them is to stop — to stop,” she concluded.

Neither Erika Kirk nor Faulkner mentioned Owens’ name. But Owens immediately recognized that the segment had been “about me.” And rather than stopping at the widow’s request, she doubled down.

The Fox segment encouraged other right-wing pundits who typically avoid weighing in on intramovement controversies to speak out — albeit without mentioning who they were talking about.

Fox star Sean Hannity used his radio show on Wednesday to call out online commentators for “saying the most incendiary, outrageous, bizarre, conspiratorial, in some cases, outright racist, white nationalist, virulent antisemitism, and they make money off the, quote, clicks that they can then monetize because, you know, people like the shock value of it.” After praising Erika Kirk’s Fox appearance, he lashed out at “people with no evidence spreading the most vile, hateful conspiracy theories about Charlie's assassination,” calling them “grifters” who are “not MAGA.”

The hosts of Fox & Friends likewise aired Erika Kirk’s remarks and criticized unnamed persons pushing conspiracy theories about her husband’s death on Thursday. “People are making money. They have unsubstantiated theories and are running with it,” Brian Kilmeade said.

MAGA slop king Benny Johnson also posted the video of Erika Kirk going “absolutely SCORCHED EARTH against evil people monetizing Charlie Kirk's death and attacking her family and the families of those close to Charlie and TPUSA,” adding: “Thank God we are finally here. The Demons are Screaming.” He has not mentioned Owens by name on X since posting in April 2024 about a potential Owens/Shapiro debate over antisemitism.

For Fox contributor Hugh Hewitt, meanwhile, this is a tempest in a teapot. Responding to a discussion started by Rufo’s post on Wednesday, he claimed that such (unnamed, of course) “grifters” only have the “illusion of influence,” while “center-right to conservative media is flourishing.” Citing podcasts with relatively small audiences and Fox’s Special Report, “the most watched news show by serious people in the country,” he commented, “A handful of extremists cannot pollute the sea of offerings but it’s still best just to ignore them.”

It is certainly possible in a fractured media environment for a Republican apparatchik with intellectual pretensions to find some voices who will make him feel good about the choices he’s made. But Owens and Carlson both host podcasts on Spotify’s top-10 list, and the latter spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention after shepherding the selection of JD Vance as the next vice president.

The guardrails are gone and all the conspiracy theorists are here

The MAGA movement that everyone on both sides of the divide supported during the 2024 presidential election worships a notorious fabulist who emerged in GOP politics thanks to his role as the nation’s chief birther, reshaped his party around the twin lies that he actually won the 2020 election and that the ensuing January 6 riots by his supporters were righteous, and is constantly lifting up the most noxious online slop imaginable.

Trump’s emergence speaks to both the willingness of mainstream right-wing institutions to accept a conspiracy theorist at the highest level of power, and the eagerness of the right-wing audience to buy the sort of lies he was selling. And his ascension has made it virtually impossible for the resulting movement to draw lines and fully cut loose people who promote deranged falsehoods and bigotries.

Owens and Carlson became right-wing stars by promoting the same types of feverish claims while climbing established institutional pathways. New York magazine detailed Owens’ conspiratorial habits of thinking all the way back in 2016, before her tenure at TPUSA, her nearly 200 appearances on Fox weekday shows over a five year span, or her time as Shapiro’s colleague at The Daily Wire. And Carlson had spent years mainstreaming white nationalist talking points as a Fox host before the network finally showed him the door. The pair assembled loyal audiences thanks to those right-wing institutions, which have found themselves able to take away their jobs but not able to stop viewers from following them to their new spaces.

And Carlson and Owens profited not in spite of their conspiracy theories, but because they fit neatly within a right-wing echo chamber that seemed purpose-built for their generation and propagation. People like Rufo and Hannity were happy to play along with bullshit about Haitian immigrants eating pets or the Democrats assassinating a party staffer when they could use such claims for the benefit of Trump and the GOP. But now that the same habits of mind that made a swath of the right into QAnon adherents are turned inside the tent, they are deeply concerned.

Meanwhile, neither Trump nor Vance seem at all interested in trying to reestablish guardrails. Indeed, their administration is filled with conspiracy theorists seemingly picked for that very reason, indicative of a political movement that is marbled through with crackpots and extremists. And the worst is surely yet to come.

MMA

### What are J.D. Vance and Sean Hannity so afraid of?

11/14/25 11:40 AM EST

### Candace Owens leaves as cancel culture comes to The Daily Wire

03/22/24 3:27 PM EDT

### A mask-off week for right-wing antisemitism

11/21/23

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AN 12 25

Slate reports videogames stuff a lot of entertainment into one sandbox, and some of them augment their storylines with every kind of conspiracy imaginable.

The two-decade-old Assassin’s Creed games are peppered with “almost every kind of conspiracy theory you can think of,” reports Joshua Rivera. “In the fiction of Assassin’s Creed, humanity is descended from ancient aliens, and this knowledge is suppressed throughout history; the tide of world events is influenced by a shadow war between two secret societies; the media exists to manipulate the public. This makes for an exciting series of video games with a near-limitless scope. It also echoes uncomfortable real-world conspiracy theories that have proven consequential in our lifetime.”

But how seriously do players take conspiracies that try to rope aliens in with an over-controlling order of the Knights Templar and a “bloodthirsty” Pope Alexander VI — a pope more known for nepotism, unexciting papal decrees and for his reputation as a patron of the arts? Media critic and scholar Cameron Kunzelman tells Slate no more than any other media source.

“Conspiracy exists as a crime that you can be charged with, because conspiracies do exist!” said Kunzelman. “There are groups of people who make decisions together that can impact other people, and they can do that secretly. Seemingly lots of things that are involved in what’s being released right now in the Epstein files are what we would call dyed-in-the-wool, true conspiracy. From human trafficking to much more banal, but just as bad, practices of money moving around and political meetings.”

But Kunzelman said today a wide variety of conspiracies are getting “mashed together” into big ugly “metaconspiracies.”

“Where conspiratorial movements at one time were seen as discrete from one another, now they kind of attach to each other and they get folded into QAnon,” said Kunzelman, whose new book “Everything is Permitted” claims that this massive folding of conspiracies mirrors how entertainment franchises are now built.

But, like zombies and other things that should not exist, they are perpetual motion machines that sometimes keep churning away long after their creators are dead and gone, using the engine of capital “to keep themselves revolving and moving,” said Kunzelman.

But Kunzelman’s book points out that algorithms on things like YouTube and other sites shunt viewers into “harder stuff,” that even our basic entertainment patterns make us minor conspiracy theorists.

“Every part of our lives where we engage with the internet is about putting us in a ditch that leads to another ditch that leads to another ditch,” Kunselman told Slate. “And unfortunately, the scale of that, the allure of that, often leads into things that will harm us in some way. It’ll remove us from our actual communities. It will put us into kind of epistemic places that are only engaged with their own ideas. … whatever happens to you is whatever happens to you.”

Oddly, Kunzelman is one video game enthusiast who thinks platforms that shunt audiences down a rabbit hole need more policing, arguing that we don’t even build open roads without some guardrails.

“I think being a very influential conspiracy-theorist TikTokker is probably on the whole more dangerous than being a drunk driver for an afternoon,” said Kunzelman. “I think it’s harming more people in serious and real ways. But we don’t take it seriously at all. It’s a bipartisan belief that these industries should not be constrained by the law, and by any concern for other human beings. I think that’s bad."

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MMA

January 6 “false flag” claim made it to the president

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 09/29/25

The right-wing conspiracy theory that hundreds of plainclothes FBI agents who were deployed to respond to the riotous mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, had actually incited the crowd in a “Fedsurrection” spread through the right-wing conspiracy echo chamber over the weekend and reached President Donald Trump in just over 36 hours after its inception.

Elements of the right-wing media, led by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, spent years concocting an alternate narrative of January 6 in which the rioters were heroes, any violence was actually caused by federal agents, and the resulting prosecutions of perpetrators constituted a brutal campaign of government repression.

Following Trump’s return to office, his pardoning of the rioters, and the firings and demotions of prosecutors and FBI agents who handled their cases, this is effectively the position of the United States government.

Given those dynamics — and the president’s willingness to promote any lie, no matter how far-fetched, as long as it fits his biases — false claims supporting the narrative of January 6 as an “inside job” can spread with alarming speed.

Late on September 25, right-wing journalist John Solomon’s Just the News outlet published a story with the headline “FBI Bombshell: 274 agents sent to Capitol for J6, many later complained they were political ‘pawns.’”

“The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to ‘wokeness’ and allowed its employees to become ‘pawns in a political war,’ according to an after-action report kept from the public for more than four years,” Solomon and Steven Richards wrote in the article’s first paragraph.

Solomon and Richards did not reveal until the story’s 11th paragraph that the agents had been deployed “after the violence started.” The pair lifted up complaints from FBI agents that in an emergency situation — in which thousands of people had laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, assaulting scores of law enforcement officers and threatening the safety of the entirety of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, who were assembled to count the electoral votes — those agents had been hurriedly assigned riot control duties even if they lacked training and gear for that purpose.

Solomon and JustTheNews both shared the story on X using the text of the headline. And right-wing conspiracy theorists quickly responded by assuming that the report fit their assumption that January 6 was a false flag operation.

Retired Gen. Mike Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term, said of the story: “The question this begs is; was there sedition or conspiracy committed on the part of the DOJ & FBI at the time?”

“You don’t just have 274 FBI agents or employees show up to execute this massive of a ‘fedsurrection.’ This required foreknowledge (intent),” he added.

MAGA poster Bill Mitchell likewise claimed that the FBI agents had been “infiltrators.”

Trump himself quickly adopted this misreading of the JustTheNews report. He posted to a Truth Social midday on September 27 that “it was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed… 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax.” He added that the reporting showed that “FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials,’” and demanded the identities of the FBI agents involved.

Trump’s post brought a new wave of right-wing conspiracymongering over the report, with various MAGA figures claiming that it showed there had been a “Fedsurrection” in which FBI agents acted as “provocateurs.”

FBI Director Kash Patel stepped in to try to tamp down the situation. Without admitting that Trump was wrong, he said in a statement to Fox News Digital that “Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards,” for which he blamed “corrupt leadership.”

Faced with the same situation, presumably Patel would have allowed the January 6 insurrection to proceed, rather than violating standards by sending FBI agents to quell it?

By Sunday morning, the false claim about the FBI agents had been thoroughly baked into mainstream GOP discourse.

When CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) whether rule of law applies “to people who stormed the Capitol on January 6,” Johnson replied, “I’m glad you brought that up,” citing “new information over the last couple of days” about how “there were 274 FBI agents in the crowd on January 6.”

Tapper quickly cut him off, saying that according to Patel, “They were sent there to do crowd control because of everything that was going on. They weren’t — it wasn't a false flag operation, as President Trump suggested.”

But Johnson, who was among the members of Congress evacuated to a secure location during the riots, replied, “Well, Jake, wait a minute. Hold on, Jake. How do you know that? Right? There's a lot of questions.”

He added: “There's videos, and it's always been disputed, what involvement some of those persons engaged in, what involvement they had. Did they spur on the crowd? Did they open the gates to allow them in? I don't know. These are questions. But they should be answered.”

Johnson went on to say that a House subcommittee newly established to reinvestigate the attack would get to the bottom of the situation.

The campaign by the Trump administration and MAGA media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to depict political violence as purely a phenomenon of the left raises some obvious questions, among them, “What about January 6?” A pro-Trump mob, summoned to Washington, D.C., by the president and incited by his calls for them to “fight,” descending on the U.S. Capitol and assaulting numerous law enforcement officers while sending Congress into hiding would surely seem to qualify.

The answer is that on the right, the January 6 rioters have been reimagined as the good guys.

### January 6 and the people who knew better

01/06/25 2:12 PM EST

### The right’s propaganda machine gets its Jan. 6 pardons

01/20/25 7:59 PM EST

### Sean Hannity once celebrated the FBI “rank and file.” Now he’s touting Trump’s purge.

02/05/2

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AN 6 25 STATES N

Just hours after Minnesotans learned that Democratic House leader Melissa Hortman had been assassinated, right-wing influencer Collin Rugg, who has 1.8 million followers on X, posted a “report” that hinted that she’d been killed because of a recent vote on ending undocumented adults’ ability to enroll in MinnesotaCare, a subsidized health insurance for the working poor.

Mike Cernovich, another right-wing influencer who has 1.4 million followers on X, took Rugg’s post and amped it up, but in the “just asking questions” style of many conspiracy theories:

*“Did Tim Walz have her executed to send a message?”

They were deeply ignorant about the MinnesotaCare issue.

Walz and Hortman — who was instrumental in passing legislation allowing undocumented people to sign up for MinnesotaCare as speaker of the House in 2023 — negotiated a compromise with Republicans in the Minnesota Legislature to end eligibility for adults, but keep it for children. They did so to win necessary Republican support in the 67-67 House to pass a state budget. Without it, state government would have shut down on July 1.

IFrame Content

Both Hortman and Walz signed the compromise agreement in mid-May. This week, Hortman spoke tearfully about how difficult the vote was for her, but she was bound to vote yes on the issue because of the prior agreement.

The “theory” of Hortman’s killing was further undercut by the vote of Democratic Sen. John Hoffman — who was also targeted by the suspect — against rolling back MinnesotaCare for undocumented Minnesotans.

Rugg and Cernovich’s posts were shared widely and just the start of the disinformation.

Once law enforcement sources began revealing a suspect, right-wing influencers ran with an insignificant detail: That Vance Luther Boelter was a “Walz appointee.”

Like many states, but even more so here, Minnesota is home to hundreds of nonpartisan and bipartisan boards and commissions, which are composed of thousands of people who typically win the appointment by simply volunteering. There are currently 342 open positions on Minnesota boards and commissions. Boelter was appointed to the Workforce Development Council by Walz’s predecessor Gov. Mark Dayton and reappointed by Walz.

It was the equivalent of calling a Sunday school volunteer an “appointee of the bishop.”

No matter, the Murdoch media machine, specifically the New York Post, had their headline: “Former appointee of Tim Walz sought….”

Cernovich had his greasy foil hot dog wrapper and began constructing a hat:

“The Vice President candidate for the Democrat party is directly connected to a domestic terrorist, that is confirmed, the only question is whether Tim Walz himself ordered the political hit against a rival who voted against Walz’s plan to give free healthcare to illegals.”

Walz had no such plan. He had signed an agreement to end eligibility for undocumented adults.

Joey Mannarino, who has more than 600,000 followers on X, was more crass:

*“Rumor has it she was preparing to switch parties. The Democrats are VIOLENT SCUM.”

It was a ridiculous “rumor.” One of the last photos of Hortman alive was an image of her at the Democratic-Farmer-Labor’s big annual fundraising event, the Humphrey-Mondale dinner, which took place just hours before her assassination.

No matter, Cernovich wanted his new friends in federal law enforcement to act:

*“The FBI must take Tim Walz into custody immediately.”

Finally, fresh off his humiliating defeat at the hands of President Donald Trump, world’s richest man Elon Musk quote-tweeted someone again falsely alleging Hortman was killed by “the left” and added:

*“The far left is murderously violent.”

The suspect’s “hit list,” according to an official who has seen the list, comprised Minnesotans who have been outspoken in favor of abortion rights. CNN reported that it also included several abortion clinics, which doesn’t sound like the work of “the left.”

Right-wing influencers marred Hortman’s death and smeared Walz on a pile of lies.

In a different, saner world, they would be humiliated and slink away. But the smart money is that during the next moment of national crisis and mourning, they will again lie for profit.

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.

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an 3 25

In the 2024, voters who helped put Donald Trump back in the White House ranged from hardcore MAGA Republicans to swing voters and independents — some of them 2020 Joe Biden voters — who blamed the Biden Administration for inflation. The economy was a major concern of Biden-to-Trump voters, and the term "buyer's remorse" is being used in connection with swing voters and independents who now regret voting for Trump and are worried about steep new tariffs or possible cuts to Social Security.

But diehard MAGA voters have no regrets about voting for Trump. In a conversation published by the New York Times' opinion section on March 21, four conservative columnists — David Brooks, David French, Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat — lay out some reasons why those voters continue to be diehard Trump supporters.

The writers aren't promoting Trump's policies during the conversation — French, in fact, is very much a Never Trump conservative — but rather, are explaining the president's unending appeal to his hardcore MAGA base.

Brooks cited **:{"brokenism" as a key reason for their support. The columnist describes "brokenism" as "the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down."}:

Brooks told his Times colleagues, "Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK, but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this from media consumption." fix cities burn immigrant crime wave gangs take apt

French, who is a scathing critic of Trump but also has major complaints about the left, interjected, "In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there's a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans, sadly, want their opponents to suffer. They're actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the 'deep state' or RINOs. So, yes, Republicans want a disruptive president, but who's being disrupted really matters — and if it's the government or institutions that many Republicans believe are hostile to them, then Republicans are just fine with the pain."

French added, "Many Republicans dislike foreign aid. Or loathe elite universities. Or hate big liberal law firms. Students and professors at elite universities have a long track record of targeting the free speech rights of their conservative colleagues, and Republicans are rationalizing their own constitutional violations as fighting fire with fire."

According to Brooks, diehard MAGA voters enjoy seeing him target institutions they feel excluded from.

Brooks told French, Douthat and Stephens, "I'd offer up one more word for consideration: 'exclusion.' Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions. Trump has gone after these institutions big time — the universities, the Department of Education, the State Department. Of course, the MAGA crowd feels justified revenge."

Douthat alluded to the fact that Trump's strongest support continues to be within the MAGA movement.

Douthat told his colleagues, "First, I would stress that Trump is not terribly popular, and undoubtedly will become less so if the stock market trends down and recession fears mount. He has a commanding position within his party, but even at his apotheosis, his approval ratings barely got over 50 percent. Second, Americans lived through the first Trump term, when sky-is-falling rhetoric was commonplace, but the average American did not experience a crisis until COVID hit."

*Read the full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).

===

ECHO FAIL IN 2 WAYS

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AN 2 25

During President Donald Trump's first month back in the White House, many right-wing media outlets — from Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business to Newsmax TV — aggressively championed his policies, including mass layoffs at a wide range of federal government agencies.

Trump's alliance with SpaceX/Tesla/X.com CEO Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), receives plenty of favorable coverage at Fox News. And the most controversial members of Trump's administration are being championed in right-wing media.

But the Washington Post's Philip Bump, in his February 24 column, stresses that Republican politicians are running into a disconnect between right-wing media coverage and public responses to Trump's policies.

READ MORE:[We've reached the moment of maximum peril for our nation and our freedoms

For example, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisconsin) — who won reelection by 22 percent in his district — was "booed upon his arrival at a town hall event near Oshkosh" on Friday, February 21. Many attendees were angry over the Trump Administration/DOGE layoffs.

"Why the divide? Unquestionably in part because Trump supporters exist in a disinformation bubble, to paraphrase a prominent foreign leader," Bump explains. "They don't see it that way, of course; in their view, their news diet represents an escape from falsehoods propagated by left-leaning elites. But the falsity of that framing is easily demonstrated."

Grothman and other GOP lawmakers who are being booed at town hall events, according to Bump, "often spend most of their lives within the right-wing media universe, where Trump and Musk are treated with fervently policed admiration."

"That Republican legislators are now facing complaints from constituents is a reminder of the limits of the extent of the right's propaganda machine," Bump argues. "The mechanism Watters celebrates may reaches millions of people, but tens of millions of people voted against Trump in November despite that. Most Americans reject the idea that firing hundreds of thousands of government employees is necessary to fight waste and fraud."

*Philip Bump's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).

===

INK 2 25

On Monday, Fox News host and Trump administration propagandist Jesse Watters laid out in explicit detail how the modern right spreads its lies. After “someone says something on social media,” Watters told Fox News viewers, “Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it, and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”

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am 12 24

Trump's second term as president is less than a month away, with the president-elect scheduled to be inaugurated on January 20, 2025. And when he is sworn in, Republicans will have small majorities in both branches of Congress.

Salon's Chauncey DeVega hasn't minced words in his anti-Trump articles, many of which have attacked him as a dangerously authoritarian.

In an article published on December 27, DeVega offers a "Words of the Year" listicle for "Donald Trump’s imminent return to power and the very dark and challenging times that may lie beyond in the country's worsening democracy crisis."

The terms in DeVega's listicle include: (1) "weathering," (2) "witnessing," (3) "dread," (4) "corporeal politics," (5) "anticipatory obedience," and (6) "malignant normality."

DeVega describes "weathering" as "the impact of chronic stress and other negative factors on a person's mind, body and overall wellbeing."

"The American people are going to experience great weathering from a resurgent Trump Administration, the MAGA Republicans and the larger 'conservative' movement and its allied forces," DeVega warns. "This weathering will also impact those people who voted for Trump — his 'working-class' supporters in red state America will be particularly vulnerable."

DeVega describes "corporeal politics" as "the relationship of the body to politics" and "anticipatory obedience" as "a temptation to surrender in advance" when " societies that are under siege from fascist and other such authoritarian, illiberal, and antidemocratic forces."

READ MORE:[GOP trifecta to feature legislative attacks on voting rights

"The reasoning here is that preemptive surrender and compliance will somehow create safety," DeVega explains. "This is largely an illusion."

According to DeVega, the "malignant normality" concept "helps to explain Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and larger right-wing's hold on power and the country's political imagination."

The Salon journalist laments, "This state of malignant normality will likely endure long into the future because the collective relationship between truth and reality has been so disrupted by right-wing malign actors and such forces as disinformation, propaganda, social media, the algorithm, digital media echo chambers, conspiracism, closed epistemes and alternate realities, a failing public education system, a weak Fourth Estate and the death of local newspapers and other legitimate news sources, and perhaps most importantly the Trump-MAGA political experience-infotainment machine and pseudo-religion."

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an 12 24

Trump and his MAGA allies repeatedly accuse mainstream media outlets of spreading "fake news" — which, Trump critics argue, is projection in light of all the conspiracy theories that MAGA Republicans promote.

In an article published the day after Christmas, Salon's Amanda Marcotte stresses that "disinformation" and a "poor information ecosystem" played a key role in Trump's victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

"In the face of Vice President Kamala Harris losing the presidential election to Donald Trump," Marcotte writes, "the punditry's focus has been almost exclusively on asking how the Democrats couldn't beat a relentless liar with 34 felony convictions and a previous attempted coup under his belt. Everyone has a different theory about Harris' 'messaging,' with every critic inevitably arguing that if she had just talked more about their pet issue, she would have won."

Marcotte continues, "Another option, however, is to listen to what swing voters who backed Trump said about their decision."

READ MORE:[Businesses are already 'capitulating to Trump' for fear of retribution

Many U.S. voters, Marcotte laments, are "addicted to BS." And she cites research from conservative strategist Sarah Longwell, a Never Trumper who recently interviewed 2024 Trump voters who listen to Joe Rogan's podcast.

"Rogan's audience perfectly illustrates the way the firehose of disinformation online — his conspiracy theory-hyping podcast has over 16 million followers — has pickled the brains of so many otherwise normal people," Marcotte explains. "Most of the people Longwell interviewed couldn't go two minutes without coughing up a conspiracy theory. Everything is a shadowy plot, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the guy who shot Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania."

Marcotte points to the far-right QAnon as an example of how outlandish conspiracy theories can be.

"After the insurrection of January 6," Marcotte observes, "a lot of attention was paid to the rise of QAnon, because so many rioters were adherents to this online cult that preached that Trump is a savior prophesized to stop a worldwide Satanic conspiracy. Alarming reports showed millions of Americans believed QAnon myths, such as the divinity of Trump or that Democrats drink children's blood."

Marcotte continues, "QAnon is still around, but it gets much less media coverage these days. One likely reason is what we see in these focus groups: bonkerballs levels of conspiracy belief is no longer a fringe phenomenon. QAnon-style beliefs are simply the norm in American society…. One of the best predictors, if not the best predictor, of a Trump vote is how poor a person's information ecosystem is. People who read or watch real news outlets voted overwhelmingly for Harris. People who get their political information from social media voted for Trump."

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david? french in xian nat doku said pick fights w faithful; why not like pres? b/c he lies; he does?

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note xitter small group can echo each other , thus amplify

mojo 12 24

n 2016, Jarrod Fidden, an Australian entrepreneur living in Ireland, announced that he’d launched a dating app for conspiracy theorists—or, as he put it at the time, for those who engage with “socially inconvenient truths.” The app was written up in dozens of news outlets in multiple languages as a funny curiosity. Fidden himself was described the same way: a jaunty, voluble character who liked to tell reporters how he and his wife had “woken up” together a few years before to the sinister, hidden hands shaping the world, generating the idea for the site.

Elon Musk’s version of X has proven especially helpful for the science-denying account.

While Awake Dating soon vanished from the headlines, the man behind the app seems to have moved on to more impactful pursuits. Less than a decade later, Wide Awake Media, a Twitter account that Fidden appears to operate, has become a major voice for climate denialism. Its more than 500,000 followers on X include former Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone; Craig Kelly, a former member of Australian Parliament and an overt climate change denialist; former General Mike Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser before becoming a QAnon promoter; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an opponent of early Covid lockdown measures and a professor of health policy at Stanford, whom Trump has tapped to lead the National Institutes of Health in his second term.

Wide Awake Media is a huge player in a small but exceedingly noisy echo chamber of climate denial accounts on X, which parrot each other’s paranoid assertions that climate change is a “hoax” and that green energy proposals are a pretext to impose global control. With the help of Twitter’s monetized verification system, Wide Awake has grown an exceedingly large audience, mostly on the right; Elon Musk himself recently replied to the account, further raising its visibility.

The fact that a single conspiracy entrepreneur has been able to gain such a large foothold in Twitter’s information ecosystem is concerning to experts who research climate denialism and its dissemination.

Jennie King is the director of climate research and policy for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank that studies how extremism and disinformation spread online. “The Wide Awake story is indicative of various online trends,” she says, “including the diversity of actors who are piggybacking on the climate crisis as a way to generate both clout and revenue.”

In its current form, Wide Awake Media began as a Telegram channel promoting primarily anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown content before joining Twitter in 2022 and becoming more active after Musk’s purchase of the site. (The Telegram channel remains, but is less frequently updated.) At the same time, the account also shifted to focus largely on climate denialism.

The Twitter account is verified, meaning its operator pays for a subscription, and in return has its visibility and replies boosted by the site’s algorithm. A verified account also means Wide Awake Media can make money from popular content.

In 2023, the account saw a huge boom in traffic; between April and November of that year, King says, “they had gone from having 322 followers to 250,000 followers. This morning they’re at 577,000. So in the course of 18 months, that is a 1.7 thousand fold increase.”

The account focuses on several themes, King says, that reliably drive grievance-based engagement, including perceived government overreach during early days of Covid and its tension with “individual liberties,” and “fundamental changes to infrastructure and our lived environment,” like proposals for so-called 15-minute cities.

“There was a diverse community of people with grievances around these themes,” she explains. “Trauma and anger from the pandemic were then directed towards something new, in this case climate action.”

The transition was especially pronounced in 2023, King says. At that time, with the worst days of Covid infections over, you couldn’t “generate the same engagement with pandemic-related content,” she explains. “So you need to expand the business model and think about how you’re going to maintain your relevance, visibility, traction, and profit drivers.”

Acting in a “mutually reinforcing” echo chamber with other online climate deniers is a huge part of Wide Awake’s strategy, King says. “It’s a tiny minority of accounts, probably less than 50 in the Anglosphere, who are really driving this ecosystem. They are constantly citing each other, appearing in each other’s channels, using each other to provide a veneer of credibility, and doing what disinfo needs to in order to survive: create the impression of critical mass.”

Wide Awake Media also uses Twitter to promote an online store selling T-shirts with conspiratorial slogans—another way the operator has monetized their presence on the platform. (It also periodically promotes donations through fundraising platforms.) As Media Matters noted in a September 2023 analysis, the account’s “seemingly scrappy operation offering little original content besides t-shirts, proves that becoming a climate denial influencer is easier than ever.”

A previous email for Fidden is no longer operational, and whoever is behind the Twitter account didn’t respond to several requests for comment—except to post a screenshot of one email I sent, warning that a “hit piece” was imminent. But there are strong indications Fidden is the person behind the Wide Awake Media Twitter account. For one, Wide Awake Media LLC was the name of the company he founded to promote Awake Dating. A previous website, wideawakemedia.ie, which advertised Awake Dating, began redirecting to an identical US-based site, wideawakemedia.us, in 2018. Both the Irish and US sites linked to the Wide Awake Media Twitter account as methods of contact. So does the vendor that sells Wide Awake Media’s T-shirts, suggesting one common operator behind the Irish site, the US site, and the T-shirt seller.

(The Twitter account has claimed to be a “one man operation” based in the UK, uses British spelling, and engages heavily with conspiracy theories about Australian politics, where Fidden is from, and local issues affecting the UK and Ireland.)

“Trauma and anger from the pandemic were then directed towards something new…climate action.”

In the transition from conspiracist dating to climate denial, Fidden seems to have lost at least one ally. Daniel John Sullivan, a Seattle-based software engineer, was previously identified as Awake Dating’s CTO. On one of several blogs he maintains, Sullivan has called Fidden a “shit head” and “a grifter.” In a brief email exchange, Sullivan emphatically stated that he’s no longer involved with Fidden or any of his projects.

Wide Awake Media could be viewed as what the Pew Research Center, in a recent report, called a “news influencer”—a poster with no journalism background or news outlet affiliation, that nonetheless helps shape how their audience reads and interprets current events.

Musk’s version of X has proved especially helpful for Wide Awake Media as it expands its audience and promotes paranoia, given that under him, the company has dismantled its trust and safety teams and fundamentally ceded the fight against disinformation. That can, King says, “create a culture of permissibility within a platform.”

“People know they’re likely to be able to act with impunity,” she adds. By removing the safeguards, “You create an enabling environment where certain accounts are suddenly able to accumulate enormous followings overnight.”

Of course, individual climate disinformation peddlers are always joined by the much more powerful industry lobbyists. At this year’s UN climate summit, known as COP29, oil and gas lobbyists outnumbered “the delegations of almost every country,” the Guardian reported.

But responses to the climate denialism industry, and the individuals who spread it, are also starting to take shape. Brazil, the United Nations, and UNESCO recently announced a project to respond to climate disinformation. Their Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change will, the groups have said, “expand the scope and breadth of research into climate disinformation and its impacts.” (Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has also announced support for the move.)

Meanwhile, King says, climate disinformation is likely to continue to be a major area of focus for conspiracy peddlers, because of the grim reality that climate change and its harmful impacts are increasingly impossible to ignore.

“Judging from what we know about the climate crisis, and how its effects are becoming more directly experienced by the general public, this topic is going to have a long shelf life,” she says.

aha note how some fever swamp BS sets of AG jihad eg 10 yo rape victim

Right-wing media launched a migrant witch hunt in rural Indiana

Hate groups, a local politician, and the Heritage Foundation tried to take advantage of the misinformation-fueled panic

Written by Olivia Little

Published 12/05/24 MMA

Months after the Trump campaign’s flagrant lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, went viral, right-wing media continue to fuel fear of Haitian migration. In Indiana, a small city was the focus of a misinformation-fueled migrant witch hunt led by right-wing media that emboldened hate groups and is now being used as a case study to justify anti-immigrant policies.

Logansport is a rural city with a population of about 18,000 residents. In mid-September, Kayla Blakeslee, a right-wing talk radio host based out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, posted on Facebook screenshots of emails that claimed “20,000 plus Haitian immigrants” were “dropped off” in Logansport over the last six months. Blakeslee wrote, “Is Logansport, IN the new Springfield, OH???”

Blakeslee’s factually inaccuratepost — the mayor said the numbers originated from a social media satire page — was the first snowball in an avalanche of misinformation and hate that spread about Haitian migrants in Logansport.

Logansport's mayor acknowledged that there is an increased immigrant population, but noted that the community has been diverse for “a very long time.” According to census data, Logansport has about a 30 percent Latino population.

Story spreads through the right-wing ecosystem

Central Indiana’s Fox affiliate picked up the story on October 10, with the headline “Logansport officials say immigrant population growth is unsustainable.”

The report pointed to “strain on schools,” first quoting a county health department administrator who said she didn’t “think our school system can sustain what they are doing right now.” The district’s superintendent, the actual authority on the district’s capacity to handle new immigrant students, was optimistic, saying, “We can handle it.”

The report also pointed to strain on a local hospital because of increased births and emergency room visits, but the hospital responded by issuing a statement pointing in part to shuttered obstetrics departments at other area hospitals as a cause of increased births at Logansport Memorial Hospital.

Right-wing X account Libs of TikTok quickly shared the accompanying video segment.

A slew of other right-wing X accounts then amplified the story, including RNC Research and Jack Posobiec.

The day after the Fox affiliate’s report came out, Indiana’s now-newly elected lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, posted false claims about Logansport’s migrant population, including a conspiracy theory that a “money trail” was responsible for “DUMPING double a town’s population in unassimilated migrants.” Beckwith also cited Blakeslee’s coverage of the story.

On October 14, Breitbart published a story about Haitians in Logansport, claiming that the town has been “targeted by the Biden regime” and that “Biden has dumped thousands of Haitians there.”

On October 16, Fox News’ Fox & Friends hosted a segment about Logansport’s “migrant influx” and The New York Post spotlighted the segment in a separate report.

The following day, Blakeslee interviewed Beckwith, who described the increased Haitian population as “an invasion” and argued that Logansport officials should deport legal Haitian immigrants.

Newsmax aired a segment about Logansport’s “immigrant influx” on October 19.

Education quickly became the focal point of the manufactured migrant crisis, even though the district’s superintendent stated that the system can handle the additional students.

The New York Post published two pieces attacking migrant students in Logansport, claiming in an editorial that migrants are “robbing Logansport kids of an education” and in a news report that “kids are being pushed out of schools.”

On the same day, the Daily Mail published a piece about the “tiny Midwestern town where ‘explosion’ of Haitian migrants is overwhelming schools,” writing that “locals … say students are being muscled out of public schools by an influx of thousands of foreign newcomers.” The Daily Mail quoted a retired teacher, who said that “the native born are now a minority in the local school system.”

The next day, Fox News’ America Reports hosted a segment about Logansport, which Libs of TikTok later posted on X.

Hate groups take advantage

On October 23, Logansport’s local newspaper, the Pharos-Tribune, reported that stickers recruiting for white nationalist hate group Patriot Front were found in the city.

Around the same time, at least one Logansport resident received a flyer from the “Trinity White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” reading “3RD WORLD IMMIGRANTS BRING 3RD WORLD CONSEQUENCES.”

Springfield residents faced a similar situation when hate groups swarmed the city after false claims about Haitian immigrants there went viral.

Indiana’s AG calls for investigation, and the Heritage Foundation uses Logansport to support anti-immigrant policies

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita responded by launching an investigation into the local health department, school system, and a Tysons Food plant (Logansport’s largest employer), seeking information about supposed human trafficking and other issues.

Rokita said the investigation is “focused on the coordinated efforts among international and local nonprofit ‘refugee resettlement’ organizations and employers, like Tyson Foods, to bring large numbers of migrants to Indiana.”

On November 19, the Heritage Foundation published commentary about Logansport, using the city to claim rural American towns are struggling due to an influx of immigrants.

Heritage proposed that Indiana and other states should “pass legislation prohibiting business licenses for organizations involved in facilitating illegal migration” and “prohibit the use of any state and local taxes from funding immigration [lawyers] and NGOs providing legal representation for aliens.”

President-elect Donald Trump has been emboldened by anti-migrant misinformation, threatening mass deportation and promising to end Temporary Protective Status, a program that allows people from select countries, including Haiti, to live and work in the United States. Ending TPS would likely force family separations and negatively impact communities, like Logansport, where TPS holders have lived and been employed for years.

---

ymail 11 24

A near-majority of American voters willingly reelected Donald Trump. This harsh reality is a collective moral failure, but it’s also not a choice made in sound mind.

Consider that voters believed Trump’s first presidency was a roaring success and Joe Biden’s only term a Carter-level catastrophe. It’s an upside-down Bizarro World view that ultimately played a key role in dooming Kamala Harris.

[

The global anti-incumbent backlash doomed Kamala Harris

[Noah Berlatsky](https://substack.com/profile/2185926-noah-berlatsky)

Nov 7

[Read full story](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/kamala-harris-anti-incumbent-backlash-2024)](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/kamala-harris-anti-incumbent-backlash-2024)

Trump’s 2024 platform was rooted in an obvious lie — that the nation under Biden’s leadership is a flaming dumpster fire and everyone was much better off when Trump was president. Democrats challenged this false reality with facts, but they ultimately lost the messaging war. Their best efforts were no match for the most powerful weapons in Trump’s propaganda arsenal — a timid press and a right-coded social social media environment.

Greg Sargent reports in the New Republic that the Harris campaign’s own internal polling revealed an alarming trend: “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency — even if they saw these things negatively — were his fault.”

According to exit polls, Trump decisively won the questions “who do you trust more to handle the economy?” and “who do you trust most to handle a crisis?” Of course, in reality Trump utterly botched the 2020 pandemic response, which researchers concluded resulted in 40 percent more deaths than necessary. And yet swing voters are willing to risk it all again in hopes of cheaper eggs and cruelty against outgroups.

Disinformation on demand

Legacy media shoulders significant blame for their “sanewashing” of Trump’s incoherency and deteriorating mental state. Voters believed Trump could fix a steadily improving economy despite his promotion of inflationary tariffs. The media even presented Trump’s rants as cogent discussions of economic theory.

Sanewashing and the damage done

[Stephen Robinson](https://substack.com/profile/52692688-stephen-robinson)

Sep 10

[Read full story](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-sanewashing-2024-campaign-nyt-cnn)](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-sanewashing-2024-campaign-nyt-cnn)

It’s worth noting, however, that an NBC poll from April revealed that voters who received news primarily from legacy media (newspapers, cable news, etc.) still overwhelmingly supported Biden. Trump owes his victory in great part to low-propensity voters of all races, including young men, and those voters don’t necessarily form their views based on mainstream media reporting. Rather, far too many are stuck in an online social media bubble where they are delivered a steady diet of rightwing propaganda.

The median age of a Fox News viewer is 68, and liberals have joked about the network “brainwashing” their conservative parents. But rightwing social media content has effectively targeted and radicalized younger people, who — unlike the typical Hannity-obsessed grandpa — can vote for the next several decades.

TikTok, which Trump joined in June, has 170 million users in the United States, and according a Pew Research survey, more than half of them said they regularly get their news from the platform. That’s up from just 22 percent in 2020. This is a serious concern because the far right uses TikTok to advance unfounded conspiracy theories and outright lies.

Rightwing content on TikTok goes mostly unchallenged. In the past year, there were twice as many pro-Trump posts as pro-Democratic ones. A recent estimate places 70 percent of TikTok’s users between the ages of 18 to 35. Once a key Democratic constituency, Kamala Harris won voters aged 18 to 44 by just 5 points (51 to 46 percent), a steep decline from Joe Biden’s 14 point margin (56 to 42 percent).

Trump surrogates boosted his youth appeal on the platform with videos of him attending Ultimate Fighting Championship matches and college football tailgates. Meanwhile, over the past year, TikTok users have encountered an onslaught of posts criticizing the Biden/Harris economy. The term “Silent Depression” went viral, as seemingly average, everyday young people complained about increased costs for housing, food, and transportation.

IFrame Content tiktok vid]

@woodsowned 💰Inflation on the rise!📈 Brace yourself, it's a rollercoaster ride!😱 #EconomyCrisis #economy #inflation

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser]

Woods Owned frequently posted video compilations of Americans shouting about inflation. Blair Allison, an avowed Trump supporter, received millions of views for her video that wondered “how people can afford to live right now.” These videos fostered a negative feedback loop, and content creator Kyla Scanlon, who birthed the term “vibecession,” warned last year that people were steadily getting angrier about the economy.

Lower income Americans, particularly young people, do spend more of their income on groceries, rent, and gas. That’s why Republicans were so laser focused on the price of eggs. Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of liberal content countering the negative vibes. Of course, explaining the post-pandemic economic recovery is complex and requires more than a punchy one-minute video can convey. Although people might idly scroll TikTok all day, consuming 60-second quick hit videos like potato chips, they will balk at reading an extensive, well-reported news article. That’s too filling a meal.

[

Trump demands Senate recess so he can install Star Wars cantina

[Liz Dye](https://substack.com/profile/6000720-liz-dye)

Nov 13

[Read full story](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-recess-appointments-demand-gop-senate)](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-recess-appointments-demand-gop-senate)

According to a University of Oregon study, 40 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans surveyed said they’d become more conservative from their TikTok usage. Half of the Democrats surveyed said they’d grown more liberal, but a lot of far-left content on TikTok is downright alienating and can sound like MAGA’s idea of a strawman leftist. For instance, one user boasted that she “didn’t care” if liberal economic and social policies “hurt the economy,” thus conceding that those policies are in fact harmful to economic progress.

TikTok’s artificial “vibecession” dominated the discourse, while abortion-related content was actively suppressed even while pregnant women were bleeding out in parking lots. Users of the platform resorted to disguising the word “abortion” as “aborshun” or “ab0rti0n” in order to reach an audience. TikTok has a longstanding policy against promoting abortion services, which it classifies as “unsuitable businesses, products or services.” However, TikTok, YouTube, and Meta have allowed users to spread and monetize anti-abortion misinformation.

Studies have shown an interesting gender gap in where young people receive their news on social media: For most women, it’s TikTok, while most men learn about the world from YouTube, X, and Reddit, all of which have become havens of crude masculinity.

On YouTube, 56 percent of users are between the ages of 18 and 44. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that researches extremism, conducted a four-part research project this year that determined :{YouTube’s algorithm consistently steers users to rightwing and Christian content. The algorithm does this even with seemingly apolitical search terms, like “male lifestyle guru,” which YouTube reflexively associates with conservative ideology. Rightwing news content was also more frequently recommended, including anti-vaxxer videos. As far back as 2019, both YouTube and Facebook’s autofill search boxes would return content that promoted anti-vaccine misinformation.}:

Meta’s social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Threads suppress political content, and while this has choked off liberal creators, far-right ones still thrive. Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro have millions of followers on Facebook and there’s significant engagement with their rage bait. They also drive the political debate, often putting Democrats on the defensive. Walsh supercharged the “groomer” smears against LGBTQ Americans, which led to anti-queer legislation in Florida and other red states. There’s a direct line from hate influencer Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok social media posts to Trump’s sudden fixation with trans youth.

Why rightwing content has the edge

When Kamala Harris appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, host Alexandra Cooper told her listeners, “I do not usually discuss politics or have politicians on the show because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place that everyone feels comfortable tuning in.” Left-leaning podcasters/social media content creators often avoid politics for fear of turning off their right-leaning fans. Joe Rogan and Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports don’t bother with such apologies when they have rightwing guests because it doesn’t compromise their brand. They are rightwing cultural influencers.

Liberal podcaster Hasan Piker recently commented on the impact rightwing influencers have on young men of all races.

“There is a massive amount of rightwing radicalization that has been occurring, especially in younger male spaces. Everything is completely dominated by rightwing politics,” he said. “If you’re a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever, whether it’s playing video games, whether it’s working out, whether it’s listening to a history podcast or whatever, every single facet of that is completely dominated by center right to [the] Trumpian right. Everything they see is rightwing sentiment.”

The wreckage Merrick Garland leaves behind

[Lisa Needham](https://substack.com/profile/10292-lisa-needham)

Nov 8

[Read full story](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/merrick-garland-failures-explained)](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/merrick-garland-failures-explained)

Rogan and Portnoy might not present as overtly political as Walsh and Shapiro, but their edgy, hyper masculine personas are pure MAGA. Even billionaire CEO Elon Musk likes to present himself as a “disrupter,” an agent of change who boldly confronts the status quo. Anyone who’s seen the more popular indie films of the 1970s would realize how compelling this narrative is to young men.

The subtle way that Rogan and Portnoy infuse politics into their personas presents a contrast with left-leaning social media content. The liberal TikToker or YouTuber who releases videos about home makeovers might endorse Democratic politicians during election season while wearing their “just voted” sticker, but rightwing influencers prime their audience on a daily basis. Young men marinate in a stew of rightwing sentiment and end up resenting the libs.

Trump significantly improved his performance among Latino voters, outright winning Latinos in Michigan and flipping some predominately Latino districts in the northeast. This shocked Democrats considering Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant rhetoric. But Latinos are a disproportionately younger voting cohort and they use social media more regularly than white Americans. It’s reasonable to assume that most of those voters were shielded from Trump’s more grotesque positions or only encountered them through rightwing commentators defending them.

It’s true that Latinos are not a homogenous voting bloc, and a third-generation Latino in a Texas border town might have a harder line on border security than a white liberal in Portland. But it’s definitely convenient for Trump and the GOP that Latino voters ranked the economy and violent crime as their top issues, both of which right-coded social media platforms present as five-alarm fires.

Another area of concern for Democrats is that Trump doubled his share of support among young Black men. As the civil rights movement fades further into the past, Black voters’ cultural and traditional links to the Democratic Party are becoming less secure. Studies have also shown that Black Americans are now less likely to get their news from political and religious leaders than from social media platforms. (Rogan has a sizable Black audience, more so even than The Breakfast Club.)

At first glance, it seems condescending to declare that voters made the wrong choice because they didn’t know any better. However, on every major issue, voters were fundamentally misinformed and insisting otherwise won’t improve Democrats’ chances in future elections. Democratic politicians and liberals need to quickly discover some way to engage in this Orwellian information environment. Otherwise, all the self-flagellation about messaging failures and policy changes won’t amount to much.

Thanks for reading Public Notice.

---

see mma 2 anno

Angelo Carusone and Molly Jong-Fast discuss how American discourse is “pickled in misinformation and right-wing rage”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Angelo Carusone Fast Politics excerpt, 11/7/24

November 7, 2024

CitationFrom the November 7, 2024, edition of IHeart's Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast

MOLLY JONG-FAST (HOST) Let's talk about growing power from the fringes. So does that look like McCarthyism?

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah. But you know what's so different about — and that's one of the reasons why you mentioned McCarthyism as opposed to, say, the John Birch Society. Right? Because McCarthy actually was able to get some power. Right?

And whereas the John Birch Society, they hey. Yeah. They were influential, but they didn't —. Here's the difference, and it gets it, and there's a modern analog to it. The difference is that America has always had fringes, just like any society. We've had a little bit more fringes. In part, that's what makes us a little spicy. Our fringes are kind of a feature in a way, but what we haven't had is the fringes being connected. Right? And so you can't build power unless you connect otherwise disconnected audiences.

That's where McCarthyism comes in. Obviously, McCarthy was a demagogue, so the tool was demagoguery. But what it did was it connected otherwise disconnected audiences, and he used a platform that he had to do that. And what we have now, the modern analog, and, like, to your point about McCarthyism, in a way, it's McCarthyism on steroids because McCarthy still needed to rely on traditional means. And one of the things that we have now is that you have extremely powerful algorithms that connect otherwise disconnected audiences.

If you like one piece of QAnon content or two pieces QAnon content, even if you don't intentionally know it's QAnon or not, the algorithms will feed you more and more and more of that and move you down a rabbit hole and move you and intensify or capture you. They will convert you and they will connect you to new people. And so that is partly what we're dealing with now is that we are dealing with a McCarthyism that does not need to dilute itself to speak to mass audiences. And believe it, the McCarthy thing strangely enough was diluted. It needed to be diluted in order to reach broader and broader audiences. What happens when you don't need to dilute to have the same reach and saturation because the tools that we're using, the tech platforms, are automatically distributing that content to those individuals. And I just wanna make one point on that because I think it helps tie into the outcomes here.

The major platforms had put in place many safeguards since the last election about about about what was recommended, about who they were recommending content to, about not accelerating extremism. And in the last year, most of those safeguards have all been systematically eliminated or reduced as a result of pressure from right-wing influencers. They worked the refs at these platforms. So they knew what they were doing because they knew that in order to scale and execute organizing power on the fringes, you needed the runway and the tools that these tech platforms provided. So I would say it looks like McCarthyism, but strangely enough, a more raw and nondiluted version of McCarthyism.

And I don't think we should joke about the demon thing. When I said that before, it's a joke, but think about it. There's the increase of Christian nationalists, the rise of this evangelical strain, of this intense religious strain, this idea that there are demons among us doing bad things — that is going to be something that they start to name. They're going to start identifying — I'm not even joking. When I talk about Qanon and, like, you know, back in 2018, people, donors, supporters, they really thought I was losing my mind.

And I talk about demons now, not because like, it's a focus point of mine, but I look where they get their information. And it's like they're gonna start screaming that person's a demon. That person's being motivated by demons. And that is a tactic of the same thing that McCarthy is. They will have — they will they will build up new boogeymen, new labels that they can then apply to individuals in order to harass them, persecute them, and all of that is designed to sort of make examples out of people fast so that more and more people duck and cover.

JONG-FAST: Yeah. Let's just keep going with this for a minute. What do we think that we do next? I was on a show this morning. It was on the late-night MSNBC, and we're talking about, like, what went wrong.

CARUSONE: Yeah.

JONG-FAST: Which is what we're gonna be talking about for the next five hundred — until the midterms. And one of the things that, you know, there was a lot of, like, this and that, and this went wrong, this went wrong. But, like, one of the things that I think is that it seems to me like there is a real information problem. Right? Like, we — there are parts of this country that don't have news. The news they're getting is red sludge. Remember how, you know, the thing that Elon shared after Paul Pelosi has been you know what I mean? So what — what's the solve there?

CARUSONE: I would say there are three sort of immediate things, and they — and part of it's you know, a lot of this all starts too with the with the recognition early on that I was describing about how they're organizing and building power. And because that — sort of then is you're working toward countering that.

I think there's sort of three things that are important in terms of the next step here. One is everyone I think a lot of people talk about messaging and say, oh, we need better messaging. I look at it a slightly different way. You know, there's three ways that you can talk to somebody. You can talk to their head, their heart, or their gut. That's it. It doesn't matter what the message is. It's either to their head, their heart, or their gut.

And if you look at the bulk of Republican and conservative and right-wing message you know, messaging, what they're saying, it's almost all to people's gut. Sometimes it'll be to their to their heart, never to their head. If you look at Democratic messaging, it's almost always to people's heads, sometimes their heart, never to their gut. And why that matters is that we live in — we have this information asymmetry, but obviously people say, well, not that many people watch the news or read papers. Sure. But they still live in an information world because they — you get it through word-of-mouth.

You get — you don't get the individual facts or the threads, but you get the narrative. We all live in a narrative or narratives. And when that narrative when the right wing has narrative dominance, and as you noted, that narrative dominance is really just a reflection of right-wing sludge, you're just pickled in misinformation and right-wing rage all the time. Even if you don't consume a drop of it, you're still pickled in it because your friends are, because indirectly you're getting it, it's on the television, you see the chyron when you're picking up your bagel in the morning. You form a narrative. That's what happens. And so I think we need to, 1, think about how it is that we communicate, and communicators need to recognize that we need to rethink about that.

The second, there were two more structural pieces. One is that there's no shortage of creators on our side, but the one thing that the right-wing does, and they've done this for decades and they do it better, is they invest in people.

There's no reason why our content creators should not be getting — have to have other jobs. You know? Some of our best people are you know, it's not their primary position. They're not full-time, you know, you know, video creators or podcasters. It's something they do on the side incidentally, and we've never really made robust investments in them, whereas they have, and they have a pipeline for that.

JONG-FAST: Which they have. Yeah.

CARUSONE: You know, there are people on Instagram that got grants from Charlie Kirk years ago that will make their way to or have already made their way to Daily Wire podcasts after a few years. Right? And that's how it works. And so you get the benefits immediately of you balance out the scales because you have your own people out there pushing information, and it's it's authentic. You're not trying to come in and control it, but then you're also building revolving capital in businesses that are designed to build and shape narratives. So unless that challenge is confronted, you know, and liberals are so burned by what they — by Air America. It's like, well, we tried to combat right-wing radio in the ninety you know, in the late nineties and early two thousands and it failed. So let's give up forever. You know? And that's a mistake.

And then the last thing I'll say is — so one is we need to do grapple with that, and that's not no. We'll spend one point five billion dollars on ads that we know don't work, but we won't spend a hundred million dollars to incubate and seed a new generation of creators and talkers and storytellers. That's ridiculous. That's stupid.

And that's a mistake. And then the third thing I'd say is that the tech platforms are going to kill us. They are. And we need to deal with that. And the Democrats you know, Republicans worked the refs in newsrooms, and then they took the same strategy.

JONG-FAST: And it worked.

CARUSONE: And it worked. And it worked. And they did it again here. You know, every time you know, YouTube or another major platform rolled back another election policy as a result of right-wing pressure, there was no Democratic counter-response.

There was no talk of them cheating or yelling and screaming. I wasn't surprised by what happened with Jeff Bezos or what we saw in Silicon Valley as the spring rolled by because those seeds were sown months ago. They were scared from Republican pressure that they were getting. And that needs to be something that Democrats really grapple with. And it's not only because that will help, again, balance out the scales, but it's also that they'll maybe get some insights into that the political landscape is realigning. They need to be more responsive to what is happening, and that political landscape is actually a reflection of what the larger information landscape is.

You know? Obviously, I'm at Media Matters, whenever I talk to them about the media, people say, well, not that many people watch CNN or read The New York Times. Like, sure. But they get a podcast secondarily. They sit online. They get push alerts on their phones. All these things add up.

JONG-FAST: Right, it's downstream.

CARUSONE: Yes. And that's it. And Republicans understand, and Trump in particular, you know, I think we need to internalize the lesson. He's a media creature, and he was able to do a lot because he is a media creature.

And, you know, part of what allowed people to say, oh, he doesn't really mean it is a thing called kayfabe, which exists in WWE. It's a wrestling thing. It's a character. And people sort of— all the stuff that people that really has turned him off to people, they say, oh, but he's just a character. No one thinks the Undertaker really murders their villain in the, you know, their opponent in the ring and brings them underground. It's a joke. And I think a lot of times, what Trump was able to do was not only manipulate the media to have narrative dominance and to coordinate, you know, take advantage of this massive right-wing megaphone that they've had, but also rely on the benefit of the doubt and the sort of the way that consumers engage with those characters and in particular him. And we need to recognize that that is a thing that we're gonna have to grapple with as well because he won't be the last. That's the scary thing.

Tucker will be a rising political force, and we need to accept that as a thing that is true. We will have to accept that, look out the trail, and look who performed in terms of engagement. Very few people cut across right the right-wing landscape in the way that Trump does, and Tucker is one of those few figures. Obviously, Musk as well. That's it.

That's the next step. And it doesn't solve everything, but I don't think circular firing squad or trying to figure out some of the micro things that would have been different are gonna be helpful because what took place here is macro, and we need to think about it at a bigger level.

mma

MAGA propaganda machine helped carry Trump back to the White House — and it’s not done poisoning America

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 11/07/24

Donald Trump was reelected president on Tuesday, four years after fomenting a coup which saw a mob of his supporters storm the U.S. Capitol and then leaving the White House in disgrace. He owes his return at least in part to a rankly dishonest right-wing information ecosystem that helped carry him through countless scandals that would have ended the careers of most politicians, driving his comeback to the pinnacle of power.

Conservative audiences are dependent on a right-wing media complex that bombards them with falsehoods and grievances while dissuading them from consulting any alternative sources of information, be they legacy news outlets or government officials or medical experts.

Once Trump captured the GOP and ascended to the presidency in 2017, that bubble served him and his interests. Within it, for example, his supporters were convinced by a sprawling conspiracy theory portraying the then-president as the victim of a shadowy “deep state” cabal that justified vast retribution.

The January 6 insurrection presented Trump’s propagandists with a crossroads. Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire includes right-wing bastions like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Post, privately sought for him to become a “non person.” But Tucker Carlson and his allies at Fox and elsewhere instead went to work creating a counternarrative in which Trump was blameless. People who knew better either played along or actively participated in the whitewashing of that day.

Trump’s various indictments for a host of crimes provided additional hinge points. Right-wing media figures who could have used evidence of his abject criminality as a rationale for cutting him loose instead rallied to him and sought to delegitimize those seeking to bring him to justice.

The right-wing media bubble’s eagerness to excuse Trump’s actions gave him a dominant position in the Republican primary. As he romped to the nomination, his opponents complained that they were unable to gain traction because the party’s propaganda wing had united behind him.

Trump again became the nominee of one of the two major parties. He selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a Carlson favorite, as his running mate, and demonstrated the importance of the right-wing echo chamber by giving Carlson himself a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.

With the general election set between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, right-wing propagandists went to work holding the GOP base together with a combination of grievance-mongering and silence.

They flooded the zone with a bogus narrative of “migrant crime” while ignoring evidence that violent crime was actually plummeting from its Trump-era high.

They instructed their audiences to treat immigrants as a scapegoat, falsely claiming that federal disaster aid desperately needed to respond to hurricanes had been siphoned off to benefit migrants and ginning up grotesque lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets.

They lashed out at the press, urging the Republican base to treat Trump’s poor showing in his debate against Harris as the result of media bias.

When an unprecedented string of former Republican officials and Trump’s own former administration aides came forward with dire warnings of what Trump did in his first term and could do in a second one, they hid the news from their audiences.

And they kept quiet on a host of unpopular aspects of Trump’s policy agenda, from Social Security to reproductive rights, while beating back burgeoning scandals over his alleged January 6 crimes, communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a political event at Arlington National Cemetery.

Journalists and political strategists will spend the next weeks and months grappling for explanations as to how Trump returned to the White House. But without the support of the right-wing propaganda machine, he would not have been in position to sweep his party’s nomination in the first place — and in an evenly divided country amid a global anti-incumbent wave, that provided a strong position to win the presidency.

Now, the same propagandists who helped him back to power are poised to help him carry out his extreme agenda of destruction and retribution.

---

mail 11 24

here is a paradox of the 2024 election result: Democrats advanced what they believed to be a profoundly inclusive platform, but they read to many voters as an out-of-touch, elitist party. Meanwhile, Republicans advanced a flagrantly exclusionary agenda, almost exclusively favorably to the richest and most powerful Americans, and they read to many voters as a populist movement friendly to the working class.

There is no point in fact-checking what people perceive. Elections are not math tests. There are no “right answers.” What people hear is all that matters, not what you intended to say.

The.Ink

Some of this paradox is explained, I think, by an underappreciated difference between platform and posture. There is the matter of what you stand for, and the rather different issue of how you stand. We all have that friend who believes all the right and beautiful and just things, but wouldn’t help you in a pinch. We all also have that friend or relative or neighbor who believes awful things but would be the first person to offer to help us move.

For reasons we will still be examining for some time, Democrats have somehow ended up in a situation where their platform is all about openness, but their stance reads to many voters as closed. It feels — and whether rightly or wrongly is beside the point — like a judgmental movement for inclusion and equity. Republicans have, at the same time, chosen a platform devoted to closings — of the border, of the gates of citizenship, of the generosity of the safety net, of fundamental freedoms — but their stance reads to many voters as open, inviting, come-as-you-are. It feels to many like a nonjudgmental movement for exclusion.

Please don’t misread this on purpose. It is not an endorsement of the right’s methods. But I think we need to be straightforward about this paradox. It is a scandal to allow the most exclusionary platform in modern American history to be read as openhearted to so many. It is a scandal that so many of the very people it would degrade feel attracted to the cause.

Part of what’s going on here, I think, is the Republicans embracing an ethic that I first heard from progressive community organizers: Meet people where they are.

This is the organizer’s code, the idea behind all other ideas. But when I wrote my book The Persuaders, many of the organizers on the left whom I profiled were sounding an alarm through my book about their own movements turning away from this ethic. They worried about their movements seeming to have prerequisites to join. Linda Sarsour, the progressive activist, described her own movement as being like a prison where you have to enter one gate and have that gate close behind you to cross the next gate. You had to know the right terms, never mess up, not have questions about the right approach to advancing social justice for marginalized groups, and, frankly, silence concerns you might have about the best strategy.

That Republicans have ended up with more of a “meet people where they are” ethic is beyond ironic. Again, I’m speaking of posture, not policy; stance, not substance. But they have managed to create the sense of an open invitation to join this movement of closings. There is a thirst for converts, rather than a suspicion that they may not be aligned with you on every last issue. There is an understanding that a lot of politics is actually about vibes and having your cause be an aspirational brand people want to join; and the Republicans made inroads with many nontraditional voter groups this time around by having the MAGA hat function as a status symbol, allowing people to flex and separate themselves from other members of their own communities, showing people that they are winners who didn’t need the Democrats’ offers of help.

But what turbocharges these differences in stance is a gigantic media ecology on the right that functions as a voter radicalization funnel. Meeting people where they are means that you pull people into that funnel at its very wide end. As they enter, they are merely annoyed by things around them — upset about inflation, frustrated at not being able to own a home, feeling destabilized by the rising status of women and people of color, unsure of their role. And the funnel — consisting of traditional media, newer media like podcasts and video talk shows, social media, and YouTube content — slowly pulls them from annoyance with questions toward ever more radical and pungent certitude. It doesn’t require them to be at the pointy end of the funnel at the beginning. The point of the funnel is to pull in everyone. The movement is self-confident enough to think that it can turn anyone bothered by a pea under their mattress, whether valid or invalid, utterly racist or genuinely born of pain, into a believer.

The pro-democracy movement needs to build its own funnel, now. It cannot and should not be a mirror image of the right’s funnel. It should be grounded in truth, not lies, and generosity, not closedness. But it needs to be a total media ecology that can meet people at any level of annoyance, curiosity, irritation, gripe, doubt, with any question — and move them toward a more humane and magnanimous view of the world. It needs to take lost and lonely boys and men and move them toward a sense of how to be in a gender-equal world. It needs to invite people to see their own story in the story of a pluralist America of the future. It needs to be longer on invitation, shorter on blame. It needs to meet you where you are, and be confident enough to move you, over years even, toward greater consciousness.

There is simply no such media ecology right now, no such organizing infrastructure at the scale required. People who want to build things like this get no help from those who could help them. People sit around and fret about Tuesday but don’t have the vision to help build the mental infrastructure for a different future.

Let’s change that.

---

===

no lnx

alternet-Fox News is the reason the race is close

Sabrina Haake, Raw Story November 02, 2024

This is my last column before the election. I am as tired of writing about politics as most Americans are tired of reading, thinking, and hearing about it. The stress of this make-or-break Democracy test feels cruel and unusual. Cruel because of what’s at stake, unusual because it is unrelenting.

For people who inform themselves through fact-based media outlets, the most commonly heard question is, how is this race even close? Of all the craziness we’ve seen and heard, the Nazi-adjacent rhetoric, the venomous threats, the crazed narcissist making the nation’s struggles all about himself, how can half the country still support him? How can half our fellow citizens vote for him, knowing what they know about him? Are they crazy? Are they hateful?

The short answer, IMHO, is no. Most Trump voters are not Nazis, voting for Trump because of who Trump is. MAGA mostly just wants to be entertained, they enjoy the carnival of camaraderie. They don’t know who Trump really is, what his policies really are, because Fox News, again, deliberately hides it from them.

People who watch Fox News support Trump

Forty-three percent of the country watches Fox News, which correlates directly with the percentage of voters who support Trump over Harris.

ALSO READ: The 101 worst things about Trump's sham presidency

More telling, most Fox viewers don’t diversify the information they consume: Viewers with consistently conservative political views get them from a single outlet—Fox News—to a much greater degree than independents and liberals, who inform themselves from a variety of sources. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly half (47%) of consistently conservative Americans get their government and political news just from Fox News.

Fox News topped primetime viewership in August 2024. According to a recent Deadline Report, Fox News’ The Five was “the top regularly scheduled program in cable news, averaging 3.29 million viewers, followed by Jesse Watters Primetime with 2.97 million, Hannity with 2.61 million, Gutfeld! with 2.55 million and The Ingraham Angle with 2.44 million.”

Voters can’t act on what they don’t know

The high percentage of Americans hooked on Fox entertainment-sold-as-news escalates the risks inherent in Fox’s pro-Trump propaganda from fraudulent, to dangerous, to a national security threat. It elevates the stakes from “political speech,” protected by the 1st A, to weaponized disinformation. The difference is substantive, and both legislature and courts need to deal with it in a meaningful way.

For now, whenever there’s a news cycle unfavorable to Trump, Fox hosts either spin it in the opposite direction to help him, or, more frequently, they redirect their viewers to election topics deemed favorable to Trump, like the border. Over the past several months, Fox has focused obsessively on our broken immigration system, featuring dog whistles meant to frighten white people, but Fox hosts almost never mention how Trump intentionally killed the border bill just so he could campaign on it.

When Fox tires of showing black and brown people committing crimes, and lying about violent crime rates that have actually fallen, Fox programmers switch to pablum like popular hairstyles, dog breeds, and who eats ketchup on their omelets. Meanwhile, ominous and unprecedented national security warnings about the dangers of a second Trump administration, coming in from Trump’s own advisors, are hidden from Fox viewers.

Fox buried warnings from Trump’s own brass

Last week when news broke that John Kelly, Trump’s own Chief of Staff, wanted to warn Americans about Trump, including that Trump wanted generals more like Hitler’s and exhibited fascistic urges, Fox News re-directed viewers to Trump’s publicity stunt where he cosplayed at McDonalds. Fox ran dozens of insipid articles about Trump at McDonalds (Trump standing at the fry counter, Trump claiming Harris never worked there, Trump charming the customers at the drive-through window, etc.) Meanwhile, they reported almost nothing about John Kelly’s warning.

In one of two articles I saw about Kelly’s statements, Fox packaged it as a Harris ploy, reporting last week that, “The Harris campaign on Friday put out a letter penned by 13 ex-Trump administration officials seeking to bolster claims made by former President Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly…” The article then identified 13 fairly low-level Republicans who signed a letter warning about Trump, instead of the hundreds of high ranking Republican advisors issuing the same warnings.

Fox focused on Trump smiling in an apron to bury dire statements from heavy hitters including Mark Milley, the highest ranking military officer and Trump’s own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fox News articles about other Republicans against Trump, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, are mostly led with misleading headlines against Democrats and Harris because the vast majority of people- 70 to 80%- read only the headlines.

Even after Trump said Liz Cheney should have 9 rifles pointed at her (execution squad style). Fox headlines spun the story against both Cheney and Harris.

Over 300 high ranking Republicans, including military and political leaders, have issued warnings against another Trump administration. As the NYT reports, the list includes “former defense secretaries Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; Robert B. Zoellick, former World Bank president; ex-CIA directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; former director of national intelligence John D. Negroponte; and former Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld,” and former Trump administration officials Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye.

Or, as Fox described the letter from 13 Republicans, “Mike Pence who has signed multiple letters from Republicans attacking Trump, signed this letter, as well.”

No matter what happens Tuesday, we need fairness in the news

One thing we know for sure about domestic politics is that when the pendulum swings, it always swings back, the question is when, and after what.

When the day finally comes that our Supreme Court isn’t ethically compromised—and that day will come— voters will challenge Fox News (and likely Elon Musk) for aiding and abetting election fraud, as Dominion did. The next time around, the outcome for Fox won’t just be the cost of doing business.

We’ve legislated truth in the news before, and we were better for it. In 1969, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the Fairness Doctrine, which required all news broadcasters to give fair coverage and opposing views on matters of public importance. Balancing publishers’ first amendment rights against the right of the public to be well informed, the Red Lion Court ruled that the public’s right to access full information takes priority over the First Amendment concerns of broadcasters.

“It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited market-place of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market.” This is the same legal analysis that should be applied to today’s “political speech defense.” Bottom line, there’s a difference between free speech and weaponized speech, and the law needs to catch up with rapidly changing social media, AI, and monopolized town squares.

Legal change will eventually come, it’s not if but when. We aren’t meant to hate our neighbors, as much as Putin, Xi and Trump want us to. As Harris said, there’s a better way. In the meantime, take a walk in the woods. Leave your phone at home. Vote, speak up, write a column, drive your neighbors to the polls. Then let it go.

ALSO READ: A stupefying poll shows Harris breathing down Trump’s neck in Kansas. Here’s what that means.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the Substack, The Haake Take.

===

mma

A conspiracy theory about overseas voting spread from an election denial website to Trump — and now to the MAGA media infrastructure

Conservative pundits are mischaracterizing a longstanding law that allows US citizens abroad to vote

Written by John Knefel

Research contributions from Madeline Peltz

Published 10/10/24

Right-wing media figures have amplified a conspiracy theory that Democrats are attempting to steal the 2024 election by weaponizing a longstanding law that allows Americans overseas to vote.

As researchers at the University of Washington explained, right-wing junk site The Gateway Pundit appears to have originated the false claim in early September, and former President Donald Trump promoted it later that month.

The September 6 Gateway Pundit blog mischaracterized a Democratic Party press release announcing a plan to register Americans living overseas to vote through a 1986 law known as the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA). The article’s headline falsely claimed that the get-out-the-vote effort — a first from the Democratic National Committee — was an “Undetectable Way to Steal the Election From Trump,” rather than a legal avenue to reach voters.

“The Democrats are talking about how they’re working so hard to get millions of votes from Americans living overseas,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on September 23. “Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT!”

David Becker, the founder and executive director of The Center for Election Innovation and Research, told The Associated Press, “In over 25 years of working in elections, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, and with election officials of both parties, I don’t recall any of them, or any elected leader from either party, ever denigrating this important program, until Trump’s false claims this week.”

Shortly after Trump endorsed The Gateway Pundit’s misinformation, Republican officials in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan filed lawsuits challenging aspects of UOCAVA and related laws designed to facilitate overseas voting. Cleta Mitchell, a prominent election denier and former Trump adviser who attempted to overturn the 2020 election, said on a right-wing radio show that she’d “helped to organize” the suits in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, adding that she hoped to file another, similar suit in Wisconsin.

Several right-wing media outlets and pundits further spread the conspiracy theory that Democrats will “exploit” UOCAVA to register “bad actors” ahead of the 2024 election.

The Gateway Pundit has published several additional articles mischaracterizing UOCAVA:

- One article claimed that UOCAVA “could very well be the key to how Democrats plan to steal our upcoming election from President Trump.”
- Another stated that “UOCAVA opens the door to unlimited foreign voter voting.”
- A third argued that Democrats were using UOCAVA to “exploit weaknesses in Federal law in order to use noncitizens as political pawns to achieve desired outcomes."

True the Vote founder and election denial activist Catherine Engelbrecht cast doubt on overseas voting, suggesting it would be used by noncitizens and adding, “Without the data for citizenship, you cannot tell. It's outrageous.” (As the University of Washington researchers pointed out, state laws vary but overseas voters need to validate their eligibility prior to casting a ballot.) Engelbrecht concluded that “the fraud’s been institutionalized.”

Claiming she “helped to organize” two lawsuits challenging overseas voting, Cleta Mitchell said without evidence that UOCAVA had been “exploited, and they’re literally getting people to lie and say that they’re overseas, or to say that they’re citizens, and the states are not checking at all.”

Former Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington celebrated the Pennsylvania lawsuit, writing: “5 Congressman just filed a lawsuit in PA over Democrats refusal to verify identity in the overseas ballot program. There are 25,000 UOCAVA ballots in PA already for 2024 and only 3,600 —14% — are to military members and their family."

- Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, the founder of America First Legal, an anti-voting rights organization, also reposted Harrington’s thread.

Right-wing website The National Pulse praised the Pennsylvania lawsuit as well, claiming the overseas voting process “could be open to bad actors.”

Joel Barry, managing editor of right-wing satire site the Babylon Bee, wrote that UOCAVA is part of “the Democrat plan to steal elections using ‘overseas’ ballots.”

Right-wing blog The Federalist baselessly warned of the potential for fraud, writing that it is “hypothetically possible to sit in Anytown, U.S.A., and request that a UOCAVA ballot be emailed to you, while claiming you are in another country.”

Caroline Wren — an adviser to prominent election denier and Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake — criticized the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign for failing to file a lawsuit in Arizona challenging “the UOCAVA overseas ‘voters.’”

Right-wing website Just the News wrote that “Republicans and election integrity advocates are sounding the alarm over possible fraud that could occur with absentee ballots sent from other countries.”

Conservative activist and election denier Heather Honey appeared on a Rumble stream to baselessly claim that “some of the provisions” of UOCAVA are a little bit loosey goosey” and that Democrats and associated nongovernmental organizations are “not telling people on social media that there are citizenship requirements.” (At least two of the examples she used in her presentation included the word “citizen” in the advertisement.)

The right-wing targeting of UOCAVA comes against the backdrop of a larger conservative campaign to spread fear that noncitizens will vote in large numbers in November (there is no evidence to support that allegation, but Fox News and other right-wing networks have saturated their airwaves with it).

The GOP has its own outreach program to Americans abroad called Republicans Overseas — one of more than 100 conservative organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling right-wing effort to provide policy and staffing to a second Trump administration.

In 2021, Republicans Overseas vice chairman and CEO Solomon Yue — who is also a Republican National Committee member — wrote a resolution for the Oregon Republican Party that falsely claimed there was “growing evidence” that the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” intended to “to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans,” according to The New York Times.

===

jdv said ok to lie to wake US up b/c press fail

###### JD Vance, Springfield, and how MAGA media spun a racist lie out of control

Vance’s office was told it was “baseless” from the beginning

Written by Matt Gertz

:{Published 09/18/24 mma

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance told reporters on Tuesday that it was their job — not his — to fact-check his claim that Haitians were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. The Wall Street Journal did just that, revealing on Wednesday morning that Springfield’s city manager told Vance’s office that the story was baseless, soon after the Republican vice presidential nominee started publicly making the racist claim.

A Vance staffer contacted Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck on the morning of September 9 and “asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” Heck told the Journal. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”

The Haitian immigrant saga is a testament to the right’s refusal to abide by anything resembling evidentiary standards, their demagogic response when anyone dares to point out that their claims are unsubstantiated — and how their lies can spiral wildly out of control.

Thousands of Haitian immigrants have settled in Springfield and its environs in recent years, fleeing violence, political unrest, and economic collapse in their home country while being drawn by local jobs and a “dire labor shortage.” The population surge has created real but surmountable challenges for local governance, resulting in an influx in state assistance and calls for federal aid.

Local businesses and church leaders, however, praise the new residents, who “are here legally,” according to the Springfield government.

### A racist lie spread from “third hand gossip” on Facebook to the Republican ticket

Earlier this month, a Springfield resident published a since-deleted post to a private local Facebook group spreading “vague, third hand gossip” about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets in the area.

The internet rumor spread to X on September 5 and spiraled through the right-wing media apparatus for days. Then on the morning of September 9, Vance, who is extremely online, promoted the claims on X, triggering a slew of supportive coverage from right-wing media.

Springfield’s city manager told Vance’s staffer such claims were “baseless” soon after, the Journal reported. Vance kept his post up and added another the next day in which he acknowledged that he was promoting “rumors” that may “turn out to be false,” but nonetheless urged his supporters to “keep the cat memes flowing.”

That night Donald Trump cited what his running mate had acknowledged were “rumors” that his office had been informed were baseless at a presidential debate before an estimated television audience of nearly 70 million Americans.

The former president, who shares the evidentiary standards of the average denizen of right-wing fever swamps, told the public that Democrats had allowed “millions and millions of people to come into our country” and that “in Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there.”

### Fact-checking the “rumor” triggers a days-long right-wing freakout

ABC News moderator David Muir responded by telling Trump what he could have learned from speaking to his running mate’s staff if he were marginally interested in saying true things.

“ABC News reached out to the city manager there,” Muir said. “He told us ‘there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.’”

:{Video

CitationFrom the September 10, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox News Democracy 2024 - ABC Presidential Debate

This mild rebuttal of what Trump’s running mate had publicly called a “rumor” which could be false — along with a handful of similar fact-checks of right-wing media nonsense Trump promoted that night — triggered a massive right-wing freakout targeting ABC.

Over the following days, Trump and his allies called for government retribution against the network and its parent company and even criminal charges, while promoting absurdly thin claims about an “ABC whistleblower” who was exposing the purportedly rigged debate.

Meanwhile, Trump’s right-wing propagandists scrounged for evidence even vaguely resembling the initial claims which immediately collapsed under scrutiny, including a photo purportedly showing a Haitian immigrant carrying a dead goose to eat, a video purportedly showing a cat being grilled in neighboring Dayton, Ohio, false claims that Haitians were causing an increase in “communicable diseases like HIV and TB,” and an attack on Haitian immigrants in Pennsylvania.

### As Vance refuses to apologize, Springfield suffers the consequences

Springfield’s community has experienced significant disruption since Vance and Trump took a rumor from the right-wing fever swamps, gave it a national audience, and mired the city in a ridiculous national debate.

Local schools, colleges, churches, and government buildings have suffered bomb threats that resulted in evacuations. The Proud Boys, a violent Trumpist gang, marched through the streets, while “fliers from a group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan” circulated. Haitian residents say they fear for their safety and are keeping their children home from school.

Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine publicly urged Trump and Vance to end their “very hurtful” attacks on Haitian immigrants. Springfield’s mayor Rob Rue, also a Republican, added that "It would be helpful if they understood the weight of their words and how they could harm a community like ours.”

But Vance, Trump, and their right-wing media allies are undeterred. Their aim, as Vance admitted in a Sunday interview, is to “create stories” by uplifting bullshit in order to drive media attention to the purported horrors of immigrants (and presumably away from covering unpopular aspects of their agenda, like restricting abortion, raising grocery prices, and rolling back protections on health coverage for preexisting conditions).

On Tuesday, he denied any sense of responsibility for his actions and their consequences.

“A woman who was behind an early Facebook post about the Haitian migrants in Springfield has now apologized for spreading false rumors,” a reporter told Vance at a Q & A during a rally in Wisconsin. “You say that you have a responsibility to share what your constituents tell you, but don’t you also have a responsibility to fact-check them first?”

“I think the media has a responsibility to fact-check the residents of Springfeild, not lie about them,” Vance replied, to cheers from the crowd. “I actually think this is really interesting, and I’ve learned a lot about the American media over the last week, and none of it is good.”

Vance went on to claim that his office had heard the story about pets from “multiple people” and the media has descended on the town and engaged in “bullying on an industrial scale” that he called “disgraceful.”

:{Video

CitationFrom a September 17, 2024, of a JD Vance campaign event

Vance’s office, meanwhile, had provided the Journal with one new piece of evidence, “a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors,” which instantly dissolved when the paper went about trying to “fact-check” it.

“But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement,” the Journal reported on Wednesday.

“Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.”

Don’t expect similar apologies from Vance, Trump, or any of the right-wing propagandists peddling this story.

Right-wing media are gleefully promoting a false, racist rumor that Haitian migrants are eating pets

09/10/2

---

vic of bubble gertz finally implodes?

9 24

MATT GERTZ (MEDIA MATTERS SENIOR FELLOW): If you go through the fact-checking in the debate, it's like four things. One of them is, "Actually, there were no pets being eaten in Ohio." One of them is, "You didn't actually win the 2020 election."

JOHN FUGELSANG (HOST): Small detail.

GERTZ: You know, it's just that we're talking about, like, basic stuff. You know, "Actually, violent crime is down, not up, according to the FBI." And I think the fourth one is --

FUGELSANG: And then "Women aren't murdering their newborn babies. Women aren't committing infanticide with the help of doctors and hospitals."

GERTZ: And, so, that's the whole list. Like, if you can't get through that level of fact-checking in your debate and you're also getting dramatically more time than Kamala Harris did -- I think he had, like, eight more minutes total, something like that. He can't actually drive a message. And the reason he can't drive a message, as I've written, is because he is so deeply entrapped in this right-wing media bubble. He just is focused on the bizarre fixations of the weirdos who love him and have their own TV shows.

FUGELSANG: That's it.

GERTZ: And, you know, at that point, you end up saying you you end up talking about how dogs and cats are being eaten in Ohio and saying things that are not just wrong, but if someone came up to you at a bar and started talking to you about that, you would move to the other end of the bar. Like, you would not want to be near someone who is randomly screaming about how the pets are being eaten. It's just, it is totally incomprehensible.

...

But if you're a normal person, like, if you're just going about your daily life, and all of a sudden -- and you say, "Huh. I think I want to find out some information about the presidential election. I'm gonna watch the debate tonight." And all of a sudden, one of the candidates is screaming about cats being eaten. You just -- that is not an appealing situation for you. And that, I think -- it's a huge problem for Donald Trump. It's a huge problem for the Republican Party as a whole that all of these crazy weirdos have such a huge impact on the party's message.

...

FUGELSANG: I mean, Donald Trump completely failed to bring anybody new to his ticket. But, Matthew, this has got to be because he's listening to these right-wing influencers. He doesn't seem to be -- listening to the people he pays to give him advice.

GERTZ: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a huge part of it and also that he is personally addicted, to getting his news from these crazy people. Like, on the one hand, they're speaking to him directly, like Laura Loomer apparently is now traveling with him to campaign events. But also, I mean, he gets his news from watching Fox News and seeing what people are Truth Social-ing at him and, you know, basically immersing himself in these crazy places.

This was the largest audience that either candidate is likely to see for the entire election cycle. Right? This was, it was 57 million people tuned into this debate. Dramatically more than either of them got for their convention speech, way more than, obviously, either of them will get for any other speech or television appearance or anything else. A huge opportunity to speak to people who might not be inclined to vote for you and make your case. And he just couldn't do it. He couldn't come close to doing it. He ended up babbling and ranting about all manner of nonsense partly because Kamala Harris was incredibly effective at baiting him, but partly because he is psychologically incapable of not taking that bait under any circumstance.

===

bubble problem

Listen to Media Matters' Andrew Lawrence explain how the “conservative media bubble” drives the “weirdness” of Republican candidates

Lawrence: “To get on Tucker's show and Donald Trump Jr.'s podcast, you have to be weird ... And if you don't get on those shows, you're not going to be up for the VP nomination”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 08/29/24

Video

CitationFrom the August 27, 2024, edition of SiriusXM's The Dean Obeidallah Show

ANDREW LAWRENCE (GUEST): There’s this alternate universe that they’re living in and what I see happening, it’s sort of leading too – they’re really just confined inside of this conservative media bubble. And when they break out of it, that’s why they’re coming across as so weird because they’re not seeing these things that are happening, they’re not hearing about them. And Fox News is just hiding this stuff from their audience, they really are.

ALEX BERG (HOST): You mentioned the “weirdness,” I feel like every clip that I see of JD Vance, it’s just like, I don’t know, it’s like AI was tasked with making what they thought would be, like, a relatable candidate. You know what I mean?

...

LAWRENCE: This is sort of the corner Republicans have painted themselves into. If you remember, JD Vance got the nomination because Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson wanted it. Along with Peter Thiel and a bunch of the donors and stuff like that. My point is that in order to be friends with Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson and to get on Tucker’s show and Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast, you have to be weird. Like, you have to say these things about single women. And if you don’t do that, you’re not going to get on those shows. And if you don’t get on those shows, you’re not going to be up for the VP nomination. But now, it all starts coming out.

I've been seeing JD Vance on Tucker Carlson's show for years saying stuff like that and then tweeting it out, saying stuff about childless cat ladies and, you know, essentially, women are just baby incubators, you know, that type of thing. And it never really breaks out of that conservative media bubble.

Now that he's on the national stage and this is, you know, this is such an issue for the Republican Party because if he starts coming out, if he starts apologizing for these types of things, well, then he's going to lose the hard right, the incels, the groypers, the white supremacists that are backing them, and then they lose that huge part of their base voters.

But without, you know, without becoming a little bit more normal, you're not going to get independent votes. And it's really -- they have really painted themselves into a corner with this. And I don't know. It's fascinating to see from my standpoint.

---

===

wapo

Democracy Dies in Darkness

How Trump’s allies amplify his Truth Social messages to the wider world

By Sarah Ellison and

Clara Ence Morse

May 8, 2024

On the second day of his civil fraud trial in New York last fall, Donald Trump posted a photo of a young woman, Allison Greenfield, standing next to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). Trump claimed falsely that she was “Schumer’s girlfriend” and was “running this case against me.”

Donald Trump's Truth Social profile picture

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Schumer’s girlfriend, Alison R. Greenfield, is running this case against me. How disgraceful! This case should be dismissed immediately!! https://www.instagram.com/greenfield4civilcourt/A photo of Allison Greenfield standing next to New York senator Charles E. Schumer displayed as a silhouette.The Washington Post is not displaying this image.

October 3, 2023 at 6:56 p.m.

Trump’s post about Greenfield, the principal law clerk for New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, received only around 1,400 shares, modest activity for a former president whose Twitter account once had nearly 90 million followers.

Engoron, who oversaw the trial, ordered Trump to take down the post, which he did the same day. But the message was already out. The next day, insults directed at Greenfield flooded right-wing podcasts and social media.

X/Twitter

alt text

Laura Loomer

LauraLoomer

President Trump posted this on Truth Social. Judge Arthur Engoron’s Principal Law Clerk Allison Greenfield appears to be a Democrat political operative who is collaborating with @SenSchumer who has openly proclaimed his desire to “get Trump” and see him jailed. WITCH HUNT

October 3, 2023 at 3:13 p.m.

TimCast podcast

October 4, 2023

“These people have an agenda. They have had a bias, obvious bias against Donald Trump from day one.”

— Tim Pool

The Michael Knowles Show podcast

October 4, 2023

“Trump took a swipe at one of the judge's staff members and pointed out that she's a huge lib, Alison Greenfield. She's a big lib. She's a big Democrat.”

— Michael Knowles

Over the next two months, dozens of articles focused on Greenfield’s role. Conservative media personalities such as Laura Loomer and the cable TV news channel Newsmax kept the spotlight on the clerk by frequently repeating Trump’s complaints.

Breitbart

November 3, 2023

A Breitbart headline reading: Conniption in Court: Gasps as Breitbart Exposé on Trump New York Judge’s Clerk Takes Center Stage

NewsMax

November 3, 2023

A NewsMax headline reading: Judge Blasts Trump Lawyers for Attacking Staff

NewsMax

November 3, 2023

New York Post

November 15, 2023

A New York Post headline reading: Trump seeks mistrial in 'tainted' $250M civil fraud case — citing judge's 'overwhelming' bias

The Epoch Times

December 7, 2023

A The Epoch Times headline reading: NY Judge Argues Against Trump Suit, Says Relationships Between Judge and Staff 'Sacrosanct'

With the attention from Trump’s backers came threats and abuse — a torrent that compelled Greenfield to tighten security at home and avoid public transportation.

When transcribed, the harassing voice-mail messages left for Greenfield covered more than 275 single-spaced pages.

Those concerned about the impact of Trump’s incendiary and often inaccurate messages have long sought ways to limit his reach. Cable news networks stopped airing his speeches live. Social media companies adopted new rules to slow the spread of false information. The targets of his bogus election conspiracy theories sued him and his proxies.

Perhaps the most significant move to limit Trump’s audience came after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol: bans on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, blocking him from some of the most influential social media platforms of the era.

And yet, three years later, a Washington Post analysis shows how those efforts have failed.

Now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Trump is as potent a political force as ever, with an army of amplifiers ensuring that his messages — true or untrue — reach a broad swath of the American public. He is set to face President Biden in November, with Trump running roughly even in national polls.

When Trump was initially suspended from the major social media platforms, he issued a statement: “We will not be SILENCED!”

He then created his own social media platform, Truth Social, where he would never be banned and which would allow him to profit financially from his own messages.

Former president Donald Trump is reflected in a mirror as he speaks to supporters in Laconia, N.H., on the day before the New Hampshire Republican primary. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Truth Social was estimated to have 5.4 million website visits in the United States in March, with another 800,000 on its app. By comparison, X, which was formerly known as Twitter, claimed more than 200 times that, with over 1 billion visits. Facebook is estimated to have had 3 billion visits in the same period, according to audience tracking firm Similarweb. Even though Trump has now been reinstated on the larger platforms, he has stuck with Truth Social, a platform that gives him greater freedom but a far more limited reach.

Yet despite its relatively small user base, Truth Social is influential because it sustains the networks of MAGA influencers, culture warriors and election deniers who power the right-wing media and guide the rhetoric and policies of many Republican elected officials. It directly connects Trump to influencers with enormous networks and audiences outside the platform, The Post’s analysis found.

Press Enter to skip to end of carousel

How Trump has become angrier and more isolated on Truth Social

Here on his company’s social network Trump is offering followers an intimate view of what his second term could look like: isolated, vitriolic and vengeful.

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The Post analyzed 14,101 of Trump’s posts from the day he announced his presidential campaign on Nov. 15, 2022, through March 15, 2024, including 7,716 original text posts as well as reposts and image-only posts. He posted to Truth Social, where he now has 6.96 million followers, an average of 29 times a day over that period.

Those messages were in turn shared by followers with wildly popular Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, podcasts and cable news shows, some of which reach tens of millions of people. The Post’s analysis focused on nearly 200 right-wing political influencers who have active accounts on Truth Social and other social media sites.

“The people around Trump know better than anybody how to spread a message,” Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump senior adviser and influential podcaster, said in an interview. They also benefit personally from their role.

Supporters of former president Donald Trump try to get his photo as he walks out to announce his bid for president at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Nov. 15, 2022. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)

By “recirculating golden nuggets from Trump, influencers provide the bonding of this media ecosystem,” said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who has long studied propaganda. “The more outrageous and trolling of the libs it is,” added Benkler, “the more attractive it is for those who want to make money and get credibility inside the political community for being a true believer.”

Trump recently praised Truth Social for its effectiveness. “When I put out a statement or message, it is SPREAD all over the place, fast and furious. EVERYBODY SEEMS TO GET WHATEVER I HAVE TO SAY, AND QUICKLY,” he wrote on the platform in early April.

Shannon Devine, spokesperson for Truth Social, said in a statement that “since users can express themselves on Truth Social without censorship and without their message being filtered through biased media outlets, it’s unsurprising that Donald Trump would use the platform or that people would spread his statements elsewhere.” The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s biggest amplifiers include well-known political figures and media organizations, as well as those who have built their brands almost entirely based on their habitual echo of the former president’s words, The Post’s analysis found.

Influencers such as conservative radio and TV host Mark Levin, former Trump adviser and media commentator Sebastian Gorka, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, and online personalities such as Philip Buchanan, who posts using the handle Catturd, regularly share Trump’s Truth Social posts within the platform and amplify his messages to their massive followings off it. Levin, Gorka, Flynn and Catturd each boast over a million followers on X, and Levin and Gorka host popular podcasts. Levin, Flynn and Buchanan did not respond to requests for comment. Gorka responded by saying, “You are scum and a hack. Go to Hell.”

Sebastian Gorka greets supporters on the first day of CPAC on March 2, 2023, in Fort Washington, Md. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Former Trump national security adviser and retired three-star Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn greets visitors during the ReAwaken America Tour on Oct. 21, 2022, in Manheim, Pa. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Trump uses Truth Social to promote his campaign and personal brand, attack political rivals and solicit donations. He also makes false claims of election fraud, spreads far-right conspiracy theories and hurls vitriol at the judges, witnesses and prosecutors involved in his court cases. Posts that make claims of election interference, discuss his court cases or include aggressively insulting language, tend to get the most attention. Five of Trump’s 10 most reposted messages involve election denial.

Early in his campaign, almost all of Trump’s election-denial posts focused on the 2020 presidential race. But after his first indictment in April 2023, Trump began alleging that prosecutors, by charging him, were interfering in the 2024 election. Around the time of his June indictment for mishandling classified documents, his posts on alleged 2024 election interference began to outnumber claims of 2020 election fraud, a trend that continued throughout the year, the Post analysis found.

On Aug. 14, when Trump was indicted in Georgia, he posted three messages equating the indictment with election interference. “THOSE WHO RIGGED & STOLE THE ELECTION WERE THE ONES DOING THE TAMPERING, & THEY ARE THE SLIME THAT SHOULD BE PROSECUTED,” he wrote in his typical all-caps style.

His language was repeated dozens of times in the two following days on right-wing media, podcasts and television. Internet personality Catturd posted a screenshot of Trump’s post to Twitter an hour later, where it garnered 150,000 views. That afternoon, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) wrote on Facebook and Truth Social that the justice system was rigged against Trump, ending the post with an allegation of “election interference!”

The phenomenon is a “steroidal version of political messaging,” according to Chris Stirewalt, politics editor at NewsNation and a former political editor at Fox News. “Trump says or does something egregious and the people who are currying favor with him say, ‘Well, let’s workshop this,’ and they share his message on their own account, but add their own twist.”

One of the reasons Trump has not regularly posted on X is that he wants to create and keep financial value for his Truth Social site, which he carefully tracks, according to people close to him who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

He has relentlessly tried to promote it, telling his advisers that he wants to break news on the platform to bring in more users. That focus paid off with an early, heady valuation of the company that peaked at more than $10 billion in late March, though shares in parent company Trump Media and Technology Group have fallen sharply since then.

Supporters use their phones during a rally in Erie, Pa., on July 29. (Dustin Franz for The Washington Post)

Trump has posted on X only once since leaving the Oval Office — his mug shot last year from an Atlanta jail, where he was booked on charges of trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.

But “even though Trump had been kicked off Twitter, people like me can get out Trump’s message on Twitter,” said Mike Davis, a former Senate aide who helped guide the confirmation of Supreme Court justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Davis, who founded the Article III Project, a judicial advocacy organization, is a frequent podcast guest on shows hosted by influencers such as Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, Jack Posobiec and Bannon. He estimates that he’s done over 3,000 media appearances, “and that’s in addition to constant social media and writing opinion pieces defending Trump.”

Davis said that being kicked off social media is galvanizing for conservatives, and he would know. He has been suspended from Twitter five times. But each time, “it was the best thing ever, because then I would go on Fox News and talk about how I was being censored and that would build a bigger audience.”

An ideal testing ground

The day before the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Bannon hosted a “force amplifier” event for influencers to discuss the most effective ways to support Trump’s causes.

Truth Social is an ideal testing ground, Bannon said, because it provides a way to test a message among a relatively small group that can then pass along the most effective lines to a wider audience.

“This entire industry is predicated upon the Trumps of the world creating compelling content daily,” said Bannon. “From YouTube to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, the whole thing. People are making businesses and careers out of his content.”

A radio show is live-streamed as supporters of Donald Trump gather to watch election results following the presidential primaries on March 12 in Smyrna, Ga. (Megan Varner/For The Washington Post )

On July 27, new charges against Trump in the mishandling classified documents case were filed by special counsel Jack Smith. The following day, Trump wrote three posts on Truth Social referencing the “weaponization” of the Department of Justice or FBI, including one post that garnered over 8,400 reposts and 29,000 likes. The language quickly found its way off Truth Social.

“People are not stupid,” Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina said that night on Sean Hannity’s show, which typically reaches 2.3 million people. “As a whole, they are starting to understand that the weaponization of the justice system is full throttle right now.”

“This morning, I joined Fox and Friends to discuss the illegal weaponization of the DOJ against Joe Biden’s top political opponent,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) posted on her Facebook page, which has 360,000 followers, that afternoon.

Newsmax posted a video to its YouTube channel, which has 2.2 million subscribers, promoting an interview with former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, who said the Biden administration had “weaponized the justice system in a shameful and disgraceful way.” (A Newsmax spokesperson said the network covers both sides of Trump’s trials. Guilfoyle said that the “censorship of President Trump is un-American, a total assault on the First Amendment.”)

Despite his frequent public complaints about how Fox treats him, Trump is also still amplified by its major prime time shows. The night he posted about the Georgia indictments, guests on the popular Hannity, “Jesse Watters Primetime” and “Fox News @ Night” shows, cited the indictments as evidence of election interference.

“For mainstream outlets, it’s the laziest kind of rage revenue because TV producers and web editors go out to find the posts that online rage merchants have already made,” said Stirewalt, who is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “And then you can bring it back to your more mainstream audience and say: ‘Aren’t you enraged by how enraged they are?’”

From anonymity to influencer

Some of the former president’s biggest boosters have built their identities almost entirely online, with no credentials beyond their instinct for amplifying his words.

Philip Buchanan, a 59-year-old living in the panhandle of Florida, is the person behind the social media personality Catturd. Buchanan began tweeting in 2018 as a so-called “Reply Guy,” someone with a small social media following who communicates primarily in the comments section of prominent users. Today, his X account boasts 2.4 million followers, including former Fox host Tucker Carlson, billionaire X owner Elon Musk, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Trump.

Buchanan, who is behind the social media personality Catturd, has 2.4 million followers of his X account. (Screenshot from social media)

Buchanan’s interactions with Trump highlight how each benefit from the other. Through much of 2020, the Catturd account had featured pandemic-era jabs at Democrats, often with a scatological twist. But after the election, Buchanan — like Trump — became fixated on false claims of a rigged vote. Trump retweeted him three times that November.

More recently, Buchanan posted a screenshot of an April 6 Trump post on Truth Social attacking New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s hush money case. “Trump just violated the gag order and dares the corrupt activist hack judge to put him in jail,” Buchanan wrote on X. He followed up with a flame emoji to express his appreciation for Trump’s stance.

Buchanan, whose identity was revealed by Rolling Stone and confirmed by The Post, has credited his social media fame with changing his financial life. In January, he told Carlson, the former Fox News personality who now hosts a show on X, that he bought a new truck, started a podcast and now sells a line of Catturd-branded merchandise.

A clerk under threat

The public scrutiny of Allison Greenfield began with a Wisconsin man named Brock Fredin, who unearthed the photo of the law clerk with Schumer. Fredin posted the photo on X, using the handle @JudicialProtest, and added a caption asking why she was “palling around with Charles E. Schumer?”

Fredin did not respond to a request for comment.

Days later, Trump took a screenshot of Fredin’s post, added a link to Greenfield’s Instagram account, and pushed the message out to his followers. His campaign sent out an email blast targeting Greenfield minutes later.

Although Trump did not directly threaten Greenfield, he clearly voiced his disapproval to his many followers. Right-wing influencers publicized Greenfield’s cellphone and social media accounts, and she scrambled to hide her personal information and that of her family. Court security directed her to stop taking the subway and instead travel by car.

Judge Arthur Engoron, right, sits on the bench with principal law clerk Allison Greenfield, center, during former president Donald Trump's civil business fraud trial in New York on Nov. 2. (John Taggart for The Washington Post)

Laura Loomer speaks during protests against the indictment of former president Donald Trump outside the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami on June 13. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)

Greenfield, who is now running to be a Manhattan civil court judge, declined to comment for this piece. But her experience was described in court papers and by Jerry Skurnik, a consultant for her campaign.

Trump’s post resulted in roughly 20-30 calls per day to Greenfield’s personal cellphone and approximately 30-50 messages per day across social media, Linkedln and two personal email addresses, according to court papers. The threats, many of which were sexist and antisemitic in nature, included several death threats.

Loomer was among those who focused attention on Greenfield, sharing Trump’s Truth Social message about the clerk to her nearly 1 million followers on X and proclaiming the case against the former president a “WITCH HUNT.” When reached for comment, Loomer said that “it is important for me and the MAGA base to be Donald Trump’s bullhorn,” a role that she said has only become more crucial since he has been subjected to multiple gag orders.

Once an appellate judge temporarily paused the gag order on Nov. 16, Trump lashed out again at Greenfield and Engoron on Truth Social. “His Ridiculous and Unconstitutional Gag Order, not allowing me to defend myself against him and his politically biased and out of control, Trump Hating Clerk, who is sinking him and his Court to new levels of LOW, is a disgrace,” Trump wrote.

Trump continues to attack several of the judges overseeing his cases, and recently flouted a gag order in his hush money case in New York by lashing out against two potential trial witnesses and the jury.

Trump said he would be “honored” to go to jail for violating the gag order. Instead, in late April, Merchan fined Trump $9,000.

The same day, Trump posted on Truth Social that the judge was “Rigged, Crooked, and above all, and without question, CONFLICTED.”

Loomer shared Trump’s post on X, and Catturd reshared the message to his followers, adding three fire emojis.

note crm conspir echo escalator

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"Real Time" host Bill Maher recently noted that when Republicans and right-wing media outlets find a new talking point, they work it to death regardless of its merits. And he cited the claim that President Joe Biden is using some type of drug or stimulant ahead of his first 2024 debate with presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump as a prime example.

Right-wing media outlets have been claiming that if Biden performs well against Trump in the June 27 debate that CNN is hosting in Atlanta, it will be because he is getting an unfair advantage via a stimulant. But there is no proof or evidence to support that baseless claim.

In an op-ed published on June 26, the Washington Post's Aaron Blake details how that claim took off in right-wing media.

"When Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo asked Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) about the just-announced presidential debate last month," Blake explains, "she prefaced the question oddly. 'So, let me get you to put your doctor's hat on for a second, given the (GOP) Doctors Caucus that you are leading'…. What did being a doctor have to do with handicapping the debate?.... Murphy quickly took the cue, though, launching into a baseless suggestion that Biden might take something to enhance his performance."

Blake continues, "He said Biden 'must have been jacked up' during his State of the Union address in March — that 'they gave him something.' Murphy gave no evidence but said he could provide proof for his claim to Bartiromo 'offline.'"

The Washington Post columnist notes that "a little more than 40 days" after that Bartiromo/Murphy conversation, "such evidence still hasn't seen the light of day." But Trump and allies like Fox News hosts Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity, Blake adds, continue to promote their claim anyway.

"Responsible journalists don't just accuse people of drug use based upon suspicion," Blake argues, "and there's still no actual evidence."

*Aaron Blake's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).

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see echo escalator

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The right-wing ecosystem that created the Paul Pelosi conspiracy theory

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 10/31/22

It took roughly 48 hours for the right-wing media ecosystem to turn a story about a man who committed political violence after becoming consumed by right-wing conspiracy theories about the depravity of the left into another right-wing conspiracy theory about the depravity of the left.

On Friday morning, a man broke into the San Francisco home of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He was reportedly carrying zip ties and duct tape and, according to law enforcement, was looking for the woman who is second in line to the presidency. She was not present, but the man did find and severely beat her 82-year-old husband, Paul, with a hammer, sending him to the hospital for emergency surgery.

The assailant, who was arrested and identified by police as David DePape, had an extensive Internet footprint that suggests a standard case of online right-wing radicalization. DePape’s writings show his adherence to a wide range of conspiracy theories that are often propped up or adopted in their entirety by prominent right-wing media figures and Republican officials. President Joe Biden on Friday night condemned the impact the Republican Party’s “vitriol” has on those who may be mentally unbalanced.

But in the days since the attack, people who get their news from right-wing sources have instead been told an absurd and baseless conspiracy theory. In this telling, there was no home invasion; instead DePape is actually Paul Pelosi’s leftist gay lover, and the police, Democrats, and the press are covering up that the assault was really a lovers’ spat. The tale was quickly adopted by influential right-wing figures – including Twitter owner Elon Musk – and, if past is prologue, will be accepted by a sizable percentage of the GOP base.

The Pelosi conspiracy theory took hold so quickly thanks to the parallel media ecosystem the right constructed over decades. That ecosystem features numerous outlets that generate conspiracy theories for partisan and financial gain; food-chain mechanisms that swiftly distribute them to millions of people; an existing right-wing audience trained to demand such fantasies; minimal internal guardrails within the right-wing press to provide more credible information; and strong external barriers against contrary information from mainstream news sources.

How the right built a Paul Pelosi conspiracy theory

The right’s conspiracy theorists went to work soon after news of Paul Pelosi’s assault broke. They create dubious but politically beneficial narratives by taking existing facts – particularly ones that emerge early in the life of a story, when initial reports are often wrong – mixing in falsehoods, and using wild logical jumps to put the result in a different context.

First, an investigative journalist at a local TV affiliate reported on Friday that the assailant was wearing only his underwear when police arrived. But the journalist retracted that reporting the same day, and no other outlet confirmed it.

Second, the dispatcher who received a 911 call from Paul Pelosi said that he had identified the intruder as a “friend.” But Pelosi, according to law enforcement, was making that call surreptitiously from the bathroom and speaking “in code” to the dispatcher in an attempt to avoid his suspicion.

Third, some alleged that there were no signs of forced entry at the Pelosi home, suggesting that Paul Pelosi had willingly let DePape inside. In fact, police say he forced entry through the rear door, and aerial photos and video show shattered glass around that entryway (in fact, other internet sleuths claim that the glass pattern is suspicious).

Fourth, Politico reported on Friday based on San Francisco Police Chief William Scott’s press conference that the first police officers responding on the scene “were let inside by an unknown person. They discovered DePape and Pelosi struggling for a hammer.” This generated speculation that a third individual had been present. But Scott did not actually say that, and the SFPD subsequently confirmed only two people, DePape and Paul Pelosi, were at the home when police arrived.

The right’s conspiracy theorists took those four pieces of evidence, mixed in Paul Pelosi’s May DUI charge, and concocted the narrative that hehad been the victim of a drunken gay lovers’ spat that was subsequently covered up.

By Sunday, versions of this speculation were rampant on the right. Commentators who present themselves as credible offered a version in which they were simply asking questions because the press supposedly refused to do so.

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Those who lack such airs simply claimed, as Dinesh D’Douza did, that “this guy, the assailant, is either a sexual partner or a male prostitute, and this is a sexual rendezvous that went sideways.”

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Eventually, the story reached Musk, a troll beloved on the right with a penchant for conspiracy theories. And on Sunday morning, he blasted it out to his 112 million Twitter followers.

After Hillary Clinton shared an article about DePape’s promotion of conspiracy theories and commented that “violence is the result” of the right spreading such lies, Musk responded, “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to the story than meets the eye.” He provided a link to a site with the headline, “The Awful Truth: Paul Pelosi Was Drunk Again, And In a Dispute With a Male Prostitute Early Friday Morning."

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The website, the Santa Monica Observer, had previously alleged that Clinton died in 2016 and had been replaced by a body double for her presidential debate with Donald Trump.

At the same time, the right-wing media generated nonsensical explanations for why the assailant’s Internet footprint is forged and he’s actually a leftist. They cannot accept that the assailant believed right-wing conspiracy theories without taking on responsibility, so they’ve developed an alternate explanation instead.

Roughly 72 hours after news of the assault on Paul Pelosi had broken, the conspiracy theory had been promoted by a Republican member of Congress and by Donald Trump Jr., and “Pelosigaylover” was trending nationally on Twitter.

The conspiracy-minded ecosystem that fuels the right

The right-wing information ecosystem is built to create and propagate conspiracy theories like the latest drivel about the Pelosi attack.

On message boards and social media platforms, an army of right-wing would-be sleuths looking for political advantage or simple amusement are constantly on the hunt for raw materials that they can spin into these alternate narratives.

Hyperpartisan news sites with no journalistic standards – from local ones like the Santa Monica Observer to national players like Gateway Pundit – trawl those venues looking for stories that they can write up and monetize.

The conspiracy theories move up the right-wing media food chain, with more and more prominent influencers and outlets picking up the story and running with it, until it becomes pervasive on the right.

Sprawling conspiracy theories like 2020 election denial, QAnon, Pizzagate, and Gamergate – all of which DePape had championed – worked their way through these networks.

The right-wing audience is uniquely vulnerable to these narratives.

The right-wing press spent decades spinning out these politically convenient narratives about the diabolical nature of their perceived enemies until the audience came to demand them. Few on the right – and none with any real degree of influence – are interested in debunking the rampant lies once they get going. Instead, powerful figures at Fox News and elsewhere end up pushing the likes of QAnon talking points and scoffing at its extremism. And decades of right-wing attacks on the mainstream press have created a bubble in which the audience is unlikely to receive or credit contradictory information from those outlets.

The result is that we consistently see the conspiracy theories come to infest the ranks of the movement, from Vince Foster’s death to QAnon.

I expect the Paul Pelosi fantasy to follow the same route. Republican politicians and prominent Fox hosts will either stand by as the conspiracy theory builds credence on the right or even give a knowing wink and nod to its supporters. Some will probably promote it entirely, perhaps suggesting that these are simply questions that the media refuses to answer.

Credible news outlets will divert resources from covering the rising tide of right-wing political violence or the GOP’s disturbing policy aims if the party gains ground in the midterm elections to pointing out that the right is peddling nonsense about Pelosi. But thanks to the right-wing media bubble, their facts won’t make it to the people inclined to believe it. And so a sizable chunk of the GOP will come to believe an absurd lie.

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accident day after hush money def implodes after fox pushed fail guy?

over a handful of hours on Tuesday, the right’s conspiracy theory ecosystem concocted a sinister plot by President Joe Biden to assassinate his predecessor out of the banal fact that FBI agents received standard instructions on the use of force before conducting a court-ordered search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in 2022.

Hundreds of pages of filings were unsealed on Tuesday in Trump’s classified documents case, revealing that the former president — who is charged with 40 federal criminal counts related to his alleged willful retention of documents after leaving the White House — had multiple documents marked “classified” in his bedroom that were discovered months after the 2022 search.

Credible outlets reviewed the documents and produced a wave of news stories detailing what a judge described as “strong evidence” of Trump’s allegedly criminal acts. Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA media supporters ginned up a counternarrative based on a credulous reading of a deceptive argument from Trump’s lawyers that was included in the unsealed documents.

The story that emerged from the right-wing media echo chamber posits that pro forma language provided to FBI agents before the 2022 search which stated that “law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary” was actually part of a Biden scheme to assassinate Trump. This is both a horrific accusation to make without evidence and facially absurd for any number of reasons. (Why would the Biden administration issue assassination orders in writing and then conduct the Mar-a-Lago search on a date specifically selected because Trump would be in New York instead?) But it spread quickly from its initiation by a key figure in the right’s January 6 disinformation community, through the ranks of MAGA influencers, to Trump himself, and then to the Fox News airwaves.

By Tuesday night, Trump’s campaign had issued a fundraising email in which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee alleged of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”

The startlingly quick adoption of an unhinged conspiracy theory shows how the right-wing media apparatus operates, dreaming up convoluted but inflammatory nonsense and bombarding their audience with it. Here’s how it happened.

Right-wing fabulist turns standard FBI policy into “mind-blowing” story

The right-wing writer Julie Kelly, in a series of Tuesday afternoon posts on X (formerly Twitter), purported to reveal the “bombshells” she had uncovered by scouring the unsealed documents.

“Tons of new unsealed filings on classified docs case--I will try to post as much as I can (there goes the workout) but this is mind-blowing,” she posted at 1:21 p.m. ET. “FBI authorized the use of deadly force at Mar-a-Lago.”

She included a screenshot of a filing from Trump’s lawyers which stated that the FBI’s “Operations Order” for the Mar-a-Lago search “contained a ‘Policy Statement’ regarding ‘Use of Deadly Force,’ which stated, for example, ‘Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary.’”

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Kelly went on to post the “Policy Statement” and claim that the instructions show that “the FBI risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests for a publicity stunt to make it look like Trump stole national security files.” She added, “People need to be arrested for this.”

In reality — and as more credible journalists pointed out — those instructions are standard for FBI searches.

“These are the rules that apply to FBI agents whenever they do anything,” Reuters reporter Brad Heath wrote in response to Kelly’s initial claim on X. He added, “Agents - like all cops - can use deadly force when met with a sufficiently serious threat. The policy the FBI followed here applies all the time; they are the same rules agents follow when walking down a sidewalk.”

“One clue that this is the generic DOJ use of force policy — not something cooked up for Mar-a-Lago, let alone ordered by the president — is that it talks about the use of warning shots in prison,” Heath noted in response to Kelly’s post with the “Policy Statement.”

The FBI would later issue a statement confirming that the bureau had “followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force.”

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Kelly is among the foremost proponents of the right’s January 6 counternarrative. She has argued that the violent rioting at the U.S. Capitol by Trumpists who assaulted scores of law enforcement officers “was probably the biggest instance of police brutality that this country has seen since the Civil Rights movement,” described a police officer who testified before the January 6 select committee as a “crisis actor,” and suggested that the FBI fabricated the pipe bombs discovered at the Republican and Democratic national headquarters that day because it is “an enforcement arm, a surveillance arm of the Democratic Party.” And her interpretation of the filings made no sense and was quickly debunked.

None of that slowed down the ranks of MAGA influencers, who quickly seized on her story.

MAGA influencers run with “assassination” nonsense

Within minutes, influential figures in the MAGA movement adopted Kelly’s interpretation and effectively began competing for the most overwrought response as they furiously posted on X. Many alleged that the document showed a Biden-directed assassination plot against Trump.

“The FBI authorized the use of **deadly force** when they raided Mar-a-Lago,” Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk commented. “You read that right. They were authorized to kill Trump employees, possibly even assassinate Trump himself, to exact their political revenge.”

“The FBI authorized the use of deadly force when they raided Mar-a-Lago?” wrote podcaster and former One America News host Liz Wheeler. “Were they hoping to assassinate Trump or his family or employees? This is insane.”

“So that was the real reason for the FBI raiding a president’s home: an excuse to use deadly force against Donald Trump,” offered The Federalist’s Sean Davis. “The court case was just plan B for the corrupt DOJ and FBI.” He added, “The FBI is a domestic terrorist organization.”

Trump ally Laura Loomer similarly argued that the document shows “a possible assassination attempt of President Trump by the Biden regime and FBI!”

Trump and the GOP lie that this shows Biden is “A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY”

Trump and his campaign are very attuned to the nonsense his online supporters generate, and within hours they adopted their bogus narrative.

At 5:21 p.m. ET — just four hours after Kelly’s initial post — Trump posted on his Truth Social account: “WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!”

Trump’s campaign posted his comment to X, where it was quickly reposted by an arm of the Republican National Committee.

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The former president’s most unhinged congressional supporters chimed in.

“The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light. Does everyone get it yet???!!!!” commented Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

His biggest media supporters were not far behind.

Fox “news” and “opinion” sides parrot the MAGA spin

Right-wing commentators have spent the last nine years figuring out how to respond to Trump’s massive lies. At this point, everyone who retains a major platform knows their role is to, at the least, soft-pedal his unhinged claims, and at most, to prove they are on board with the MAGA movement by treating them as truth.

That’s what played out on Fox’s airwaves after Trump declared that the FBI’s use of standard orders for the Mar-a-Lago search showed that Biden is “A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”

Fox could have provide credible reporting tamping down on the lies circulating online. The network employs people who report on the Justice Department and FBI and even has Kerri Kupec Urbahn, a former top aide in the Trump DOJ, on the payroll. If the network wanted to find out if the FBI orders were standard, it would be really easy to do so.

But Fox’s business model and its political agenda both depend on propagandizing for Trump, so that’s not what happened. Instead, around an hour after Trump’s Truth Social post, FoxNews.com sent the following push alert: “BREAKING NEWS New docs reveal Biden DOJ authorized ‘deadly force’ in Mar-a-Lago raid.’” Here’s how the story’s promotion looked on the website’s front page:

From FoxNews.com at approximately 6:23 p.m. on May 21, 2024.

When the network first discussed the story later that hour on the flagship “news” show Special Report, the segment focused on the same “deadly force” language Kelly had flagged.

Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor, opened by highlighting that “former President Trump's attorneys argue the Biden administration Justice Department authorized the use of deadly force if necessary” during the Mar-a-Lago search. Correspondent Kevin Corke responded that the order is “quite shocking.”

Baier went on to downplay the notion that the FBI instructions were standard.

“There may be some people, Kevin, who say that this is just a policy statement of standard operating procedures put inside this operations order for this specific raid,” he said. “But obviously it's not standard operating procedure when you're going into the house of the former president, who happens to be protected by Secret Service.”

Video file

CitationFrom the May 21, 2024, edition of Fox News' Special Report.

When Baier offered a similar comment later in the hour during a panel segment, contributor Byron York described the situation as “kind of worrisome” because the FBI was supposedly “loaded for bear and prepared for the possibility of some sort of violent confrontation with the Secret Service. … The idea that it was prepared for this way, as opposed to, say, worked out in advance, is really troubling.” (In fact, the FBI ensured that “the Secret Service would receive a heads-up a few hours before FBI agents arrived to avoid any law enforcement conflict,” The Washington Post has reported.)

Fox’s “opinion” hosts have been running with the story ever since.

CitationFox News screenshots, 5/21/24 and 5/22/24

“They were actually thinking of using deadly force, or it's on the table that might be necessary at Mar-a-Lago?” Laura Ingraham asked Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO). “Deadly force? OK. It’s really lawfare, it’s not funny. Something actually could have gone down I guess at Mar-a-Lago, beyond just looking for the documents.”

Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro went even further on Watters’ show, with the host declaring, “Authorized armed agents to use deadly force in the Mar-a-Lago raid. That is insane. Is there any justification for that?”

“Absolutely not,” Pirro replied, adding that “my mind as a prosecutor goes to maybe they wanted the engagement of physical force. Maybe they wanted to come in without FBI, without DOJ, without all of that identifying so that they could engage in deadly physical force.”

Sean Hannity called the “deadly force” language a “shocking new revelation.” He acknowledged it was “boilerplate language” but nonetheless asked, “Why was Merrick Garland prepping for a possible, what, shootout?”

Fox was still carrying Trump’s water on Wednesday morning:...

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mma 4 24

google is profiting from PragerU’s climate denial ads on its search engine

Special PROGRAMSCLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 04/16/24

Google is allowing right-wing propaganda organization PragerU to run climate-denying ads on its search engine even though the tech giant previously committed to prohibiting ads that feature claims that contradict the “well-established scientific consensus” about climate change.

In 2021, Google updated its ad policy to prohibit ads for or on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”

Yet, nearly three years later, Google is still profiting from ads that contain climate change misinformation.

When Media Matters searched for phrases like “climate change,” “global warming,” and “climate crisis” on Google Search, the search engine returned PragerU ads that promised its website reveals “the truth about climate change” — or what it calls the “fake climate catastrophe.”

“Climate policies are causing inflation and keeping poor countries trapped in poverty,” the ad-description text read. “Get the facts with our Climate Change and Energy playlist.”

[ggl screenshots see monetize ads]

When clicked on, the ads lead Google Search users to a video on PragerU’s website titled “Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?” In the video, anti-renewable energy activist Michael Shellenberger tells the audience that “pushing the planet toward wind and solar energy would actually cause more harm to the environment than good.” (While all extractive processes have environmental impacts, scientists agree that the consequencesof burning fossil fuels on the climate along with the declining costs of both renewable energy and renewable-energy storage make those cleaner technologies essential to a sustainable energy future.)

Shellenberger is known for spreading misinformation about wind energy and downplaying the impacts of climate change. In 2020, Shellenberger wrote an article in which he claimed that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse.” A 2022 report produced by hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists argued that climate change has increased the intensity — and in some cases the frequency — of extreme weather events.” Shellenberger has also defended former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that “windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before” and “driving them [whales] crazy.” In 2023, he produced a documentary that alleged — again, without concrete evidence — that “government officials have been lying” about the role offshore wind turbine construction has played in causing whale deaths.

The video featuring Shellenberger is one of 30 videos on PragerU’s “Get The Truth About The Climate” playlist.

Other videos on the playlist feature an assortment of well-known climate deniers, including former BP chief scientist Steve Koonin and nuclear energy consultant Patrick Moore, who has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he co-founded Greenpeace.

In a video titled “Is there really a climate emergency?” Koonin claims that climate change is not settled science, an argument he also detailed in a 2021 book called Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

Another video on the playlist called “The truth about CO2” features Moore, who claims that rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere do not present a danger to humans and that “we're already seeing the positive effects of increased carbon dioxide now.” “We should celebrate CO2 as the giver of life that it is,” Moore adds.

Video

CitationPragerU ad in Google's search engine, accessed April 4, 2024

PragerU is deeply rooted in climate change denial

Along with the Daily Wire, PragerU is financially dependent on generous donations from fossil fuel billionaire Farris Wilks.

Recently, PragerU Kids, a PragerU offshoot that produces conservative “educational” content targeted at school age children, has partnered with five different states to bring right-wing propaganda into public school classrooms.

Media Matters reviewed PragerU Kids’ ”educational” content and found it was rife with misinformation about climate change. In one video, a cartoon narrator explains why embracing climate denialism is akin to participating in the Warsaw uprising, when Polish Jews attempted to liberate Warsaw from German occupation during WWII.

Since 2021, researchers have demonstrated that Google has failed to follow through on its promise to address climate denial. One study found 100 monetized YouTube videos that seemingly violated Google’s climate change misinformation policy. The videos had accrued more than 18 million views. Despite those seeming policy violations, only eight of the hundreds of climate-denying videos studied were eventually demonetized. Google has also profited significantly from ads placed by fossil fuel companies attempting to “greenwash” their reputations as drivers of the climate crisis.

### Climate solutions coverage on broadcast news programs declined in 2023

04/16/24 9:49

mma 4 24

a panel on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Thursday highlighted the role right-wing misinformation is playing in distorting perceptions about the state of the economy and the rate of inflation, which a majority of Americans incorrectly believe is headed in the wrong direction.

Wall Street Journal economic reporter Greg Ip drew attention to the enormous disparity between perception and reality when it comes to consumer sentiment about the economy in an April 4 article, titled “What’s Wrong With the Economy? It’s You, Not the Data.” Ip pointed to public opinion data showing that a vast majority of respondents incorrectly believed inflation has gone up in the past year, when indeed it has fallen significantly and stabilized in the nearly two years since peaking in June 2022. Furthermore, Ip highlighted a survey showing that by 40-to-60 point margins, respondents think the overall U.S. economy is getting worse while their own state economy is getting better. He also cited data indicating that by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, a majority of Americans wrongly believe the economy — which has enjoyed robust job creation and GDP growth — has gotten worse over the past year.

Ip's article spurred a conversation on the set of MSNBC's Morning Joe, where co-hosts Mika Brzenski and Joe Scarborough and New York Times columnist and CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin keyed in on the role played by the partisan misinformation ecosystem in fomenting pessimism and distorting reality.

“The misinformation that’s been put out across the country about this issue is so shocking, because of the way people feel versus the actual reality of the numbers,” said Sorkin. “It’s hard to tell people that you shouldn't feel one way, and I know that is true, but the numbers are directionally, shockingly, going in a good place.”

NBC News national affairs analyst John Heilemann chimed in that while the economy has improved, the tapering of inflation happened slowly, and that from a political standpoint for the Biden White House, “You cannot argue people out of their feelings,” with Heilemann recommending a different approach.

“You have to figure out a way to say to them, hey, we know that prices are still too high, we know you're still feeling it in your pocketbook now, but look at all the progress we've made,” Heilemann said. “Give us some more time, because you know it's just going to be worse with Donald Trump. He's not on your side. We're on your side, we fixed a lot of stuff. This thing still, we need some work, we've made some progress, but not enough.”

Indeed, liberal and conservative economists agree that Trump’s policies would make inflation worse — but mainstream media outlets have barely covered this.

Scarborough then contrasted the poll findings that people thought their own state economies were doing well while the rest of the country was doing badly, then turned the question back to the sheer volume of right-wing media misinformation.

“I'm sorry but, you know, if you looked at certain cable news channels you would think we were in the middle of a Great Depression, that illegal immigrants were racing through schools across America stabbing people in the face, and that leprosy is going to be spread by migrants going across the border, and that trans athletes are coming to your middle school to beat up your, you know, sixth-grade girl,” Scarborough declared. “I mean, seriously, turn it on any time. Turn it on any time, and it’s the economy is in free fall, migrants are coming to kill you, and trans athletes. I mean, it's constant — it’s a constant, constant churning of these messages. And it has an impact on polls after [airing] 24/7.”

Right-wing media have often painted the completely false picture of the dystopian, even post-apocalyptic America that Scarborough described. On those exact topics that Scarborough mentioned, for example, Fox News has ignored or dismissed positive economic news, falsely depicted a “war on fossil fuels” when in fact the country is producing more energy than ever, and depicted minimum wage increases as a danger to the economy and American way of life. Fox has also run an obsessive level of coverage depicting migrants as a criminal threat to the country, and hyped supposed new threats without any empirical evidence. (Scarborough’s reference to immigrants purportedly carrying leprosy was actually a Fox News narrative from 2018.)

And of course, Fox has engaged in a vast culture war against transgender people, and the network drastically picked up its coverage in 2021 as soon as Democrats took control of the White House and Congress. This intense coverage has continued for years, including targeted hate campaigns, treating urban legends as if they’re real news, and whipping up new cultural battles via days of relentless coverage and dishonestly edited footage.

Watch the full segment from Morning Joe below:

March 14, 2024 rww

Tim Dickinson @ Rolling Stone: Trump Campaign Ads Are Monetizing Pro-Nazi Content on Rumble

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is running online advertising to raise cash for 2024 — and a portion of that ad spending is monetizing pro-Nazi content on the streaming service Rumble, Rolling Stone has observed.

Justin Horowitz @ Media Matters: Misogynistic manosphere influencers embrace Nazism

Right-wing “manosphere” influencers including Sneako, Jon Zherka, and Myron Gaines are embracing Nazism and defending Adolf Hitler online.

Matt Shuham @ HuffPost: Election Deniers Have Taken Over The RNC After A Trump Shake-Up

Donald Trump never gave up his lies about the 2020 election. Now, party leadership is stocked with his picks.

Matthew Choi @ The Texas Tribune: Political novice Brandon Gill seeks to be Trump’s biggest advocate in Congress

Brandon Gill is on a glide path to becoming the next congressman of Texas’ ruby red 26th Congressional District, after beating a crowded pool of Republicans in the primary to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess. For those wondering how the likely congressional newcomer intends to conduct himself on Capitol Hill, Gill says it’s simple — he will follow Donald Trump’s lead.

Wendy Suares @ KOKH: Oklahoma tax dollars funding national promotion of State Superintendent Walters

A DC-based firm is pocketing tens of thousands of your tax dollars to promote State Superintendent Ryan Walters on a national stage.

Telling Jefferson Lies: Wolfe in Wolf’s Clothing

Stephen Wolfe’s book The Case for Christian Nationalism ignited a firestorm of controversy when it was released in 2022. In the book, Wolfe calls for revolt against tyranny and for Christians to mobilize at the state and local level to enact self-conscious Christian governments. In principle, according to Wolfe, Christian state’s could use violence to maintain a Christian social order.

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NOTE ESCALATOR FEVER SWAMP

AHA DOH CONSPIR AS SMEAR ~ TARGET = DIRTY TRICK BUT REQ ALT FACT EARTH 2 MURDOCH FUCKERY

AN 12 23

When special counsel Jack Smith announced 37 federal criminal charges against former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case in June, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) warned that he would be "the subject of relentless attacks" and could expect "death threats."

Schiff definitely called it.

Smith has been inundated with death threats not only because of that case, but also, in response to his election interference case against the former president. Trump and his loyalists have repeatedly used words like "deranged" to attack Smith, who has become a major target of MAGA conspiracy theorists.

In an article published by Mother Jones on December 13, journalists David Corn and Dan Friedman describe an anti-Smith conspiracy theory that is showing up on far-right websites.

"A new conspiracy theory rising on the right is being deployed to help Donald Trump," Corn and Freidman explain. "It claims that Jack Smith, the special counsel who is prosecuting Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and for his alleged swiping of classified documents, was part of a multimillion- dollar extortion scheme when he was the chief prosecutor investigating and prosecuting war crimes in Kosovo. In the past two weeks, this unsubstantiated narrative has started popping up on fringe right-wing sites and social media posts."

The reporters continue, "Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser and QAnonish MAGA champion, has promoted this tale…. This campaign against Smith is based on documents circulated by John Moynihan, a onetime DEA employee who says he handled money laundering investigations for the agency."

According to Corn and Freidman, MAGA Republican and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne "has claimed credit for helping to launch Moynihan's allegations against Smith."

The journalists note, "Byrne tweeted a link to a story on the Moynihan charges that appeared on Gateway Pundit, a fringe-right site, and he declared, 'I DID THAT. Well, the extraordinary federal John Moynihan and I.' He added laughing emojis. A website he created called Deep Capture was among the first to post the Moynihan complaint."

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MMA 1 24

A January 3 Washington Post article by Sarah Ellison explores the influence of far-right MAGA site Gateway Pundit and its founder, Jim Hoft, whose false claims Media Matters has documented for years.

Ellison expertly examines Hoft's influence in spreading pernicious voter fraud claims, which others in right-wing media build upon. She even quotes Steve Bannon saying that Hoft and Gateway Pundit provide an “infrastructure” for pro-Trump voices to riff on:

The site’s founder, Jim Hoft, who started blogging as a hobby in 2004, is among “the best at creating a right-wing echo system,” right-wing podcast host and former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said in an interview. Hoft did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this report.

Bannon said Hoft is often one of the first to pick up a social media post or a local news story that other right-wing personalities then repeat and aggregate. He “isn’t afraid to take a leading edge where you don’t have all the facts but they are coming together,” Bannon explained. Once Gateway Pundit puts one of its signature all-caps headlines on a story, that provides what Bannon calls an “infrastructure”[PERMISSION?] upon which his own podcast and other right-wing outlets and influencers can build.

...

In the weeks before he left office in 2021, Trump brandished printouts of Gateway Pundit articles questioning the results of the election, say former aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private White House conversations.

“When he was looking for evidence, Gateway Pundit was one reliable place he knew he could go for validation, and maybe even some new ideas,” said one former aide.

The site has been influential in promoting false election fraud theories even though some of the most influential figures on the right say they don’t trust it. One prominent conservative radio host, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of offending political allies, said in an interview that the site’s stories are “bull----.”

Gateway Pundit represents a “a fringe segment of so-called conservative media that’s driven by conspiratorial clickbait to drive revenues to stay afloat,” the host said.

A former Trump administration official who denies that Joe Biden rightfully won the 2020 election nevertheless told The Post in an interview that if you cite Gateway Pundit in an argument, “it means you’ve lost. You can’t use it to make an argument. You can only use it to hear what you want to hear.”

The entire piece is worth reading, specifically to learn how Gateway Pundit has amplified false and misleading claims about voter fraud in Michigan.

With the 2024 election on the horizon, it's worth remembering that the earliest, most viral false claims to arise may well be sourced – directly or indirectly – to Gateway Pundit.

REF WAPO

WAPO NO LNX

Democracy in America

Election 2024

Democracy in America

A right-wing tale of Michigan election fraud had it all – except proof

Gateway Pundit, a favorite news source of former president Donald Trump’s, has pushed false claims of a stolen election even as others have pulled back in the face of consequences

By Sarah Ellison

January 3, 2024

The story had all the elements of a blockbuster crime saga: burner phones, semiautomatic weapons, silencers and bags of prepaid cash cards. “NOW WE HAVE PROOF!” blared the headline on the right-wing website Gateway Pundit. “Massive 2020 Voter Fraud Uncovered in Michigan.”

The story referenced “thousands of fraudulent ballots” caught by Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch. Grateful readers deluged her office with hundreds of calls, hailing her as a hero.

But Meisch knew it wasn’t true.

According to police reports, the Michigan attorney general’s office and an interview with Meisch, an employee of a voter registration drive company had submitted to the Muskegon city clerk thousands of voter registration applications weeks before the 2020 election, some with faked signatures and faulty addresses.

Meisch’s staff spent hundreds of hours weeding out the bad applications. The guns the police found were legally registered to a landlord who had nothing to do with the registration drive. The prepaid phones and cash cards were given to temporary employees to contact new voter prospects.

“There were no fraudulent ballots,” Meisch said in an interview, “not a single one that anyone in my office was aware of.”

But for Gateway Pundit, which is run out of its founder’s home and whose small staff produces stories that help set the agenda for Donald Trump’s most ardent followers, the August story provided weeks of headlines that radiated across right-wing media and were repeatedly amplified by pro-Trump influencers. That’s despite the fact that it was published nearly three years after the election — and after Meisch’s staff had thwarted any fraud.

The outlet’s emphasis on long-debunked fraud claims helps explain why election denial has proved so durable, despite the many efforts to halt the spread of disinformation and impose consequences on those who persist in it.

Trump himself faces multiple criminal counts for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election on the disproven grounds that it had been rigged against him. The Trump lawyers who pushed false voter fraud claims have, in some cases, been hit with criminal charges, as well as censure and disbarment proceedings. In mid-December, a federal jury ordered former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million to two election workers who sued him for defamation. Trump’s largest media ally, Fox News, agreed last year to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation suit.

Some right-wing outlets, such as Fox’s smaller cable-news rival Newsmax, have pulled back from election-related conspiracy theories in the face of lawsuits and threats of legal consequences.

But through it all, Gateway Pundit has continued trumpeting disproven election fraud stories, even as it faces defamation suits over its coverage of the 2020 election. It has also taken its own legal action against fact-checkers, disinformation researchers and story subjects, while pressing in court to make it harder for social media companies to crack down on misinformation.

The outlet’s reporting was a favorite of Trump’s as he clung to the presidency more than three years ago, aides said, and it has become a key amplifier of his continued fraud claims as he campaigns to return to the White House. Gateway Pundit traffic peaked in November 2020 at nearly 7 million page views, and the site still averages more than a million visits each month, according to Comscore, which measures the readership of media sites.

Less than a year from the 2024 election, the latest polls show that some two-thirds of Republicans falsely believe that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Gateway Pundit’s influence helps explain why, experts in disinformation say. Though the site employs only a handful of regular writers, it has played an outsize role in popularizing false claims.

“Gateway Pundit is a known source of disinformation that quickly trades up the chain,” said Joan Donovan, an assistant professor at Boston University studying online disinformation and media manipulation. “Because when they report a piece of information, it gives others license to do so.”why?

The site’s founder, Jim Hoft, who started blogging as a hobby in 2004, is among “the best at creating a right-wing echo system,” right-wing podcast host and former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said in an interview. Hoft did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this report.

Bannon said Hoft is often one of the first to pick up a social media post or a local news story that other right-wing personalities then repeat and aggregate. He “isn’t afraid to take a leading edge where you don’t have all the facts but they are coming together,” Bannon explained. Once Gateway Pundit puts one of its signature all-caps headlines on a story, that provides what Bannon calls an “infrastructure” upon which his own podcast and other right-wing outlets and influencers can build.

That infrastructure was useful to pro-Trump One America News, a small cable network that pushed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. A former OAN producer attested that he and his colleagues were directed to consult Gateway Pundit when they arrived at work to inform the day’s programming, according to depositions and documents from a defamation lawsuit filed against the Trump campaign and others, including Gateway Pundit, by a former Dominion Voting Systems executive who was falsely accused by Trump allies of helping to swing the 2020 election.

“Check Gateway Pundit, Epoch Times and The Blaze right when you get in. … These are very helpful to find good OAN content,” read one Jan. 14, 2021, email to producers from the channel’s news director. OAN settled in the case under undisclosed terms in September.

“Gateway Pundit’s articles were chopped-up sentences that were drawn from whatever crazy thing a Twitter user was saying about election denial,” the former producer, Marty Golingan, said in an interview, “and they would spin it with maximum outrage and reactionary emotion.”

In the weeks before he left office in 2021, Trump brandished printouts of Gateway Pundit articles questioning the results of the election, say former aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private White House conversations.

“When he was looking for evidence, Gateway Pundit was one reliable place he knew he could go for validation, and maybe even some new ideas,” said one former aide.

The site has been influential in promoting false election fraud theories even though some of the most influential figures on the right say they don’t trust it. One prominent conservative radio host, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of offending political allies, said in an interview that the site’s stories are “bull----.”

Gateway Pundit represents a “fringe segment of so-called conservative media that’s driven by conspiratorial clickbait to drive revenues to stay afloat,” the host said.

A former Trump administration official who denies that Joe Biden rightfully won the 2020 election nevertheless told The Post in an interview that if you cite Gateway Pundit in an argument, “it means you’ve lost. You can’t use it to make an argument. You can only use it to hear what you want to hear.”

Gateway’s origins

:{:{In the nearly two decades since its founding, Hoft’s website has spread debunked conspiracy theories on a wide range of topics — for instance, casting doubt on President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and suggesting that student survivors of the 2018 Parkland, Fla., school shooting were part of an anti-Trump plot.}:

More recently, Gateway Pundit has helped spread misinformation about the attack on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who was bludgeoned in the couple’s San Francisco home last year by an intruder intent on kidnapping his wife. It has also falsely claimed that U.S. aid money for Ukraine is being laundered and going into the pockets of Democrats.}:

But the site’s most notable focus in recent years has been promoting disproven narratives about election fraud.

Hoft created Gateway Pundit in 2004, inspired by the role that bloggers played in debunking a “60 Minutes” segment on George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, according to former associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations. Bloggers had been the first to point out that “60 Minutes” had unwittingly relied on falsified records in telling its story; CBS ultimately retracted the piece.

Hoft, 60, rarely grants interviews. But years ago, the Iowa native described in a message posted online ahead of a high school reunion how he started the site.

“So much has happened since I left Fort Dodge,” Hoft began his note to his former classmates at a Catholic school, explaining that “something exciting happened in late 2004. I started writing a little political blog” that, after a few years, “gained thousands of readers every day.”

The work started getting him invited on “paid trips to different conservative events around the world,” Hoft wrote, including a 2007 visit to Israel sponsored by a conservative political group. There he met Andrew Breitbart, who at the time was an editor at the Drudge Report. The two became friends and developed an appreciation for the power of the internet to take a small ember of a story and turn it into a conflagration.

“Jim is a direct descendant of Andrew Breitbart,” Bannon said, referencing the founder of the right-wing media site Breitbart News. “Remember, they’re both about citizen journalism, and Jim knows how to harness the energy of regular citizens.”

Trump’s candidacy was a boon for Hoft and for Gateway Pundit, which, according to a study conducted by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, became one of the most popular sites on the right in 2015-2016. Among those sites, the study found, “Gateway Pundit is in a class of its own, known for ‘publishing falsehoods and spreading hoaxes.’”

In 2020, Gateway Pundit became a key part of what researchers at the University of Washington and Stanford University among others deemed a “disinformation campaign” produced by “hyperpartisan media and political operatives” working “alongside ordinary people to produce and amplify misleading claims.”

Instead of operating from the top down, this kind of campaign seizes on the social media posts of “concerned citizens” and turns them into shareable pieces of content that can spread to different outlets and to powerful influencers, the researchers found.

In one illustrative example given in the study, Gateway Pundit helped circulate a photo posted on Twitter by a writer for conservative outlet the Blaze in September 2020. The photo purported to show 1,000 mail-in ballots found in a dumpster in Sonoma County, Calif.

“Big if true,” read the caption. Five hours later, Gateway Pundit weighed in with this headline: “EXCLUSIVE: California Man Finds THOUSANDS of Unopened Ballots in Garbage Dumpster — Workers Quickly Try to Cover Them Up.”

The county responded in a Facebook post: “This is not true.” Instead, the county said, the photo depicted old ballot envelopes from the November 2018 election that had been discarded in accordance with California law.

Gateway Pundit updated its story after the post: “The County of Sonoma put out a statement saying the ballots were from 2018. The county says the ballots were already opened. You can judge for yourself.”

In May, Hoft, alongside a co-director of a coronavirus vaccine skeptics group, sued the researchers, alleging that the entities colluded to “censor” speech by sharing their research with social media platforms as part of an attempted crackdown on misinformation. A representative for Stanford said the case, which is in its early stages, is “completely without merit.” A representative for the University of Washington declined to speak about ongoing litigation.

Election workers under threat

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Gateway Pundit enjoyed a social-media-fueled traffic spike similar to the one it had during the 2016 election. A German Marshall Fund analysis found that “verified account shares of its content” on Twitter increased ninefold from the first quarter of 2018 through the fourth quarter of 2020, reaching 7.2 million shares, more than for The Washington Post, NBC News or NPR. Nine of its 10 most-shared articles “included disinformation about voter fraud,” the analysis found.

One of Gateway Pundit’s highest-profile stories of 2020 was published after a volunteer Trump campaign attorney presented a misleading video during a post-election hearing in Georgia. The video purported to show that Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, her daughter, had tampered with ballots.

That day, Gateway Pundit published the first of 58 articles on the two women that would appear over the next year and a half, despite the fact that Georgia election officials had quickly debunked claims that the pair had engaged in election fraud. Gateway Pundit’s stories cast Freeman and Moss as “crooked” operatives who counted “illegal ballots from a suitcase stashed under a table!”

In 2021, the women sued Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft and Hoft’s twin brother, Joe, who is a frequent contributor to the site. Gateway Pundit and Jim and Joe Hoft filed a counterclaim, alleging that the case against them is designed to drive Gateway Pundit out of business. The counterclaim was dismissed in 2023.

The lawsuit by Freeman and Moss, which is awaiting trial, alleges that the falsehoods about them “have not only devastated their personal and professional reputations but instigated a deluge of intimidation, harassment, and threats that has forced them to change their phone numbers, delete their online accounts, and fear for their physical safety.”

In their response, the Hofts said articles in Gateway Pundit about Freeman and Moss were “either statements of opinion based on disclosed facts or statements of rhetorical hyperbole that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.”

A federal jury recently ordered that Giuliani pay the two women $148 million for his own false claims that they helped steal the election from Trump. His lawyer, Joseph D. Sibley IV, told jurors that Gateway Pundit had been “patient zero” for the false claims.

Not a smoking gun

Meisch, the Muskegon city clerk, fears she may come under the same kind of attack when people learn that she doesn’t believe she uncovered massive voter fraud in her city.

“I’m just worried people will turn on me,” she said.

Gateway Pundit’s Aug. 8 story about Muskegon, a formerly booming foundry town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan that Trump narrowly lost in 2016 and 2020, outlined a purported voter fraud conspiracy. The report was built on a police investigation that had been reported on three years earlier by local news outlets. The police had found no evidence of a broader effort to subvert the election, but referred the case to the FBI because the voter registration company at the center of the case was based out of state. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.

Gateway Pundit published a copy of the 2020 police report, which contained new details about the investigation, including that police had found guns in the storefront that the voter registration company had rented. Almost immediately after publication, other right-wing outlets picked up and amplified the piece. The same day the story was published, Bannon hosted Hoft on his daily podcast to discuss it. Over the next two days, then-Fox News host Lou Dobbs, conservative podcaster Joe Oltmann and Right Side Broadcasting, a pro-Trump streaming service, cited the story.

Dobbs called it a guide to “how the Marxist Dems stole Michigan.” Oltmann said the gun silencers, also known as suppressors, were evidence “of organized crime.” Bannon said the story showed that “demon” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, was a “liar.”

For the next 10 days, Gateway Pundit averaged a story a day on the topic, eventually publishing at least 40 pieces. During that period, an array of right-wing podcasters all discussed the story on their shows, including former Fox personality Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec, a far-right blogger.

Twelve days after the initial story was published, the Michigan attorney general’s office issued a statement responding to the report, citing its “false claims of election law violations.”

“Despite Gateway Pundit’s continuing claims to the contrary, the 2020 election has been thoroughly litigated and audited and has been proven well beyond a reasonable doubt that it was fair and accurate,” the statement read.

The voter-registration company employee who had handed in the faked registration applications to the clerk’s office had not filled them out herself; she was responsible for collecting the registration forms from many employees and submitting them in batches, according to Nessel’s office. Voters registration in Michigan are nonpartisan.

The state attorney general’s office said that while it had not ruled out that a crime may have been committed in Muskegon, numerous state agencies had investigated and none had uncovered evidence of successful fraudulent registrations because they had all been “intercepted and not filed into the state’s voter database.”

“This is once again, not a smoking gun for their long-debunked theories,” the statement read.

But Gateway Pundit was unbowed. The same day, the site published another piece on Muskegon and Hoft appeared on Bannon’s podcast again, calling Nessel’s statement “confirmation” of the Gateway Pundit story.

On Sept. 5, Trump posted about the story on Truth Social, without comment, and was reposted 3,300 times.

In late August, the Michigan Republican Party held a news conference in Lansing, the state capital, that party Chairwoman Kristina Karamo billed as an opportunity to “address the recent reports of election corruption uncovered in Michigan.”

“The constant questions surrounding our election system is an absolute threat to our republic,” Karamo said. “No one is going to continue to convince us that these are all just a bunch of anomalies.”

Gateway Pundit “slanted the story to make it seem that the attempt to interfere with the election was successful,” Karen Buie, the Muskegon County clerk, said in an interview. “There was an attempt. You can’t negate that. But it failed because we have systems in place.”

Meisch, the city clerk, said in an interview that she is bracing for even more mistrust of the system that she has worked for over 30 years to protect. Already, she said, paranoia among voters has been growing as baseless conspiracy theories spread about voting machines and drop boxes.

“We haven’t yet seen the full impact of the Gateway Pundit story,” said Meisch. “We won’t see that until the next [presidential] election.”

But for Gateway Pundit, the impact is already apparent. In July, the month before the Muskegon story, the site’s traffic fell below 700,000 unique visitors for the first time in years, according to Comscore.

In August, it more than doubled, to 1.5 million.

Clara Ence Morse and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

---

escalator but fox starts?

mma 1123 no twt

Fox News falsely reported last Wednesday that a car accident at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara, New York, was an act of terrorism. Much of the network’s coverage was based on reporting from correspondent Alexis McAdams, who attributed her information — later debunked — to anonymous law enforcement sources. A close look at Fox’s treatment of this event shows how the network manufactured a terrorist event out of thin air, and then blamed it on Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and their supporters.

Fox News personalities and guests made at least 97 claims alleging or speculating that the crash was an act of terrorism or an attack from when the incident happened at 11:30 a.m. ET, until about approximately 5:15 p.m. ET, when Gov. Hochul stated that the explosion was not related to terrorism. From when the network first began reporting the crash, around 1:15 p.m. ET, through Gov. Hochul's statement, Fox News aired 1 hour and 45 minutes of on-screen text that speculated that the car crash at the U.S.-Canada border was an act of terrorism or an attack. Several Fox guests and personalities backpedaled their statements over the course of the timeframe.

The incident occurred on November 22, one of the busiest travel days of the year, at a border checkpoint between the United States and Canada. By 9:40 p.m. ET Wednesday evening, the FBI had concluded its investigation, determining that “no terrorism nexus was identified.” Local police have now taken over the investigation, and a cause of the crash has yet to be released. The Niagara police chief criticized media outlets for spreading misinformation about the crash, which he said had “created significant and unnecessary anxiety in the community.”

Right-wing media outlets including Fox News have consistently fearmongered about the purported threat of Muslims and Arabs looking to cross into the United States to carry out violence following an attack in Israel on October 7 by the armed wing of Hamas, the Palestinian organization that governs the occupied Gaza Strip. An estimated 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack; Israel responded with a bombardment and invasion of Gaza that has reportedly killed more than 14,000 Palestinians, an estimated 10,000 of whom are women and children. Incidents of anti-Muslim discrimination in the United States have skyrocketed over this period.

### Fox quickly suggests Niagara crash was terrorism

Fox News was an early source to falsely claim the accident in Niagara was an act of terrorism, with the clear implication that it had been carried out by Islamists.

“High level police sources tell me this is an attempted terrorist attack,” Fox’s McAdams posted on X (formerly Twitter) at 1:53 p.m. ET on Wednesday, November 22. “Sources say the car was full of explosives. Both men inside dead.” By 3:16 p.m. ET, The New York Times reported, “A preliminary investigation has found that the car did not contain explosives,” which users on X added to McAdams’ post as a community note.

CitationFrom the official X account of Fox News correspondent Alexis McAdams

### Fox's claim spreads, and a Fox anchor suggests Hamas may be to blame

McAdams’ post spread fast. Fox News border reporter Bill Melugin shared McAdams’ post to his more than 350,000 followers and made his own post paraphrasing and citing his colleague. Melugin later deleted that post, but his repost of McAdams’ initial message is still viewable on his timeline.

Around the same time, Fox News anchor John Roberts read McAdams’ reporting on air, including information not contained in her post.

“Alexis McAdams is reporting that according to high-level police sources, the explosion was an attempted terrorist attack,” Roberts said. “A lot of explosives in the vehicle at the time, the two people who were in the car are deceased, one Border Patrol officer was injured. Driving from the U.S. apparently to Canada, and were trying to drive toward the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] building.”

Video

CitationFrom the November 22, 2023, edition of Fox News' America Reports

Roberts also suggested that Hamas might be behind the attack, claiming the “unrest in the Middle East that has spilled out past Israel” means there “could be operatives in this country sympathetic to terrorists who want to send a message here in the United States.”

Video

CitationFrom the November 22, 2023, edition of Fox News' America Reports

### Supercharged misinformation

From there it was off to the races, as other Fox News on-air talent and guests began pushing the narrative that the incident was an act of terrorism. “When you are talking about radical Islamic terrorism and the attacks against the United States, this has happened before," said senior correspondent Eric Shawn.

During the 2 p.m. hour of America Reports, Roberts speculated whether the two people involved were "acting alone” or if the explosion was “part of a larger plot.”

“How long have these people been in the country — are they American, are they foreign-born, are they radicalized, are they just trying to make a statement here?” he continued. “I mean, there’s so many possibilities.”

McAdams joined the program as well, reporting that there may have been a “second car possibly involved” and that the original car was “full of explosives, according to those high-level sources.” She added that “there’s going to be big crowds of people coming here to New York City for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade," insinuating it could be a target, and also repeated that the explosion was “a planned terrorist attack, according to high-level police sources who were on the ground."

Video

CitationFrom the November 22, 2023, edition of Fox News' America Reports

### Former Homeland Security adviser suggests “jihadists” may be behind it

Later that hour, former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend suggested, like Shawn before her, that Hamas or another group of “jihadists” may be to blame.

“We don't know yet whether or not this is attributed — can be attributed to Hamas or another terrorist group, but I will tell you from our own experience we know that this sort of bomb, this kind of a vehicle bomb is sort of a classic technique of, you know, jihadists,” Townsend said. “So I don't think law enforcement yet understands who it was or what the intended target was, but the detonation of an explosive, a vehicle explosive this size, is regrettably — look, there could have been many more casualties — but as I say, very much a hallmark of jihadists.”

Roberts interviewed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who used the opportunity to go on an anti-migrant tirade. “We have a number of people, by the tens of thousands, who have entered this country with bad intentions,” Ramaswamy said.

### Fox reporter stands by the terrorism claim even as it falls apart, before finally retracting it

At 4 p.m. ET, McAdams joined Your World with Neil Cavuto to double down on her initial reporting, only to then retract it — all over the course of a few minutes.

“We’ve been checking in with police sources who were very confident just in the past hour or so saying that they believe this was a terrorist attack there, at that border crossing,” McAdams said. But the story had already started to fall apart.

“The bomb techs, who have lots of experience, thought that this was an explosive — that the car, I was told, had explosives in it, several explosives were in that vehicle,” she continued. “Now they’re backing that up, saying it was the way that the car landed that caused such an explosion.”

Finally, McAdams was forced to retract her initial claims. “We started seeing those conflicting reports, but that’s what happens with breaking news,” McAdams said. “They get new information, they give it to us, and we bring it back to the viewers.”

“So as of now, they’ve walked back that it was a possible terrorist attack,” she concluded.

### Even after the report was retracted, Fox used the crash to attack Palestinians and migrants

Still, McAdams’ walkback didn’t prevent Fox from continuing to weaponize the incident against Palestinians and migrants.

On The Ingraham Angle, guest host Jason Chaffetz acknowledged the explosion might not have been an act of terrorism, but used it to argue for a nativist immigration policy anyway.

“Today's explosion at the border, regardless of the motive behind it, is a chilling reminder that we are all on high alert and living in a post-9/11 mindset, which means that our borders need to be secure,” Chaffetz said, adding, that the Biden administration doesn’t “have the political will to actually shut down the border."

Later that evening, Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany insinuated that it was only natural to assume the explosion was tied to Hamas or connected with Palestinian solidarity demonstrations.

“The crash was so fierce and in such a sensitive location that everyone's mind of course went to the same place — terror,” McEnany said on Jesse Watters Primetime. “With war in the Middle East, violent domestic protests, radicals calling for days of jihad, the FBI director telling us to be vigilant — we are all on edge.”

### Fox's false reporting spread beyond Fox

McAdams’ misinformation reached far beyond the confines of Fox News.

On The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, host Clay Travis interviewed former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie about the incident, also citing McAdam’s reporting. “Alexis McAdams, who is at Fox News, says: 'High-level police sources tell me this is an attempted terror attack,'” Travis told his listeners.

“This should not be surprising to any of us,” Christie concluded.

On X, a paid X Premium account called The Insider Paper posted Fox News’ supposed confirmation that the car crash was an “attempted terrorist attack,” which was reposted by right-wing media figures including Richard Grenell and Colin Rugg, racking up thousands of reposts and millions of views.

Right-wing sites American Greatness, The Gateway Pundit, The Daily Caller, and PJ Media also amplified McAdams’ false report, only to be forced to update their stories after she retracted her initial claims.

There was no terrorist attack at the U.S.-Canadian border on Wednesday, November 22. But Fox News’ manufactured panic was very real, and risks exacerbating the threats that Muslims and Arabs in the United States already face.

### Methodology...

---

The unsubstantiated claim comes from a Gateway Pundit post that was soon shared by Trump on Truth Social; the photos are purportedly workout progress photos someone posted to Engoron’s high school alumni newsletter online, but it has not been confirmed that it’s him in the pictures.

With a “censored” bar covering the male figure’s nipples, Curanaj attempted to shame Engoron: “If there was a shirtless photo of me I would lose my job, right? Because Newsmax would say, ‘What kind of judgment does Lidia have to do something like that?’ And he just recently did it. This is not something he did many years ago.”

mma 11 23

---

fox digital as fever swamp incubator //NY post?

### How the right ran with a Fox hoax about a Marine veteran’s burial

08/28/23

...fox News published a false accusation that the Pentagon forced a Gold Star family to pay $60,000 for the transportation of remains

As U.S. and NATO forces withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, and conducted massive airlift operations to evacuate civilians fleeing the Taliban, at least one suicide bomber killed 13 American service members and as many as 170 civilians outside at crowded entry gate at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. One of the American Marines killed, Sgt. Nicole Gee, had previously been photographed tending to a wounded baby at the airport and had spoken positively of her role in the evacuation effort. Her remains arrived in her hometown of Roseville, California, on August 29 of that year, and were later transported to Arlington National Cemetery and laid to rest.

- On July 25, a Fox News Digital article claimed that Gee’s family was “forced to pay to ship” the body of a slain Marine. In the article — which has since been deleted from Fox’s website — Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) told Fox that he was “enraged to learn that the Department of Defense had placed a heavy financial burden” on Gee’s family, which secured the $60,000 transportation fee from a nonprofit organization. Fox News Digital, [7/25/23 via Internet Archive]
- Mills linked to the Fox article in a social media post and wrote, “At no time should our Gold Star families be financially responsible for burying their loved ones and American heroes.” Twitter/X, [7/25/23]
## Military-focused news outlets were quick to refute the claims in the Fox story
News outlets focused on the military, veterans, and service families were the first to speak with Gee’s family directly about the false Fox story, and quickly pushed back on Mill’s false claims. Their reporting made clear that Fox neglected to fact-check or substantiate his statements.

- Statements from the Marine’s family first reported by the military-focused publication Task & Purpose asserted that the family never contacted the Department of Defense about financing the relocation, nor received any bills. Task & Purpose contacted Gee's family and was first to report their statements refuting Fox’s story. The statements were later confirmed by The Sacramento Bee, the family's hometown newspaper. The family stated that the flight was organized and “donated” by a non-profit organization and a Pentagon representative confirmed that the military had “no record of any incurred charges or any pending requests for reimbursement associated with the transportation of Sgt. Gee’s remains to Arlington National Cemetery.” Task & Purpose, [7/26/23]
- The Marine Corps Times repeated the family statements collected by Task & Purpose and further clarified that there was “no record of any such cost for the family” over the transportation and burial of the remains. Its coverage specifically called out both Mills and Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) for attacking the Department of Defense over the nonsense claims. Marine Corps Times, [7/27/23]
## Fox quietly scrubbed the false report and eventually apologized to the family
After pressure from the Marine Corps, and nearly a month of back and forth between representatives from the network and the Department of Defense, Fox issued an apology to the fallen Marine’s family for the false story – but never published a correction.

- Fox News, according to Military.com, edited the article’s headline and content “without noting a correction,” and later removed the entire article containing Mills’ original false claims. Military.com further reported that after Gee’s family said they were never billed by the Pentagon and refuted Mills’ false claims, he issued a statement on July 27 claiming that the family was “confused in their time of grief” and continued to attack the Department of Defense. Military.com, [7/28/23]
- Military.com also detailed the Marine Corps’ month-long attempt to convince Fox to retract and correct its “false” story. According to Military.com, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps had requested that Fox News apologize directly to the family and insisted that Fox fully correct its false story. Maj. James Stenger wrote in an email to Fox after it changed its article, “This headline correction is still misleading and your story is still false.” He also wrote that Fox was “using the grief of a family member of a fallen Marine to score cheap clickbait points.” Military.com, [8/23/23; The Washington Post, 8/27/23]
- On August 26, CNN reported that Fox News had finally apologized to Gee’s family, with a network spokesperson asserting that the false story had been “addressed internally.” Although Fox had scrubbed the article from its site at least a month prior, there has been no formal retraction or correction issued. Fox, in a statement, said, “We sincerely apologize to the Gee family” and said its fake story was “now unpublished.” CNN, [8/26/23]
## Right-wing media ran with Fox’s story before it was deleted
Although searches of the SnapStream video database showed that Fox News never aired this false story on its cable programs, many other right-wing media outlets picked up the story and used it to attack the Biden administration. This included conservative social media figures, right-wing blogs, and Fox competitors Newsmax and One America News. Right-wing media often used the story as a vehicle to pursue their own petty criticisms of the Biden administration’s policies, including attacking health care for transgender military personnel, criticizing military aid to Ukraine to defend itself against the ongoing Russian invasion, and objecting to reimbursement for military personnel travel costs for abortion care.

- Chronicles Magazine editor Pedro L. Gonzalez: “The family of Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan, was forced to come up with $60,000 to transport Gee’s remains to Arlington National Cemetery because the Pentagon wouldn’t pay for it.” Twitter/X, [7/25/23]
- Talk radio host Dana Loesch: “One of the 13 Gold Star families who lost their daughter in Afghanistan was forced to pay to ship her body back — until nonprofit stepped in to pay $60,000 to move Marine Corps Sgt Nicole Gee's remains to Arlington National Cemetery.” Twitter/X, [7/25/23]
- The Right Scoop: “HORRIBLE: Biden Pentagon FORCED Gold Star family to pay to ship fallen Marine killed in Afghan withdrawal to Arlington.” The article added: “What a freaking slap in the face!” The Right Scoop, [7/25/23]
- The anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok posted: “The Biden admin is funding drag shows in Equador but refused to pay to bring a dead Marine’s body home.” Twitter/X, [7/26/23]
- Former Fox producer Kyle Becker: “NEW: The military community is furious at the Biden administration upon discovering a Gold Star Family was forced to bear the cost of transporting its slain daughter's remains after she was killed serving her country in Afghanistan.” Twitter/X, [7/26/23]
- Newsmax host Chris Salcedo: “The family of a fallen service member killed during Biden's disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal says they were forced to pay thousands of dollars to move the body of their loved one to their final resting place.” Salcedo concluded, “Another sign of how far our government has fallen.” Newsmax, *The Chris Salcedo Show*, [7/26/23]
- Newsmax host Carl Higbie introduced a segment pushing the fake story, saying, “This one’s actually near and dear to me as a veteran.” Higbie said that the fake story that Gee’s family “was forced to pay 60 grand” to bury her in Arlington National Cemetery “will permanently tarnish the reputation of our Defense Department” and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Newsmax’s Dick Morris joined in the outrage. Newsmax, *Carl Higbie Frontline*, [7/26/23]
- OAN host Dan Ball reported the “disturbing details” that Gee’s family “had to pay to have her remains moved,” and applauded Mills “for finding this out, for bringing this to the nation’s attention.” Ball lamented that legitimate news organizations weren’t covering the story at the time, linked the false story to a decline in American patriotism, and interviewed a Republican congressional candidate about the fake story. The candidate used the false story to rant against medical care for transgender military personnel. OAN, *Real America with Dan Ball*, [7/26/23]
- Talk radio host Lars Larson: “Joe Biden is now giving billions for Ukraine but nothing for a vet who died protecting our nation?” On his radio show, Larson repeated the lie that Gee’s family “was denied the usual support by the Pentagon for transportation of her remains to her final resting place in Arlington.” Larson added, “This is absolutely crazy,” and claimed that the Biden administration is undercutting and dishonoring military personnel. Alpha Media, *The Lars Larson Show*, [7/26/23]
- Townhall: “Family of Marine killed in Afghanistan forced to pay $60,000 bill thanks to Biden Pentagon policy change.” Townhall, [7/26/23]
- The Western Journal: “Family of Marine killed in Afghanistan stuck with $60,000 bill after Pentagon policy change.” The Western Journal, [7/26/23]
- Gateway Pundit: “As Joe Biden slept: Family of slain Marine at Kabul airport was forced to fundraise $60,000 to move daughter’s remains to Arlington Cemetery.” Gateway Pundit, [7/26/23]
- Townhall: “Biden cut a massive check to Ukraine after forcing a family to pay $60,000 to move soldier’s remains.” Townhall, [7/27/23]
- The Federalist: “For the Pentagon, subsidizing abortions takes priority over transporting service members to their final resting place.” The Federalist, [7/27/23]
- Salcedo returned to the fake story to discuss a lack of veterans benefits with a guest. Introducing the author of a book about veterans benefits, Salcedo asked, “Is this how far our elected leaders and our government have fallen?” Newsmax, *The Chris Salcedo Show*, [7/28/23]
## Numerous Republican lawmakers and officials also promoted the fake story
Like many of the right-wing media outlets that shared the false story, Republican lawmakers used it to air their grievances about the provision of health care to military personnel, the administration’s immigration policy, and military aid to Ukraine.

- Rep. Mark Green (R-TN): “So we are paying to fly illegal immigrants to the destination of their choice but we can’t fly a hero’s body home? This administration is totally lost.” Twitter/X, [7/25/23]
- Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ): “Biden’s Pentagon is eager to fund abortion travel, genital mutilations & a proxy war in Europe. But when a Marine was killed during the Admin’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal, her family was forced to pay to move her body. Despicable.” Twitter/X, [7/25/23]
- Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler: “Really great work by Florida Congressman @CoryMillsFL⁩ on this!” Twitter/X, [7/25/23]
- Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL): “The Pentagon is providing taxpayer funding for elective abortions, but not to transport our fallen heroes to their final resting place. This just shows how extreme the Pentagon’s unprecedented new abortion policy really is.” Twitter/X, [7/26/23]
- Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL): “This is sickening. Thank you to Honoring Our Fallen, a group that stepped up amid the Biden Administration’s absence.” Twitter/X, [7/26/23]
- Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT): “Under Biden's new Pentagon policy, a Gold Star Family was left to pay to transport and bury their loved one at Arlington National Cemetery. Absolutely despicable.” Twitter/X, [7/26/23]
- Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA): “Unacceptable. Congress cannot allow this to happen again.” Twitter/X, [7/26/23]
- Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA): “Sergeant Nicole Gee is an American hero who lost her life in the Afghanistan withdrawal. It is unfathomable that the Pentagon would decline to cover the cost of transporting her to her final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery.” The letter that Kiley attached to his social media post was cited by Sacramento media outlets, which mistakenly pushed the false story. Twitter/X, [7/26/23]
## Fox and related media outlets previously spread a hoax that veterans were kicked out of housing in New York
Fox’s creation of this fake story near the second anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal echoes another bogus story in which the New York Post — which, like Fox News, is a Murdoch media property — falsely reported that homeless veterans were kicked out of hotels to make room for asylum-seekers. Fox widely covered that hoax before airing multiple similar retractions within days. Although multiple Fox programs aired retractions, some others continued to promote the fake story as genuine even after Mid Hudson News, a local news outlet, had completely debunked it.

---

How the border-cop-to-pundit pipeline fuels anti-immigrant coverage | Media Matters for America

for Tom Homan, the answer is always simple, no matter the question: Harsh punishment and brutal tactics get the job done. As a lifelong cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who has found a new career as a Fox News pundit, Homan deals in absolutes, regardless of his job title.

“Look, when it came to zero tolerance, it worked,” Homan said in a May 2020 interview, explaining and justifying the Trump administration’s family separation border policy, which he'd been advocating for since his time in the Obama administration. “Law enforcement uses zero tolerance across this country all the time, whether it’s drug enforcement or prostitution.”

:{:{Homan is one of three prominent border cops turned right-wing pundits who exert considerable influence in conservative media and policy circles. Along with Todd Bensman and Jaeson Jones, both former officers at the Texas Department of Public Safety, Homan pushes his hardline nativist messaging to any and all audiences that will have him. He and Bensman are both fellows at organizations founded by John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.”}:

...?

As ex-cops, Homan, Bensman, and Jones speak with a practitioner's authority. Their claimed expertise, supposedly gleaned from firsthand experience, allows them to mask xenophobia as hard-won knowledge about public safety. They provide a faux-empirical justification for anti-migrant policies, giving viewers a sense that they’re getting the unvarnished truth from people who have lived it. (In reality, border officers are frequently ignorant about basic immigration facts.) But the role these three play isn’t to inform; it’s to reinforce existing anti-immigrant prejudices and provide scaffolding for new laws and policies restricting immigration.

Tom Homan: From family separation architect to Fox News stardom

Of this cop-turned-pundit trio, Homan is the most influential. He has made at least 357 appearances on weekday Fox News since becoming a contributor in August 2018, affording him a massive platform to influence conservative thinking about immigration. Homan’s history in border enforcement — which dates back to 1984, when he became a Border Patrol agent and later joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service — is integral to the authority he commands among conservative activists, politicians, and audiences.

One Fox appearance from 2019 shows how Homan uses his sway to legitimize outlandish proposals — in this case, sending the U.S. military to Mexico to target drug cartels. In late November of that year, then-President Donald Trump floated the idea of designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, which could potentially facilitate operations into the country. Days later, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade interviewed Homan and asked about a recent mass shooting in Mexico that left 21 people dead.

“Tom, I know you say we should go help — but don’t we need to be asked?” Kilmeade said to begin the segment.

“Well, yeah. I think that would be great, and I think the Mexican president is going to ask,” Homan replied. “He has proven he can’t handle it. Mexico has failed at handling these cartels for the last three decades. They can’t succeed without us.”

Homan then approvingly referenced the U.S. invasion of Panama to oust its then-leader Manuel Noriega before arguing that Mexican drug cartels should be formally designated as terrorist organizations to empower federal law enforcement — and presumably the U.S. military — to wage war against Mexican drug cartels on their home soil.

“If we declare them [Mexican drug cartels] a terror group, what changes?” Kilmeade asked. “What does that legally let us do?”

“I think that helps the U.S. do some out-of-the-country operations to attack these organizations,” Homan responded.

If there was any confusion about where Homan stood, in its write-up of the interview, FoxNews.com characterized Homan’s remarks as “agreeing that the cartels should be designated as a terror organization by the U.S."

Homan wasn’t the only conservative pushing that idea, but he was an early adopter. Just as importantly, his years of appearances since then on Fox News have helped solidify the racist ideas used to justify the proposed terrorist group designation: that the United States is being invaded by migrants, and that those migrants are responsible for bringing a majority of the fentanyl that arrives in the country — which is factually incorrect.

Trump eventually backed off his threat to designate the cartels as terrorist organizations. But the idea of using such designations to confer authority on federal authorities to bomb or invade Mexico has essentially become a consensus position on the right. Nearly every candidate in the Republican presidential primary, for instance, sounds indistinguishable from Homan on immigration policy, with each of them pushing for hardline restrictionist policies that are justified by dehumanizing language about immigrants “invading” the southern border.

Nearly every candidate in the Republican presidential primary sounds indistinguishable from Homan on immigration policy.

Homan's hawkishness has been rewarded, as the conservative media and policy ecosystem has warmly embraced him since his departure from the Trump administration. In addition to his employment at Fox News, he was named a visiting fellow at the influential Heritage Foundation in 2022. He’s also a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the nonprofit legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a branch of the Tanton network that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.

Given Homan's association with that Tanton-founded organization, it’s not surprising that he has repeatedly pushed the great replacement theory, the racist idea that liberal elites are bringing people of color to the United States to replace white people. On October 11, Homan appeared on the show of a Hitler-praising antisemite where he claimed that the Biden administration is trying to purposely destroy the country by opening the borders to bring in “millions” of “future Democratic voters.”

Homan has pursued commercial endeavors as well. In 2020, Hachette Book Group published Homan’s Defend the Border & Save Lives, complete with a front-cover blurb from his Fox News colleague Mark Levin. He is a featured speaker at JL Wilkinson Consulting, a right-wing talent agency that also represents far-right cops Sheriff David Clarke and Sheriff Mark Lamb.

Homan also founded Homeland Strategic Consulting, which pulled in over $83,000 in consulting fees for services provided to Arizona businessman and failed Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Money began flowing Homan’s way just four months after he publicly endorsed Lamon’s candidacy. (Homan denied that the endorsement was related to the consulting contract.)

Homan has extensive links to extremist organizations and individuals, beyond his affiliation with the Tanton network. Earlier this year, Homan spoke virtually at an event honoring Mel K, a QAnon influencer and conspiracy theorist who has spread lies about the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and denied the results of the 2020 election.

In March 2022, HuffPost reported that Homan had been scheduled to speak at an event organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. When confronted by HuffPost about his appearance at the racist conference, Homan blamed his assistant for arranging the appearance and the fact that “so many names of conservative groups sound the same."

Homan then claimed that he left the conference after reading that Fuentes was supportive of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but he stopped short of criticizing the openly bigoted group. “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” Homan said, referring to Fuentes and his racist supporters, known as groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know."

Later that year, HTom Trentooman co-founded an anti-immigration organization that bears the same name as Homan’s book, Defend the Border & Save Lives, with fellow Islamophobe . In addition to helping Homan pilot the new group, Trento, who once told an audience at a 9/11 commemoration in 2013 that the goal of “all Islam” is to “get every single one of us to convert to Islam,” also runs an organization called The United West, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as an anti-Muslim group.

This March, Homan was named CEO of election denialist organization The America Project, founded by far-right multimillionaire Patrick Byrne. In addition to his duties as CEO, Homan also heads the group’s Border911 initiative, which has sponsored anti-migrant events throughout the country. The organization frequently posts videos of its rallies on Rumble, an extreme right-wing YouTube clone. Newsmax’s Jaeson Jones is also part of Border911, and he spoke alongside Homan at many of the group’s recent events.

Homan frequently denies that he has any political agenda, instead couching his preferences simply as apolitical enforcement of existing laws enacted by Congress. In 2018, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Homan if ICE’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy, a policy Homan was overseeing at the time, was “humane."

“I think it’s the law,” Homan replied.

“It may be the law, it may be the policy, but is it humane?” Blitzer asked again.

“I think it’s the law, and I’m a law enforcement [officer],” Homan reiterated. “I must follow the law.”

But for Homan, not all laws are meant to be followed. In April, he headlined a Border911 fundraiser with Donald Trump at the former president’s residence and club Mar-a-Lago to raise money for families of people who participated in the January 6 insurrection. Speaking to the crowd, Homan reminisced about an early conversation in which Trump told him to “enforce the laws, that's all I'm asking you to do.”

“We kicked ass,” Homan reflected. “We kicked ass.”

Todd Bensman: Not an expert on immigration, by his own admission

Like Homan, Bensman has leveraged his history in law enforcement into a new career as an immigration restrictionist pundit and writer. Most of his work appears on the website for the Center for Immigration Studies — another branch of the anti-immigrant Tanton network — but he’s also written two books, and has published pieces at The Daily Wire, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, and other prominent conservative news outlets. He’s been on Fox News and Fox Business combined at least 27 times since 2017, according to a search of an internal Media Matters database and Bensman’s official website.

As Media Matters previously reported, Bensman has also appeared on extremist streaming programs as well. In June, he appeared on The Stew Peters Show, whose eponymous host is a white nationalist. He’s also been on at least three programs or platforms with ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, including: The Mel K Show, Making Sense of the Madness (hosted by QAnon supporter Sean Morgan), and The Debbie Aldrich Show, from Creative Destruction Media, an outfit that in addition to endorsing QAnon also posts racist and anti-LGBTQ content.

In 2018, the Center for Immigration Studies brought Bensman on as a senior national security fellow. From his first days at the organization, Bensman stoked fears about terrorist “infiltration” at the southern border, a framing he regularly returns to despite evidence that conservatives wildly overstate the perceived threat as a way to demonize migrants.

In mid-September, Bensman spoke at a conference that also hosted John Eidsmoe, a retired Air Force officer who once spoke at a conference organized by a white supremacist group and has praised Confederate leader Jefferson Davis and pro-slavery advocate John C. Calhoun. QAnon-promoter Alex Newman was also a featured speaker at the event.

A granular look at how Bensman’s misinformation traveled is instructive.

Bensman frequently adopts a flood-the-zone style of content production, using his Center for Immigration Studies-sponsored trips to the border to create images and videos that confirm the bigoted prior assumptions of his intended audience. One of his recent successful operations was seeding a myth that the Biden administration was providing all migrant families with $2,200 monthly cost-of-living checks. Experts fact-checked the claim as false in real time, and news organizations have long debunked earlier versions of the persistent rumor,but a granular look at how Bensman’s misinformation traveled is instructive.

On September 6, Bensman posted a video on X purportedly showing a Border Patrol agent saying migrant families “get a check every month” of “about $2,200.” Bensman characterized the imaginary program as a “scam,” but acknowledged that he would have “to independently confirm” its existence, which he did not do. Instead, Bensman repeated the false claim three days later, even while admitting the accusation was “short of details” and “unverified.”

In the meantime, the conspiracy theory-amplifying pipeline kicked into overdrive. The same day he first posted on X about the supposed checks, Bensman went on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and continued to spread the myth.

Video

CitationFrom the September 6, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“The government gives them cost-of-living checks, for one family per month: $2,200. So if the father brings one of the kids and the mother brings another of the kids, and they just act like two families, they’re pulling in $4,400 a month, according to that Border Patrol agent,” Bensman told Bannon. Bensman again acknowledged he hadn’t confirmed whether it was true or not, but that didn’t stop him from spending more than two minutes spreading the misinformation.

ESCALATOR:]

On September 7, junk news site The Gateway Pundit picked up the story, citing Bensman as its primary source.

The same day, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy parroted Bensman’s conspiracy theory, telling Fox’s audience that the Biden administration was “paying $2,200 per family."

Republican politicians spread the myth even further. “We are literally subsidizing our own invasion,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said on X, reposting The Gateway Pundit’s story. Former Trump official and Christian nationalist Russ Vought, a well-connected policy adviser on Capitol Hill, then reposted Gaetz.

Rep. Lauren Boebert repeated the $2,200-per-month claim on X/Twitter without any sourcing. When asked by local 9News Denver where she got her information, Boebert’s press office sent a link to the Gateway Pundit story. (9News’s ruling on Boebert’s statement? “Not true.”)

IFrame Content

On September 10, Bensman obliquely walked back his initial claim, without clearly admitting he was wrong. He later defended himself to The Washington Post, saying: “I was hoping to get to the bottom of it. Maybe an expert would send a link or explain it.”

At least one element of Bensman’s story is true. As he inadvertently acknowledged, he is not an expert. He is a propagandist, and his distortions are all the more potent in right-wing media because of his history as a cop.

Jaeson Jones: Bringing the war on terror to Mexico

On May 19, Newsmax border correspondent Jaeson Jones posted a promotional video for The America Project and Border911 to his Instagram account. In the video, Jones, sitting alongside Homan, directly addresses Border Patrol agents.

“I’m Jaeson Jones, retired captain from the Texas Department of Public Safety, and someone who’s out there on the border every day working with you guys to try to get out what you’re going through to the American people,” Jones said.

No viewer would expect Newsmax, which has sought to outflank Fox News from the right, to adhere to journalistic standards of neutrality and balance, but it’s still remarkable that Jones would openly admit that his goal as a correspondent is to show what his fellow border cops are “going through” rather than gather facts. By his own admission, he’s not covering a story — he’s “working with” the Texas Department of Public Safety and Border Patrol agents.

When Jones, Homan, and Bensman speak, they are speaking on behalf of border cops and law enforcement writ large, acting as representatives of what journalist Jessica Pishko describes as a “baronial class” of public employees who enjoy special rights and privileges. These ex-cops are pushing the ideological and material interests of that class, with the end result of expanding law enforcement budgets and political influence. The explosion of federal spending on immigration and border enforcement stretches back for decades, but the fearmongering that Homan, Bensman, and Jones push has the predictable effect of directing ever more public funds to this repressive apparatus.

That dynamic explains, in part, why — like Homan — Jones has repeatedly called for the U.S. government to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Such a move would almost certainly open up vast resources for state and federal border officers, in addition to conferring more political power and legal authority on those departments.

In fact, Jones advocated for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations well before Trump ever publicly floated the idea.

Jones advocated for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations well before Trump ever publicly floated the idea.

During a June 18, 2019, interview with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business, Jones described cartels as “global violent networks who are acting as terrorist organizations around the world.” He added that several cartels had “gone through a quantum leap in capabilities,” in part because of “what they’ve learned from the FARC, which is a designated terrorist organization."

Jones was referring to the Colombian guerilla group that the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization from 1997 to 2021, and the reference wasn’t incidental. In the early days of the war on terror, the group served a crucial role for another federal organization, the Drug Enforcement Agency.

As journalist Trevor Aaronson has described, in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government began funneling money into any project that could be described as counterterrorism. With Washington focused on global terrorism, the DEA, a key combatant in the previous generation’s war on drugs, found itself sidelined and relatively starved of federal funds. To bolster its raison d'être, the agency invented a new category of crime — narcoterrorism — and used the FARC, a designated terrorist organization funded in part by drug trafficking, as a pry-bar to access all the counterterrorism money sloshing around Washington at the time.

Under the DEA’s new mission, agents and their informants pretended to be members of the FARC and engaged in elaborate sting operations targeting purported terrorists. Given the FARC’s designation as a terror group, the DEA could claim that it stopped a would-be terrorist if its undercover agents convinced FARC rebels to act on their behalf. (Nevermind that they would have manufactured those would-be terrorists.) With federal resources on the line, fighting terrorism was as much a bureaucratic turf war as it was about waging any other kind of war.

As a former counterterrorism official at Texas Department of Public Safety, Jones likely would have known that specific history. More broadly, he surely understood how the federal funding game is played, and he kept pushing the new line. In a July 2019 interview, also on Lou Dobbs Tonight, Jones was even more explicit in calling for cartels to be labeled terror groups, and again referenced the FARC.

“These are terrorist organizations that are no longer just drug trafficking organizations,” Jones said. “They have evolved into something much larger."

“The U.S. government has not transitioned yet to look at them as terrorists and to designate them as terrorists but yet, they employ the FARC — that is a designated terrorist organization,” he added.

Jones repeated his calls that August, September, October, and November — when Trump publicly contemplated moving forward — and then again the following December, February, March, and June, all on Lou Dobbs Tonight. In the September segment, Jones told Dobbs he had lobbied four members of Congress, “trying to get this foreign terrorist designation.” In 2021, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to push for the change, and he continues to agitate for it from his new perch at Newsmax.

The once-fringe idea is now largely accepted as conventional wisdom on the right. Jones and Homan played a significant role in normalizing it, specifically by appealing to their identities as former cops. If their pitch is successful under the next Republican administration, their former agencies would almost certainly benefit handsomely from their advocacy.

The porous border between the hard-right and mainstream media

Homan, Bensman, and Jones are not the only former cops in the right-wing media and think tank ecosystem. One of Bensman’s colleagues at the Center for Immigration Studies, Jon Feere, is a former ICE and DHS official whom NPR quoted in June. Randy Clark, a writer at Breitbart, is retired from Border Patrol. Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protections, is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and is a member of Homan's Border911. The list goes on. These figures agitate for nativist immigration policies, channeling reactionary law enforcement attitudes into content served up in conservative media. The answer for them is always zero tolerance, harsher punishments, and more funding and discretion for cops.

The cop-turned-pundit pipeline isn’t unique to conservative outlets, but these figures loom especially large in their reactionary ecosystem given the centrality of nativist politics in the age of Trump. The programs where they appear, especially on Fox News, often set the tone for how mainstream outlets frame immigration, as mainstream outlets frequently adopt language that there is a “crisis” at the border.

One recent example perfectly illustrates how the Tanton network’s reactionary messaging seeps into mainstream news coverage. In mid-September, Washington Post columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria called for the president to “use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending."

To support this extreme and seemingly illegal position, Zakaria cited Nolan Rappaport, a former Department of Homeland Security official who now writes xenophobic op-eds at The Hill. Zakaria identified Rappaport only as “a longtime congressional expert on the issue,” but there’s much more to the story.

One recent example perfectly illustrates how the Tanton network’s reactionary messaging seeps into mainstream news coverage.

Rappaport, as it turns out, appears to be profoundly influenced by the organizations that employ Homan and Bensman. Rappaport blurbed Bensman’s first book, has cited him in at least three recent op-eds, and cited the Center for Immigration Studies in another. Rappaport frequently directs his stories, which he posts on X, at the Center for Immigration Studies’ policy director by tagging her username and at the account for Immigration Reform Law Institute, where Homan is a legal fellow. The Immigration Reform Law Institute then regularly reposts Rappaport’s stories to its own feed.

The pipeline from the Center for Immigration Studies and Bensman, and the Immigration Reform Law Institute and Homan, to Rappaport to Zakaria is invisible to the average reader. But Homan, for his part, sees it clearly.

“Please support CIS,” Homan said at the end of the conversation where he defended zero tolerance punishment against sex workers, people who use drugs, and families who crossed the southern border. He was speaking with Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “When I was the director of ICE, even when I was running ERO — Enforcement and Removal Operations, number three in ICE — CIS was a great help to the rule of law and helping ICE do their job."

“And they’re on the right side of the argument, folks, and we’re in a fight for our — we’re in a fight for our lives right now,” he continued. “We’re in a fight for this country. CIS gets it. They’re on the right side of the issues and they’re helping shape immigration in the future. So please support them.”

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https://www.alternet.org/far-right-womens-cult-like/

as far-right extremists continue to coalesce around Donald Trump and his third run for president, women, some of whom were once derided as "mommy bloggers," are taking an increasingly larger role as the faces of the movement.

According to a report from theGuardian, from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to "martyr" Ashli Babbitt, who lost her life in the Jan. 6 riot, increasing numbers of women are recruiting or being used as recruiting tools to draw in other women that one researcher claims are susceptible to finding cults appealing.

As the Guardian's MacKenzie Ryan wrote, “alt-right” women have "shifted to influential public-facing roles in rightwing media production and far-right national politics," as they defend the rioters who stormed the Capitol or ostensibly use the protection of children to push a far-right agenda like the controversial Moms for Liberty."

According to Dr. Sandra Jeppesen of Lakehead University, "[Far-right women] have a lot more power than you think,” adding, "I think women definitely want power. I don’t think ‘alt-right’ women go into politics for altruistic reasons.”

Case in point, the rapid ascension of lawmaker Taylor Greene, with the Guardian reporting, "In the days leading up to 6 January 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist congresswoman from Georgia, paid tens of thousands of dollars for a promoted Parlor post stating the need for a grassroots army and created a Photoshopped image of her and Donald Trump. The post, used as an election fundraiser for Greene’s campaign, garnered millions of views and played a strong role in mobilizing people to the Capitol,Jeppesen explained."

The protection of children is a central selling point to recruiting more adherents with Iowyth Ulthiin, a PhD student at Toronto Metropolitan University, explaining, "Who doesn’t love children and want them to be safe?”

The Guardian report states, "The far right can take the same recruitment posture online. Ulthiin’s research has seen women in the 'mommy blogger aesthetic' on Instagram, known for sharing photos of 'lovely, enviable lives', become subtly political and then escalate rapidly into conspiracy theories."

Ulthiin suggested, "women who fall into the far-right trap often have similar psychological profiles, stating, "It would be a similar crowd to those who are in danger of joining a cult." [link]

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BB 8 23

Remember when conspiracy theories were fun (and usually harmless) entertainment for those of us who appreciated kook culture and the fringes of thought and reason? Sadly, those days are over. Now, as these ideas spread and infect so quickly across social platforms, they can undermine science, destroy trust, polarize us, and incite violence. As part of a research project "to understand why and how conspiracy theories persist and persevere over time on social media," sociologist Christine Abdalla Mikhaeil at the IÉSEG School of Management and colleagues outlined the four stages of how conspiracy theories are embraced and then spread:

1. Identity confirmation: Users consult and view different types of content (via fora, mainstream media and social media) to actively verify and confirm their own views.

2. Identity affirmation: Individuals disassociate or pick selectively information from their original sources of information (mentioned above). In the case of "Pizzagate," conspiracy-minded users took pictures from the Clinton Foundation's support work in Haiti, created visual materials supporting supposed connections to a sex-trafficking ring, and then posted them on Reddit and 4chan. While obviously altered and taken out of context, the images were widely shared to promote the conspiracy theory.

3. Identity protection: Individuals safeguard their "informational environment" by actively seeking to discredit individuals or organizations that present contradictory evidence, for example with antagonistic or negative posts or comments.

4. Identity enactment: Individuals seek broader social approval from a more mainstream audience. This can also lead to efforts to recruit more people and call for violent actions, leveraging the community userbase.

"The 4 Stages of Conspiracy Theory Escalation on Social Media" (SciAm)

"Explaining online conspiracy theory radicalization: A second-order affordance for identity-driven escalation" (Information Systems Journal)

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MMA 8 23

Conspiracy theories are increasingly crossing from the fever swamps of Spanish-language media like Telegram onto mainstream social media platforms and news networks like Americano Media. For instance, on the July 11 edition of Battleground Americano, host Jesús Márquez claimed that a so-called “New World Order” and the elites seek to manipulate all countries worldwide through international institutions, that they aim to “enslave the majority of the population,” and that “climate change is an excuse to drive changes that favor the elite.”

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MMA 8 23

Following the indictment of disgraced former President Donald Trump on federal charges for his attempt to remain in office after losing the 2020 election, mainstream media outlets are seemingly bending over backward to seek commentary from Republican sources, many of whom end up spreading misinformation and spin, or simply wasting what could have been useful airtime.

Some outlets privileged Trump’s bogus argument that the indictment violates his First Amendment rights

Politico published an article with the headline “Trump lawyer blasts indictment as attack on free speech,” repeating, without context of its own, those misleading claims by Trump attorney John Lauro. Politico simply transcribed claims Lauro made in a CNN interview: “This is an attack on free speech and political advocacy. And there’s nothing that’s more protected under the First Amendment than political speech. … Our defense is going to be focusing on the fact that what we have now is an administration that has criminalized the free speech and advocacy of a prior administration.” Politico also quoted from a Lauro interview on Fox News: “This is unprecedented. It affects not just Donald Trump — it affects every American who now realizes that the First Amendment is under assault.” Politico, [8/2/23]
The Hill quoted Rudy Giuliani saying that special counsel Jack Smith’s “legacy” will be “violating the rights of free speech of an American citizen. … You don’t get to violate people’s First Amendment rights, Smith.”Giuliani, formerly a lawyer and campaign dirty trickster for Trump, is widely reported to be an unindicted co-conspirator in the most recent indictment. The Hill, [8/2/23]
The New York Times also wrote an article bearing the irresponsible headline “Trump election charges set up clash of lies versus free speech.”The Times also quoted an interview of Lauro making a similar argument that the indictment attacks Trump’s right to freedom of speech. It also quoted MAGA-aligned Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) saying that Trump had “every right under the First Amendment to correctly raise concerns about election integrity in 2020.” Unlike Politico, the Times did note that the indictment alleged that Trump used his election lies to try to persuade others to commit fraud. The Times also quoted Duke University law professor Samuel W. Buell, who pointed out that “there is no First Amendment privilege for giving directions or suggestions to other people to engage in illegal acts,” adding: “Tony Soprano can’t invoke the First Amendment for telling his crew he wants someone whacked.” The New York Times, [8/2/23]

In contrast to these other outlets, the Associated Press article covering this flimsy defense of Trump provided ample commentary from legal experts to debunk it.

The piece explained that the indictment conceded “that Trump had the right to falsely claim that fraud had cost him the election and to legally challenge the results,” but noted that it also stated that “the conduct of Trump and six co-conspirators he’s alleged to have plotted with went far beyond speech.”

It quoted George Washington University law professor Mary Anne Franks arguing of Trump’s election lies, “When you say it to another person and the two of you speak in a way and exchange information in a way that leads to action — that you want to take action to do something with that speech — then arguably it becomes unprotected.”

And it cited Cornell Law School constitutional law expert Michael Dorf, who argued: “Insofar as he’s giving instructions, and planning to do things that are themselves illegal and involve action, like the signing of false certificates and so forth, that’s not a very good defense.”

Conservative guests also made false arguments on-air

During an interview with CNN, former Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr, who was a material witness to Trump’s conduct in the months following the election, explained why Trump’s defense is baseless. “All conspiracies involve speech, and all fraud involves speech,” Barr explained. “So, free speech doesn’t give you the right to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy.”

Contrary to Barr’s straightforward assertions about this case, some of the conservative guests to whom mainstream outlets are turning are providing no added value to discussions of the indictment, instead propagating misleading claims:

In the CNN segment transcribed by Politico, anchor Kaitlan Collins was forced to push back against Lauro’s contentions that Trump’s conduct was protected by the First Amendment. “You talk about free speech. [Special counsel] Jack Smith noted Trump's right to free speech and to contest the election results,” Collins told Lauro. “But what he says in this indictment is that when that did not work, the defendant, your client, pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results. And that is why he is being charged here, not because of anything related to free speech.” CNN, *The Source*,[]
Lauro also forced the hosts of CBS Mornings to spend time restating parts of the indictment, with a co-host saying before doing so, “The clock is ticking.” After Lauro claimed, “This is the first time that political speech has been criminalized in the history of the United States,” CBS senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe replied, “We should point out here on page 2 that he made very clear” that Trump had the right to lie about the election results. After Lauro claimed that Trump’s “political advocacy and political action” were protected, co-host Gayle King said, “I know the clock is ticking,” before explaining that Trump was repeatedly told by many legal advisers that he had lost the election. CBS News, *CBS Mornings*,[]
In another CNN segment, former Trump attorney Tim Parlatore claimed: “You know, when I read it through, really the key element to me is knowledge and whether he knew that the claims of fraud were false. And I didn't really see anything in that indictment that really spoke to that point.” CNN anchor Poppy Harlow explained, “Tim, just to that point, ‘knowingly’ appears 36 times throughout this,” with “specific instances” in which Trump personally acknowledged that he had lost. CNN, CNN This Morning, [8/3/23]
Parlatore appeared later on MSNBC, where co-anchors Andrea Mitchell and Chris Jansing addressed his defenses of the fake electors and pointed out that Trump was informed about the election. While Parlatore insisted that Trump’s knowledge about the election could not be proved, Mitchell explained that Trump had been “briefed by many officials, many officials from the Justice Department and elsewhere, about the election being over, including Donald Trump's own family who were members of his staff.” MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell Reports, [8/3/23]

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aha we once had 3 tv networks and school textbks for shared set of facts? no silo/bubble tribes 2 am

https://www.alternet.org/florida-permits-prageru-materials-classrooms/

https://www.alternet.org/desantis-slave-trade-trade-school/

https://www.alternet.org/education/florida-crt-2659613380/

florida textbook publisher under fire for editing Rosa Parks’ story to omit race

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epitome/outcome?

aha you cannot talk to crazy but you can ignore; evil MUST be physically fought. or it will spread/get worse

Satan created a “woke mind virus.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-figures-prepare-spiritual-war-2024-claiming-their-opponents-are-demonic

no lnx many vid

right-wing media figures prepare for “spiritual war” in 2024 by claiming their opponents are demonic entities

Figures have invoked “demonic portals” and the occult to dehumanize LGBTQ people, perceived political enemies, and others

WRITTEN BY PAYTON ARMSTRONG & NOAH DOWE

PUBLISHED 07/05/23

Right-wing media figures are ramping up apocalyptic political rhetoric that literally demonizes LGBTQ people, perceived political enemies, and progressive causes, with some absurdly suggesting that demons are using portals to enter Earth and wage “spiritual war” against humanity.

Rhetoric about “demonic” influence and an existential, “spiritual” war has become a hallmark of right-wing punditry and Republican politics ahead of the 2024 elections, as Christian nationalism grows in popularity among Republican voters.Language that demonizes and dehumanizes political opponents has been a staple of right-wing commentary for years, but these recent accusations are not simple rhetorical flourishes; a number of media figures have begun to warn their audiences about occult rituals from the left and supposed portals to hell from which demons would enter the Earth. Last year, Trump ally and provocateur Roger Stone even claimed that a “Satanic portal” had opened over the White House after President Joe Biden took office.

This sort of framing, which posits that political enemies are literal “demons” waging a “spiritual war,” stems largely from a right-wing Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. For years, the NAR movement has reportedly sought “to take dominion over politics, business and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus.” Rolling Stone described the core NAR belief in spiritual war in a profile of one of the movement’s leading figures, commentator and self-proclaimed prophet Lance Wallnau:

NAR followers like Wallnau believe that America is specially anointed by God to project Christianity across the globe. And the NAR movement’s followers view foes of their quest as satanic. This is not metaphorical. They hold that the physical world is enveloped by a supernatural dimension, featuring warring angels and demons, and are convinced that demons afflict their enemies on behalf of the devil. The movement holds that these spiritual battles are reflected in earthly politics. As the late NAR founder C. Peter Wagner explained in a striking NPR interview in 2011: “I believe there’s a lot of demonic control over Congress … that needs to be dispersed.”

Fiery rhetoric of a spiritual war coupled with demonization of opponents has created an atmosphere in which violence appears permissible and justifiable to followers. For instance, the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was largely undergirded and inspired by boisterous cries of spiritual warfare from prominent figures on the religious right — including Wallnau — who have conditioned their audiences to consider political violence a legitimate tactic.

Over the last two years, right-wing media figures have increasingly adopted the scorched-earth rhetoric of movements like the NAR, setting the stage for a potentially dangerous political atmosphere in 2024. Here are a number of examples:

Right-wing media figures have suggested that demons are entering Earth, with some claiming they are using actual “portals” to hell

On several occasions, prominent right-wing media figures have claimed that demons are using “portals” to attack conservative causes or even fearmongered that Satan created a “woke mind virus.”

Right-wing media gadfly Roger Stone — who observers have noted has increasingly adopted rhetoric around “spiritual war” — claimed on Eric Metaxas’ Salem radio show that “a demonic portal” had been visible above the White House since Biden’s inauguration. Stone suggested that through the “portal,”demons began to “populate the Biden administration,” arguing “you can’t tell whether they are men or women.”

Video

Citation From a December 11, 2022, video posted to Eric Metaxas' Rumble page:

Salem media host Charlie Kirk said that “we’re in the midst of the most consequential spiritual war” in millennia because “there is no other way to explain the campaign of arson and destruction against our country other than diabolical, spiritually dark influences that are fighting for dominion over this nation.” He also argued that “witchcraft and the occult is a real thing, and there are portals to darkness and you have to be vigilant about this.” Kirk also alleged that Satan had created “the woke mind virus” to destroy America and called on religious leaders to “excommunicate … the demons of the woke.”

Video an episode of Real Life with Jack Hibbs, aired on Fox Business Network on May 6, 2023

Conspiracy theorist and Infowars host Alex Jones warned that the European Council for Nuclear Research had used the Large Hadron Collider for “satanic rituals” which he claimed “definitely has opened up a gate” to hell and let demons into the Earth “like paratroopers.” Jones has also claimed that an “alien offworld force” with demons as its agents is “working against us around the clock because they know we are about to go from our embryonic level to birthing into the next level.” What’s more, in his trial for defamation of the families of the Sandy Hook massacre, Jones attacked the judge and plaintiffs’ lawyers as “committed to occult ideology of the new world order” and implied they were “demonically possessed.”

Video

CitationFrom the April 11, 2022, edition of Infowars' The Alex Jones Show

Daily Wire host Michael Knowles said of reports of interactions with aliens: “Aliens are just demons for liberals who don't want to admit metaphysical reality."

Right-wing media figures have labeled LGBTQ people, gender-affirming care, and abortion “demonic”

Conservative media figures have also revved up their attacks on trans people, LGBTQ Pride month, and abortion by claiming they are inspired by “demons in our society.”

Knowles — who demanded this year that so-called “transgenderism” be “eradicated from public life entirely” — claimed that trans people are “demonic” and that demons are “always trans.”

Video

CitationFrom the March 14, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show

On her prime-time Fox News show, Laura Ingraham referred to gender-affirming care as “a demonic campaign to destroy the natural biological order.”

Daily Wire host Candace Owens called trans people “demons in our society” and smeared “any actor, actress, individual that supports this” as “demonic.” Owens has also argued that surrogacy is “deeply demonic.”

Video

CitationFrom the February 7, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's Candace Owens

On Fox, now-former host Tucker Carlson used the Covenant School shooting in Tennessee to falsely claim that “the trans movement is targeting Christians, including with violence,” and denounced the trans community as part of “a deranged and demonic ideology.”

On YouTube, BlazeTV’s Liz Wheeler said that “if you took the three most disgusting, demonic ideologies that you could possibly think of and put them all in one flag you would get the trans flag.”

Doomsday prophet and repeat Trinity Broadcast Network guest Jonathan Cahn recently declared that Biden had put the United States under “demonic possession” at the hands of an ancient goddess of “sexual immorality” by lighting up the White House in the colors of the rainbow for LGBTQ Pride.

Two days after a shooter killed five people in a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club,Infowars host Owen Shroyer ran footage of drag queens and questioned whether “these people are even human,” ranting: “Demon possession is real. Satanic agendas are real. I don’t know how else to describe any of this.”

Video

CitationFrom the November 22, 2022, edition of Infowars' The Alex Jones Show

BlazeTV host Steve Deace partnered with far-right Christian filmmakers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon to produce a right-wing movie that argued humanity is engaged in a spiritual war against demonic forces such as abortion and LGBTQ equality. On his podcast, in an episode titled “Hot Take: Demonic or Democrats?” Deace said that people who advertise drag story hours are “literally inhabited by a demon” and are “a manifestation of a demonic presence.”

Salem Radio host Eric Metaxas and his guest John Zmirak proclaimed that Satan himself was behind the LGBTQ rights movement, with Zmirak decrying “blasphemous drag queen rituals, in your church, mocking Christ” and comparing the Pride flag to an inverted pentagram, claiming Satan “wants you to use the pronoun they.” Metaxas then warned his audience that if they did not boycott companies that celebrate Pride Month, they would be comparable to Germans who failed to stop the Holocaust, saying, “The death camps were the result of good people saying, ‘I don’t want to deal with this. Just let me live my life.’”

Christian nationalist pastor Jack Hibbs, whose sermons air on Fox Business Network, declared that transgender people are “satanic,” saying that in “the last days there’s going to be doctrines of demons and deceiving spirits. Wonder what that’s going to be like? You’re in it.” Per Right Wing Watch, Hibbs has also claimed that "demonism” has caused public support for trans rights.

Christian nationalist influencer and repeat Fox guest Sean Feucht has described abortion and the movement for trans rights as demonic, ascribing public support to “demons” and “the demonic spirit.” Feucht is closely associated with prominent NAR movement leaders and “apostles.”

Right-wing radio host Jesse Kelly said that “we have a society so full of demons that baby murder is now popular” and also referred to the LGBTQ community as “the LGTBQ demon mob.”

Lance Wallnau, a contributor for The Victory Channel’s Christian nationalist show FlashPoint, has repeatedly invoked demons while discussing LGBTQ people. In an April show, Wallnau said that transgender people represent “a fundamental deception” and that accepting them has made society “sympathetic with evil.” Wallnau said that demons target people to make them trans, saying, “I believe a demon comes along that enters into that confusion that affirms that they are the opposite gender.” Per Right Wing Watch, Wallnau also claimed that people become trans because "Satan has taken 'em over with crazy talk about them being in the wrong bodies.”

Video

CitationFrom the April 13, 2023, edition of The Victory Channel's Flashpoint

Right-wing media personalities have also warned that Democrats and other perceived enemies are “demonic” and “satanic”

Far-right Christian media figures and prominent right-wing commentators have told their audiences that the left is engaged with “satanic worship” and “demonic forces,” rationalizing ideological opposition as a product of the “demon-possessed.”

Fox prime-time host Jesse Watters claimed that viewers should be afraid of “demonic teachers” interested in “turning their classroom into a drag show.”

Carlson warned on Glenn Beck’s show that there are “spiritual forces surrounding” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), calling him “a force of darkness.”

On a FlashPoint broadcast, contributor and pastor Hank Kunneman told viewers that “we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but principalities, powers, spiritual wickedness in high places — you know, demonic entities.” Earlier in the episode, Wallnau said that tragedies in society such as mass shootings should be understood through a lens where “you don’t deal with current events, you deal with a demonic spin cycle.”

BlazeTV founder and longtime conspiracy theorist Glenn Beckproclaimed that the 2020 election was not contested against Democrats, but against “Satan himself,” which he claimed was prophesied to him in a dream. Beck has an extensive history of linking progressives to “the devil” and warning of “demonic” influence.

Disgraced Trump ally-turned-podcast-host Steve Bannon suggested that Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is “satanic” because he “exudes … pure evil” and “hangs with Satanic Groomers.”

During his Christian nationalist ReAwaken America Tour, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has frequently asserted that there is a “spiritual war” in America. He has also called former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) a “demon.”

Right-wing podcast host Benny Johnson attacked the grand jury forewoman investigating Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference in Georgia, calling her “borderline demonic” and “demon-possessed.” He has also claimed that “you can see demonic forces at work" in Schiff's district, claiming that the congressman is “on the side of the demons.” Johnson has previously embraced the rhetoric of spiritual warfare, saying, “This rabbit hole goes down so far into the occult … This is a spiritual battle. This is a battle of possession, and there are stages of demonic possession, and we are in the oppression stage right now.”

Far-right pundit Stew Peters fearmongered about “SatanCon,” an event that is hosted by “a progressive church that doesn't worship the devil but instead uses the word to get attention,” claiming it was evidence of “full-blown satanic worship” in America. His guest, Sean Feucht, insisted that we are witnessing “the total unveiling of this demonic realm, this demonic spirit.” Feucht then warned that these alleged forces of Satan were “agitated and upset and trying everything they can do to intimidate Christians.”

On his BlazeTV podcast, Deace called the Democratic Party “a demonic construct, a satanically influenced entity, and a death cult.”

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[[ note sys:

mma 6 23

ALICIA MENENDEZ (MSNBC HOST): I leave you to the work of keeping your ear to the ground on what the far-right is saying all about this so that I don't have to, and then I can just learn about it from you. I mean I thought it was interesting, given that he called on his supporters to come rally for him. There wasn't necessarily the optics of what he potentially wanted, but I have often been cautioned by those who study and follow the far-right on this program, that sometimes it is happening underground, in ways that might not be as visible to the naked eye.

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah, and I think that's an important thing, to that observation, because a large part of the reason why people weren't there is a reflection of the type of people now that are really his supporters, the people he's speaking to. And a big reason why the people didn't show up is that they were told by the organizers, the sort of now tip people, you know the people that are actually leading the narrative for Trump, don't show up, because it would be a false flag. Don't show up, because there's no way not to commit violence. It's too early to be doing that. That was the narrative that we were hearing in the right-wing fever swamps. Not that we should be committing violence, but that it's too early. It's not the right time. And if you go, they're going to try to set you up, and they're going to try to have some informant that sort of, false flags the situation and gets you worked up to sort of take action. But it's too early, so keep your powder dry. That's the part that's really alarming, is that people didn't show up, not because they didn't support him, but because the principal organizers backing Trump right now in the fever swamps, which is where he's organizing power, on the fringes. And that's what makes this whole thing so scary is that it's very real. They said don't go. Even Alex Jones's people are saying don't go. It's too early, we're not ready yet. And this will inevitably lead to violence, and we just don't have our ducks in a row for it. And that is the scary part. It's that they didn't come because they're planning and preparing for something bigger.

...

ALICIA MENENDEZ: Right. And Angelo, part of the reason why I wanted to have you and Ruth on together is that you're both always able to articulate that this is not about a single person. This is about an apparatus that is built around them. And I was struck by the fact that you have a Fox News pundit reportedly helping convince Trump not to return the classified documents. How would you describe Trump's relationship with right-wing news? If you can even call it that at this point?

ANGELO CARUSONE: At this point, it is an instrument for organizing power. They have this massive media apparatus, but the way in which Trump organizes power on the fringes is through this vehicle.That is the mechanism for organizing, but it's also the delivery system for disinformation. So you began your segment with Ted Cruz, part of the way you get to that cycle and feedback loop is that you inject this poison into the ecosystem, and it gets reverberated through this right-wing media for ten months that it's politically motivated. Just this week, Fox News then spends several hours talking about the fact that nearly 50% of Americans think that this indictment is politically motivated, which is actually a reflection of the poison that they've been putting in the system. And then you have people like Ted Cruz coming on and validating that.

ALICIA MENENDEZ:And you think the specific verbage, that banner, the wannabe dictator banner, reportedly got this producer fired. But then you have a U.S. Senator using the same language.

ANGELO CARUSONE: Exactly. And that is what is so concerning about this, is that we've always had fringes, the society has fringes. But what would answer your question, this is bigger than just one person. Because it has activated a muchlarger piece of infrastructure, that actually has the power and it's currently doing, dismantling our democratic institutions, our civic norms,all of the things that we're seeing with misogyny, with anti-lgbt activity, all these groomer narratives, the increase in violence, the bloodthirst, the attack on our institutions. It is all a reflection and an indication, andan alarm bell of these systems in action. And Trump has really been the catalyst for that system. So you take him out of it, it's still going to continue to cascade and they've been eroding the very buttresses that would prevent it from getting out of control.

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mma 4 23

aLICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Angelo, I am so glad that Andy reminded us that 1/6 is a part of this continuum here. Philip Bump at The Washington Post reports, quote, "Fox News's coverage since mid-2020 has disproportionately involved clips of isolated criminal activity to generate a sense of unconstrained violence in urban areas -- despite evidence that the increase in crime since the pandemic also occurred in rural areas." You touched upon that, but what I want to come back to is the fact that this week, you had the GOP-led House leading a field hearing about crime in New York City, which then Fox News covers, and it just becomes part of this endless feedback loop where the circus becomes reality.

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ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT AND CEO): Yeah, and I think the part that concerns me the most is -- I think, that it's one thing when it's just a misinformation, feedback loop,that itself is a problem, but in a way, it's actually less scary than the current scenario because a couple of years ago -- and now, it's really just fully formed -- there was a switch. And basically the Republican party, via the right-wing media, decided that they were going to organize power on what used to be considered the fringes. And so once they sort of moved those fringe and set them right and directly front and center in the Republican core, it actually basically pulls in people that are most likely to act on these types of ideas, on this misinformation feedback loop. So what they're basically doing is taking an already simmering cauldron of anxiety, of fear, of hate, of rage, and they are ratcheting up that temperature, bit by bit. And so every time they sort of misrepresent, missample the threat of crime, who's actually responsible, that it's coming for you, they are basically raising the temperature on that cauldron. So it shouldn't be a surprise that it's increasingly starting to spill over and boil over. It's kind of what they're doing. They are organizing power on the fringes. This is what you get when you move the fringes front and center.

===]]

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musk twitter = escalator /amplifier

https://www.factcheck.org/2022/12/the-whoppers-of-2022/

Coronavirus origin baloney. In May, former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro incorrectly claimed, as others have before, that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci “killed a lot of people” by funding research that led to the creation of the coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2. Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of Twitter, repeated the baseless claim earlier this week on the platform, less than a month after the company suspended enforcement of its COVID-19 misinformation policy.

The U.S. indirectly funded some bat coronavirus research at a lab in Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 pandemic began, but as we explained, those experiments could not have generated SARS-CoV-2 because the viruses used were very different. Published research suggests the coronavirus spilled over into humans from the wildlife trade, as other coronaviruses have done in the past.

Fauci is stepping down from his government positions at the end of this month, after more than half a century in public service.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/anatomy-smear-campaign-how-right-wing-media-neutralized-pentagon-effort-address-white

no lnx vids

Anatomy of a smear campaign: How right-wing media neutralized a Pentagon effort to address white supremacy in the military

Right-wing media smeared the Pentagon official mitigating white supremacy in the military. Now his unit has been abandoned.

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 05/25/23

Right-wing media outlets and personalities leveled repeated attacks against a modest Pentagon initiative created in 2021 to address high levels of white supremacy in the military, ultimately neutralizing the effort and leading to the unit’s abandonment. The conservative campaign was directed atmilitary veteran Bishop Garrison, who led the Countering Extremism Working Group, which has now “vanished virtually without a trace,” according to a recent report from CNN.

Garrison was tasked with identifying and addressing the type of extremist views that would be later espoused by Jack Teixeira, who recently stole and leaked a trove of classified information to impress his private online community. Teixeira, currently in custody and potentially facing a 25-year sentence, reportedly believed that the United States was heading toward a “race war” that would pit white people against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people.

CNN reports:

As the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.

CNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.

The U.S. military has a long history of white supremacism in the ranks, including among veterans who have started or joined far-right terrorist groups after their service. More than 80 people charged with participating in the January 6 insurrection had ties to the military, primarily as former service members, according to CBS News.

The apparently successful right-wing effort to sideline Bishop’s group follows the standard conservative playbook of smearing Democratic government officials who are Black, LGBTQ, Muslim, or from other marginalized groups as internal enemies, and it will also likely serve as a template for future, similar campaigns. Right-wing media outlets have spent months convincing their consumers that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS are persecuting conservatives, with the clear aim of operationalizing these federal agencies against these media figures’ opponents — exactly what they wrongly accuse the Biden administration of doing. This programming dovetails exactly with Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which claims to be exposing a governmentwide conspiracy to throttle conservative activists and ideas. The committee has so far failed on its own terms, but Jordan remains undeterred.

Anatomy of a smear campaign

On February 16, 2021, Garrison was appointed to a newly created role to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on how to reduce and mitigate the threat of white supremacy in the U.S. military. The announcement went largely unremarked upon in both mainstream and conservative media for several weeks.

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Then on May 5, conservative website Revolver published a story headlined “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.” The site's founder, Darren Beattie, tweeted the piece out, highlighting the quote “The Biden administration has just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military." (Beattie was fired from the Trump administration in 2018 after CNN discovered that he had attended a white nationalist conference two years prior.)

The following day, Fox News Primetime’s host Pete Hegseth devoted a segment to Garrison’s appointment,describing Garrison’s effort as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists."

Video

CitationFrom the May 6, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Hegseth then referred to Garrison as “the Pentagon's newly minted MAGA purge man” and cribbed Revolver’s line nearly verbatim but without attribution.

“How do I put this?” Hegseth asked. “The White House just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military, past, present, and future."

A day later, Beattie appeared on Hegseth’s program to discuss Revolver’s piece, which largely consisted of Garrison’s tweets and other writings and social media posts.

Video

CitationFrom the May 7, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Beattie framed the issue by calling Garrison’s working group an example of “the most disturbing trend in American politics,” which is “that increasing swathes of our own national security apparatus have been repurposed and redeployed domestically against American citizens.”

Days later, conservative media websiteJust the News published a story that highlighted Hegseth’s comments from his initial segment.

On May 13, Revolver published another piece on Garrison with the factually incorrect headline “‘Free Speech Is A Digital Black Plague’: Bishop Garrison is Key Mercenary in Biden’s Dark War Against The First Amendment.”

Despite the quotation marks in the headline, the piece doesn’t include any evidence that Garrison wrote or spoke that exact phrase. Instead, the piece links to an op-ed Garrison published about the dangers of ideological polarization in news consumption leading to the spread of bad information, a fitting if ironic topic given Revolver’s mischaracterization of his stance. It’s true he described what he characterized as partisan echo chambers as a “digital black plague” that poses a danger to social cohesion, a relatively pedestrian observation common among mainstream commentators.

The next day, Beattie appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to discuss Garrison’s purview more broadly.

Video

CitationFrom the May 14, 2021, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Underscoring the siloed, self-perpetuating conservative media echo chamber, Bannon introduced the topic by claiming, “I’m seeing it everywhere — Just the News has got it, the great Pete Hegseth had it, then he had a second night with you on it,” before asking Beattie for an update.

Beattie then recycled his website’s misleading framing with a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, substituting Garrison’s actual point about information silos with the false claim that he opposed free speech protections more broadly.

Beattie described Garrison’s purported role “in the Biden administration’s dark war on the First Amendment. We’ve uncovered a article of his calling, basically, the free speech digital environment that would include War Room, that would include Revolver, but also in his words includes the Sinclair Network and Fox, as a ‘digital black plague’ — those are his words to describe the digital free speech environment that enables the American people to see narratives that oppose the official narratives on COVID, on the election, and now on [the insurrection of] 1/6.”

One day later, Fox News’ Jesse Watters picked up the story, interviewing Hegsethabout Beattie’s reporting, adding another link in the human-centipede-esque food chain of bad information.

Video

CitationFrom the May 15, 2021, edition of Fox News' Watters' World

Watters introduced Garrison as being “in charge of bringing critical race theory into our Armed Forces,” adding, “They’re calling him the Pentagon's hatchet man because his job is to purge patriots from the ranks.”

“This is about, Jesse, as scary as it gets,” Hegseth responded. “I mean, really this is, this truly is a purge of patriots. They're using January 6 as the ultimate justification.”

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Two days later, former Fox News marquee star Tucker Carlsondiscussed Garrison on his prime-time show.

Video

CitationFrom the May 17, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson referenced Revolver’s posts before characterizing Garrison as “an activist type” and “a lunatic.”

“Now — and this is the point — he is one of the most powerful officials in the U.S. military,” Carlson added. “Democrats in Congress are thrilled as they watch this. Their party now has all the tanks and drones.”

The campaign against Garrison continued at that pace for weeks, misleading framing and bad information congealing into an impenetrable narrative of conservative persecution. Beattie returned to War Room, right-wing Epoch TV covered the story, Carlson aired another segment on it, and Hegseth continued to beat the drum on Fox News.

As late as October 2022, Beattie referenced Garrison on War Room as an antecedent to a supposedly even more “outrageous” Pentagon commission on recommending changes to military bases named after members of the Confederacy.

Taken as a whole, this process clearly demonstrates how right-wing media will vigorously oppose efforts to mitigate widespread white supremacy and later defend the subsequent, predictable outcomes that ideology and set of power relations produces. As but one example, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson defended Teixeira’s actions by misleadingly casting him as a whistleblower when in fact there is no reporting to suggest he ever meant for the information he stole to be made publicly available. The fact that Teixeira’s bigoted beliefs went unnoticed and undisciplined by the military is a feature, not a bug, of this dynamic.

There are fair criticisms to be made about the larger White House initiative, such as asking what it would mean to root out white supremacy from an institution that has been at the forefront of U.S. empire expansion, directed primarily at nonwhite populations, since at least the Mexican-American War. Needless to say, conservatives were making the exact opposite critique, arguing that attempts to decrease the spread of white supremacist beliefs among service members are inherently illegitimate.

That the boilerplate backlash was successful despite being led by such mediocrities as Pete Hegseth and Darren Beattie — whom Bannon recently derided as a man-child — does not speak particularly well of the Biden administration. It also suggests that these demonization campaigns can potentially succeed absent any shimmering talent leading the charge, instead relying on mid-level functionaries in the larger conservative ecosystem repeatedly hammering the point home.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/climate-change-conspiracy-theory-about-cataclysmic-changes-earths-magnetic-field-goes-viral

mma 5 23 no vid

joe Rogan’s podcast is fueling a bizarre TikTok conspiracy theory that falsely attributes climate change impacts to cyclical changes in Earth’s magnetic field, seemingly violating the app’s new climate misinformation policy.

The conspiracy theory’s viral spread on the platform highlights TikTok’s persistent climate misinformation problem, even as it has begun implementing a new policy banning content that “undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it.”

Inspired by the January 18 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, content creators have latched onto claims made in a pseudoscientific book called The Adam and Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms. (Along with pushing the cataclysmic pole hypothesis, the book claims that Jesus Christ lived in India for nearly 18 years and was abducted by aliens in a “space vehicle” after his crucifixion.)

Between January and April, Media Matters identified seven viral clips from the Joe Rogan Experience episode discussing the conspiracy theory, which garnered over 20 million cumulative views on TikTok. The videos feature clips of Rogan discussing the book with “independent researcher” Jimmy Corsetti, who runs the YouTube channel Bright Insight, and Ben van Kerkwyk, who runs the channel UnchartedX.

Joe Rogan keeps platforming conspiracy theorists and skeptics of human-caused climate change, driving misinformation

In the January 18 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the host brought up “the Adam and Eve” theory and asked Corsetti, “How much of that is agreed upon, that there could be a time where the magnetic poles actually shift?”

Corsetti replied that “This is science,” explaining, “The Adam and Eve Story", the theory on that is that it happens in cycles of 6,500 years and that it’s a 90-degree flip, but six days later, around the seventh day, it corrects itself.” He continued to describe “a planet flip, 90 degrees, and that because of it the Earth essentially does a standstill, the sun will be direct — will basically stay in the same spot, causing heating like we’ve never experienced — and that the wind and the waters continue with their momentum, because essentially the wind travels at approximately 1,000 miles an hour at the equator, so the theory is that when that event happens it’s going to be cataclysmic.:

[vid]

corsetti’s nonsensical explanation was widely shared on TikTok, with one viral clip receiving nearly 11 million views.

In reality, NASA reports that pole reversals, when Earth’s North and South Poles swap locations — which “take place over hundreds to thousands of years,” not a mere seven days— have occurred “183 times in the last 83 million years, and at least several hundred times in the past 160 million years.” Notably:

Plant and animal fossils from the period of the last major pole reversal don’t show any big changes. Deep ocean sediment samples indicate glacial activity was stable. In fact, geologic and fossil records from previous reversals show nothing remarkable, such as doomsday events or major extinctions.

Additionally, there's “no evidence” that any magnetic excursion event (periods of “shorter-lived but significant changes in the magnetic field’s intensity”) has impacted the Earth’s climate within the last 2.8 million years. Scientists aren’t sure when the next pole reversal will occur, but a recent study suggests that won’t be anytime soon. And if it is, a doomsday scenario is unlikely.

Corsetti acknowledged this but claimed that scientists “don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Rogan has previously drawn criticism for leveraging his massive reach and influence to amplify climate denial, and his podcast has catered to guests such as Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg, who use cherry-picked and decontextualized talking points to downplay the devastating impacts of climate change and to attack climate solutions.He has also hosted figures who downright deny the fact that fossil fuel consumption is driving climate change, such as Steve Koonin, Jordan Peterson, and Randall Carlson, who has appeared on the podcast at least six times and said that and that actions.

In their discussion of The Adam and Eve Story, Rogan and his guests also downplayed the impacts of climate change that millions of people are experiencing and praised Donald Trump for suggesting that the Earth is actually cooling.

“Right now we should be grateful that it’s nice and cozy because we can live when it’s warm,” Corsetti said.

Rogan then cited r Carlson, saying, “Global warming’s not scary. It’s global cooling, that’s what’s really scary.” The host further suggested that climate change is “ this narrative that just gets repeated over and over and over and this fearmongering and everyone gets freaked out. It’s not to say that we aren’t polluting, we certainly are, and it’s not to say that we shouldn’t improve, we certainly should, but if the fucking magnetic poles might shift and we might get hit by a giant rock from space, we might have bigger problems. If we’re going to be concentrating on nonsense, which is really par for the course with human beings, we’re going to be concentrating on these things we’re really not going to fix over the short-term, when something might happen that makes all of it a moot point.”

Media Matters also identified two viral clips of this exchange on TikTok with 2 million and 2.6 million views, respectively.

What is The Adam and Eve Story?

The book was written in 1965 by Chan Thomas, who worked in the aerospace industry and claimed to be a psychic. The book was not available to the public until 2013, however, when 57 pages were released by the CIA, and this censorship has captured the imaginations of conspiracy theorists. Since its declassification, The Adam and Eve Story has worked its way into the broader conspiracy theory ecosystem.

Thomas argued that the Earth’s magnetic poles shift every several thousand years, causing cataclysmic events such as tsunamis that destroy civilizations and drastically alter Earth’s geology — one example he used was the flood in the Noah’s Ark narrative in the Bible’s Book of Genesis. Chan predicted that such an event would occur in the near future, and some are now framing increasingly extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, and droughts as evidence that the next cataclysm is approaching.

A TikTok account for a podcast called No Regulars posted a March 1 video that has been viewed nearly 18 million times in which host Darris Watkins says that the book’s explanation of cataclysmic magnetic pole shifts actually “makes sense” in describing climate change and “explains a lot” because “the Sahara desert used to be green and like Antarctica used to have forests … So now like some places turn cold, some places turn hot.[pix?]

the popularity of these conspiracy theories among TikTok users may indicate one way that climate misinformation is evolving to reach young people.

Climate misinformation disguised as ancient civilization conspiracy theories

At the time Thomas wrote The Adam and Eve Story, the public at large was not informed of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change. Despite fossil fuel companies being aware of the potential for human-caused global warming as early as the 1950s, people weren’t yet experiencing the ecological effects of increasing temperatures. But when the book was declassified in 2013, it was released into a world grappling with the dire effects of climate change.

While it was not written to provide an alternative explanation for climate change, The Adam and Eve Story provides a framework for interpreting its effects outside of an anthropogenic explanation. This narrative, which shifts blame away from our fossil fuel economy onto planetary forces beyond human control, can serve as climate misinformation.

Rogan’s guests and other proponents of this conspiracy theory purport to be interested in its ramifications for scientific understanding of ancient civilizations, but climate misinformation often serves as a backdrop for their discussions. At one point in their interview, Rogan suggested “that there was incredibly sophisticated technology that existed and … was wiped out. And that we’re talking about a really advanced civilization that lived a long time ago that’s more advanced than we are today but moved in a different direction, like we moved in the direction of combustion engines and electronics and they moved in some other direction but achieved maybe many thousands of years more sophistication in that direction than we have with our internal combustion engines.”

While climate change may not take center stage in these speculations, the implications that humans are not having any influence over our warming planet and that near-apocalyptic events are always inevitable as a result of natural cycles in the Earth’s magnetic field are nonetheless harmful misinformation that lets politicians and fossil fuel companies off the hook for their role in the climate crisis. (Meanwhile, the world’s biggest oil and gas companies just raked in record first-quarter profits.)

Cataclysm narratives as climate sedatives

Narratives that frame climate change as an inevitable disaster caused by forces beyond our control are a key argument of climate denial: If climate change is caused by changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, then there is no point in implementing sweeping action to curtail fossil fuel emissions. In the past, the Earth’s orbit, the sun, and cosmic rays have all similarly been used to provide alternative explanations for climate change.

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels. The only way to avert increasing social, political, and ecological effects of climate change is by transitioning away from a fossil fuel economy.

Despite its appearance as a conspiracy theory about ancient civilizations,The Adam and Eve Story is being used to undermine the scientific consensus regarding the cause of climate change. As TikTok ramps up the enforcement of its new climate misinformation policy, the platform should account for the ways climate denial is often incorporated into seemingly harmless conspiracy theories.

Finally, Spotify still has no clear policy regarding the promotion of climate misinformation on its platform. Spotify reportedly paid $200 million for exclusive rights to Rogan’s show, which was the top podcaston its platform in 2022. As Rogan’s contract is expected to expire in 2023, Spotify will have to decide whether platforming his misinformation and hate speech is worth the profit.

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aha doh escalator echo is amplify feedback loop

mma 4 23

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aha? antifa blm merge

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/fox-news-and-right-wing-media-circulate-seemingly-inauthentic-antifa-poster

pix of poster bring rocks ...

mma 1 23

protests emerged around the country following the release of police body camera footage of officers fatally beating Tyre Nichols, Fox News and other right-wing media sources promoted an “antifa poster” whose authenticity has not been proved. The poster supposedly called for protesters to “burn it all down” and bring rocks and heavy objects to riots in New York City.

The image was initially shared in a Daily Mail article, which called it “a shocking poster,” and on Twitter by user Rob O’Donnell, per disinformation researcher Caroline Orr.

On January 27, Fox News’ Jesse Watters hosted O’Donnell, who said he knows the poster was “put out by antifa” and it’s “calling for protests and riots at all police precincts across the city, to bring rocks, to bring pipes, to bring box cutters,” saying it’s “circulating in the underground of New York City.”

Video

In the next hour, Fox host Tucker Carlson showed the poster, using it to suggest there is “an organized militia encouraging organized violence across the United States of America.”

Carlson’s guest during the segment, former Detroit Police Chief James Craig, told Carlson the police should have “zero tolerance” for antifa protesters and chastised “Biden’s DOJ” for doing “absolutely nothing” about antifa, who he said are “threatening cities across this country.”

Carlson also suggested the poster was evidence of a “criminal conspiracy” by antifa.

Carlson’s commentary was circulated by right-wing blogs The Daily Caller and The Gateway Pundit, and FoxNews.com promoted his segment with Craig.

Video 1 27

With the poster on screen, Fox correspondent Christina Coleman saidon The Ingraham Anglethat “antifa put out this bulletin, calling for violence, even though Tyre's own family has called for peace.”

The poster was also picked up by other right-wing outlets.

On Newsmax, host Lidia Curanaj said “a police source” sent her “a flyer that showed that antifa was organizing throughout the country” but did not show it on screen. She speculated that “a lot of times these horrible incidents, like what happened to Tyre Nichols, are amplified and used by other organizations in order to achieve their political agenda.” Later on the network, Curanaj repeated that the protests must have been planned ahead of time, accused the protests of having “professional agitators,” and called on the media to “do their due diligence and actually investigate” the situation.

The poster also appeared on far-right website The Post Millennial, in an article titled “Antifa vows to 'burn it all down' in NYC following death of Tyre Nichols,” which cites the Daily Mail as having obtained the poster. Neo-Nazi collaborator and Twitter personality Jack Posobiec shared the article on Twitter.

Right-wing commentary siteTownhallshared O’Donnell’s tweet, including the image in a Friday night piece warning about “potential riots” in Memphis.

Newsmax’s Justine Brooke Murray shared the poster on Twitter, writing, “ANTIFA terrorists plan to burn down New York tonight. They’re blasting THIS out.”

Right-wing radio host David Webb on Twitter claimed the image showed that “violence is not a solution but it is a possibility.”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/election-denial-movement-and-trump-have-become-increasingly-intertwined

no lnx many vids

Media Matters for America

Research/Study

The election denial movement — and Trump — have become increasingly intertwined with QAnon

QAnon now offers a broad extremist network for election denialists to promote themselves and spread conspiracy theories to receptive listeners

Written by Alex Kaplan

Published 01/26/23

Last December, while discussing supposed “election integrity” efforts, Gregg Phillips, a leader of the election denial organization True the Vote, told an attorney for former President Donald Trump that “people want to come in and help,” and “that’s what this Anon movement is about.”

And “help” it has. Five years after “Q” began a movement based on a conspiracy theory that Trump would crush his supposed enemies and a cabal of pedophiles with mass arrests, QAnon had evolved into an online anti-reality network that has shifted much of its focus to boosting other conspiracy theories, including anti-vaccine misinformation and, increasingly, election denial. It is now an online distribution system that the election denial movement and other conspiracy theorists can exploit to spread their false claims and gain attention for their organizations.

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QAnon was born out of far-right message boards and grew as supporters repeatedly helped spread misinformation online during years of inaction from social media platforms. The movement became so much of a threat that multiple government agencies issued internal warnings on its supporters, who have committed multiple acts of violence, including the January 6 insurrection.

During the 2022 election cycle, the QAnon community saw a closer level of association with the election denial movement — including Trump and his associates — providing a broad extremist network for denialists to easily promote themselves and spread their conspiracy theories to people primed to support them.

QAnon influencer Juan O. Savin’s election-denial candidates coalition

Leading up to the midterm elections, QAnon influencerJuan O. Savin (whose real name is Wayne Willott) and Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant recruited election denial candidates for positions where they would be in charge of election administration. Savin boasted of his involvement, claiming that every week he would “have a call to all my candidates from around the country,” including discussing fundraising.

Savin also said he had created the “largest election integrity presentation groups in the country" -- events where denialists, sometimes including coalition members, discussed supposed evidence of voter fraud -- and that he was working “behind the scenes” and hiring QAnon sympathizer Lara Logan to “host” them.

Following the midterm elections, Savin moved to another election denial effort, teaming up with a pair of brothers to promote a long-shot challenge to the 2020 election, which the Supreme Court declined to hear.

Tina Peters

Savin detailed some of his efforts with his coalition during interviews, on QAnon-supporting shows, suggesting, for instance, that he helped convince Tina Peters — the Mesa County, Colorado, clerk who was criminally charged for a security breach of election equipment — to run for Colorado secretary of state. One of Peters’ primary opponents also revealed that Savin encouraged him to drop out of the race and endorse her.

After losing the Republican primary, Peters refused to concede, eventually becoming part of another Savin-linked coalition of Republican candidates in Colorado claiming that they lost their primaries due to voter fraud. Over the following months, these failed candidates went on QAnon shows to promote and fundraise for the coalition and amplify false claims of fraud in their primaries. A member of Peters’ coalition even invoked the QAnon slogan in a July interview on election denier Joe Oltmann’s podcast: “Where we find fraud in El Paso, we find fraud in Colorado, we find fraud nationwide. This is all national security.” “Where we go one,” she said, pausing; the other coalition members joined her in finishing it. “We go all.”

Kari Lake and Mark Finchem

Other candidates in Savin’s coalition also appeared on QAnon-promoting shows during the 2022 election cycle. Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake fundraised and promoted her campaign on a QAnon-supporting show right before the Republican primary, and Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem also appeared on that same QAnon show during his campaign. Finchem also had a QAnon influencer at one of his fundraisers, which featured a performance of a QAnon song. Both Finchem and Lake also appeared with other QAnon figures during their campaigns.

Election denial groups teamed up with the QAnon community

True the Vote

The long-standing organization True the Vote — whose founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has been called “the godmother of the election integrity movement” — grew particularly close with the QAnon community in 2022, using its members and infrastructure to spread nefarious allegations about election software company Konnech.

Following the release of its debunked election denial movie 2000 Mules, True the Vote’s Engelbrecht and co-founder Gregg Phillips both began to cultivate relationships with QAnon figures, repeatedly appearing on QAnon shows. They praised the QAnon community’s “spectacularly good” “open source intelligence,” while also recruiting multiple QAnon figures to help with their efforts, such as Phillips’ podcast and “research team.” They also promised to hand off supposed information from the “Anons” to law enforcement that they had partnered with.

We The Media TTV research team chat log

Citation (Left): QAnon figure Chad Vivas (known online as "KagDrogo") alongside True the Vote's Gregg Phillips (Right): Message from Vivas from leaked internal chat logs of members of QAnon influencer collective We The Media

At a True the Vote event in August called “The Pit” — which featured QAnon attendees — the group presented allegations that the Chinese Communist Party rigged elections through Konnech. Attendees were encouraged to further research and spread the claims, which they did, earning praise from True the Vote for their “brilliant” and “great work.” According to The New York Times, Konnech’s CEO and his family were subsequently forced to go into hiding, and other Konech employees “feared for their safety and started working remotely.”

In October — less than two months after an investigator in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office attended “The Pit,” according to Phillips — the district attorney arrested Konnech’s CEO over allegations similar to True the Vote’s claims. (Charges were dropped in November.) The arrest was fodder for right-wing media to widely spread True the Vote and QAnon supporters’ claims about Konnech, calling it evidence of election fraud, and the story led to local governments announcing they would cancel contracts with the company. A Virginia county “election integrity” task force even gave some of those QAnon influencers’ materials about Konnech to its county election board. Phillips would go on to credit “the Anon community” for having “dug in” on Konnech and creating “focal points … of interest that [Konnech’s CEO is] ultimately going to have to answer to.”

Clean Elections USA

Another figure who attended The Pit was Melody Jennings, a QAnon supporter who had created a group inspired by 2000 Mules called Clean Elections USA, which focused on having people “monitor” ballot drop boxes for supposed fraud. She connected with several QAnon influencers at the event, later appearing multiple times on a show hosted by conspiracy theorists she met there. She credited those QAnon figures with helping her group and connecting her with others. Jennings regularly asked her “team” of QAnon influencers to promote her efforts, which led to complaints of voter intimidation in Arizona and landed Clean Elections USA in court there.

New York Citizens Audit

Another person who networked with QAnon figures at The Pit was Marly Hornik, who founded the election denial organization New York Citizens Audit. Hornik met the hosts of a QAnon show at the event and then repeatedly appeared on their program. There, Hornik promoted her organization and lauded what “the Anons are doing with Konnech,” calling them the “citizen intelligence army.”

Video

Citation From the October 27, 2022, edition of MatrixxxGrooove Show

Other election denial groups and activists

Election denial organizations also associated themselves with the QAnon community outside of The Pit:

Members of a Florida-based “election integrity” group called Defend Florida connected with QAnon-supporting show host Zak Paine at an event hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. The members later went on Paine’s show to promote the group and say they asked Paine if they could “come on your show” rather than appearing in mainstream outlets because of “the great work that you’ve been doing for years.”

A Florida “election integrity” activist told a QAnon influencer that he was a “big fan” of his and of Savin.

Paine also connected with a Nebraska election denial group founder at Lindell’s event.

A duo who had filed a class action lawsuit against election software company Dominion, which was a target of election denialists after the 2020 election, told Paine that “everybody loves you” and that their lawsuit would be more popular if Paine was on Twitter.

Well-known election deniers Patrick Byrne and Michael Flynn grew closer to the QAnon community

Patrick Byrne and The America Project

Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who is a co-founder of election denial organization The America Project, is one of the country’s central election denial funders. Prior to the January 6 insurrection, Byrne met with Trump and fueled his voter fraud grievances. Since then, he has continued election denial activities and cultivated ties to the QAnon community. During the midterm election season, Byrne’s The America Project even funded an effort to recruit veterans to monitor polling sites for supposed fraud.

Byrne has previously suggested that he relied on the “digital soldiers” in the QAnon community and that they were his allies. He went further in 2022:

He directly invoked Q’s call in 2020 for supporters to deny that QAnon exists.

He pushed an effort to harass schools popularized by a QAnon-supporting group.

He furthered his very close relationship with Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman, a QAnon influencer known online as “Tore” who ran for Ohio secretary of state. He offered to aid her activities, including monetarily, and announced that he was working with her on “election integrity” efforts and lawsuits.

Byrne and Savin — both of whom have previously mentioned being connected — disclosed their further ties over the course of the year:

Savin said they worked together in 2020, said they talked “very frequently” with each other, and suggested that Byrne had “helped us out tremendously in the election integrity stuff.”

Byrne lauded Savin as “sophisticated,” “very helpful,” and said they had spent “some good times” together. He also invoked Savin by name to promote a legal case to overturn the 2020 election.

Former Overstock CEO suggests he collaborated with QAnon influencer known for trying to elect Big Lie election administration candidates

July 24, 2022

Former Overstock CEO suggests he collaborated with QAnon influencer known for trying to elect Big Lie election administration candidates

Audio

Citation From a July 24, 2022, online stream

Additionally, some of The America Project’s work and activities during the year were explicitly tied to QAnon supporters. Byrne used multiple QAnon shows to recruit people for the organization’s plan to monitor polling sites. The America Project also brought on QAnon sympathizer Lara Logan, as well as an attorney who has represented Tore, who became The America Projects’s “chief legal strategist.”

Michael Flynn

Michael Flynn, The America Project’s other co-founder and fellow Trump voter fraud adviser, also continued to develop ties with the QAnon community:

He hung out with members of a QAnon influencer collective known as We The Media, including on a Zoom call, according to one of We The Media’s members.

Flynn’s other organization, America’s Future, recruited Liz Crokin, a fellow QAnon conspiracy theorist.

Flynn, along with Lindell of MyPillow, attorney Sidney Powell, and some members of Savin’s coalition, also appeared on a relatively new QAnon channel on Election Day 2022 to push fraud claims.

Trump and his orbit grew closer to the QAnon community, explicitly embracing and lauding the movement

Donald Trump

Trump, the leader of the election denial movement, also embraced QAnon more closely during the past year, as did some of those in his orbit — including associates of his social media company Truth Social, one of his attorneys, and his son.

Trump’s associates claimed in 2021 that they were trying “to weed out any QAnon influences — both adherents and postings — getting close to him,” but the former president and now-2024 presidential candidate only stepped up his association with the QAnon community. (He had also publicly and privately praised QAnon supporters multiple times during his presidency.)

According to a Media Matters count, Trump amplified QAnon-promoting accounts nearly 400 times on Truth Social in 2022 — far outpacing the pace of his QAnon account amplifications when he used Twitter. That Truth Social activity included repeatedly amplifying explicit QAnon content.

Trump Truth Social QAnon content amplifications

:{:{}:

Citation Explicit QAnon content amplified by Donald Trump on Truth Social in 2022

Trump met withCrokin, the QAnon influencer, at Mar-a-Lago, and another QAnon influencer claimed to have met with Trump while visiting Mar-a-Lago.}:

Trump used a song associated with QAnon on his social media and at multiple rallies. During some of the rallies, people would hold up one finger in the air in response, possibly referring to the “one” in “Where we go one, we go all.” Trump would continue to use the song at rallies even after media and others flagged its background.

Truth Social and its leadership

Truth Social also came to embrace QAnon as part of its business model. One of the first accounts to reportedly sign up on the platform, which launched in February, was an account called “@Q” that tied itself to the conspiracy theory. Kash Patel,a former Trump administration official and member of the platform’s board of directors, and Devin Nunes, the platform’s CEO, repeatedly amplified the “@Q” account. The platform also featured QAnon ads and verified QAnon influencers. And the CEO of a shell corporation formed to merge with the company running the platform even went on a QAnon show to advocate for his own shareholders to delay the merger. The platform also helped QAnon figures and election denial activists network.

Patel also went on numerous QAnon shows on behalf of Truth Social, telling the community that “we try to incorporate” QAnon “into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences” and praised the “good” coming from it. He also signed copies of his book with the QAnon slogan, asking, “What's wrong with it?” and he said he and Trump were “blown away” by the “acumen” of some QAnon supporters.

Video

Citation From the June 16, 2022, edition of The Patriot Party News

A Trump attorney and Eric Trump

One of Trump’s attorneys, Peter Ticktin, repeatedly went on QAnon shows to push election fraud claims. On one of those shows Ticktin even asked the audience to send him “evidence in regard to January 6,” the “fake election,” and “the election fraud.” He also seemingly invoked Q’s 2020 call for supporters to deny that QAnon exists.

Trump’s son Eric Trump, who had posted a QAnon image on social media in 2020 — also went on multiple QAnon shows, and a QAnon show host Eric Trump met with claimed that Trump told him that “his Dad loves what we’re doing.”

Increasingly, where election denial goes one, QAnon goes all

Savin’s swing state coalition members failed to win election and the GOP had disappointing midterm results, but that did not deter the growing bond between the QAnon community and election denial movements. The connections reached a new level this past year, even after the midterms.

The movement continues to grow and metastasize beyond the original Q and its focus, even when Q resumed posting during the year after an 18-month absence. And with the rise of platforms like Truth Social, and Twitter increasingly reversing its QAnon crackdown under Elon Musk, the QAnon community could become even more interconnected with election denialists and other conspiracy theories. That could help grow the dangerous and antidemocratic denialist movement, making it easier to spread its misinformation faster and more broadly.

In This Article

QAnon Conspiracy Theory Voter Fraud and Suppression

Voter Suppression

In 2021, people thought QAnon would go away -- instead, it continued to fuel attacks on democracy

12/31/21

In 2020, QAnon became all of our problem

12/31/20

How True the Vote cultivated relationships with QAnon influencers to target an election software company and serve as a pipeline to law enforcement

09/15/

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On Sunday's edition of Meet the Press, Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman expounded on why Republicans in the United States House of Representatives are acting as if they came out of the November 2022 midterm elections with a broad mandate from the American people.

Historically speaking, the GOP's performance was abysmal, having failed to retake control of the Senate and only managing to secure a narrow five-seat majority in the House. The four-day-long, 15-ballot vote-o-rama that finally resulted in California Congressman Kevin McCarthy's election to the speakership further highlighted the schisms within the conservative conference.

NBC moderator Chuck Todd was curious about what could be fueling the right-wing lawmakers' apparent clash with what is obvious to outside observers.

"Why, Jake, is there so much divorcing from the reality of the midterms?" Todd asked Sherman.

:{:{"I mean, the irony here is that we don't have, you know – the faction that held McCarthy hostage is the faction that prevented them from getting control of the Senate and more House seats," Todd pointed out, referring to the "red tsunami" that conservatives foresaw but that failed to materialize in the November contests.}:

Sherman agreed and explained that the roots of the GOP's problems are its voting base's unflinching fondness of former President Donald Trump, who endorsed McCarthy's campaign for speaker. And although it had little effect on McCarthy's detractors, Sherman would nonetheless note that the localized loyalty to Trump creates echo chambers that are impervious to objective facts such as Trump's landslide loss to President Joe Biden in 2020.

"Yeah. This is a long – long been a problem in House Republican circles. They oftentimes take the wrong or no message from political fallout, from political elections. Listen, most ninety percent – or I'm making that number up – but a huge chunk of House Republicans go home to districts in which Donald Trump still retains ninety-five percent approval rating and they live in their own political bubble," Sherman said. "And now, I guess, a little bit less because you have Republicans from New York and from kind of the Northeast that have been, that are in Biden districts, but that's – they just go home to their own bubble and the leadership doesn't do anything to talk truth to them. And this has kind of been going on forever."

Watch below or at this link.

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aha yikes correction in soc media no longer POSSIBLE?!

escalator is amplifing but no blancing corrective feedback moderation --> polarization Earth2 no consequences for bad actors/bad failth

an ah 12 22

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top White House medical adviser to President Joe Biden and long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has been serving in the United States’ federal government since the late 1960s. Fauci, who will be celebrating his 82nd birthday on December 24, 2022, has been in the United States’ federal government since the late 1960s. And he has never had a problem serving under conservative Republican presidents, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

The younger President Bush, in fact, had nothing but praise for Fauci when he presented him with the 2008 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci became a major target of the MAGA movement. Countless MAGA culture warriors, consumed with identity politics, have turned hating Fauci into a popular pastime. Tesla CEO and new Twitter own Elon Musk, who supported President Joe Biden in 2020 but often sounds very MAGA in his rhetoric, bashed the retiring NIAID director when, on December 11, he tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” [// desantis BS]

Many Twitter users have been calling Musk out for that tweet. But liberal Washington Post opinion columnist Greg Sargent, in his December 13 column, stresses that Musk is unfazed by such critics because his motivation is appealing to the “right-wing information ecosystem.”

“By now, it should be obvious that for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself,” Sargent explains. “In the brutal competition of the so-called attention economy, provoking large-scale outrage and loathing is not an incidental feature of making controversial arguments. It has become a key marker of success.”

Sargent continues, “Over the weekend, Elon Musk called for the prosecution of Anthony S. Fauci, the leading infectious-disease expert in the Biden Administration. 'My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,' Musk tweeted, mocking transgender people for good measure. Musk then endorsed a complicated right-wing conspiracy theory about Fauci’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Democrats and other Musk critics reacted with an explosion of outrage.”

Twitter users who vigorously defended Fauci against Musk ranged from Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota to former CIA Director John O. Brennan. The latter told Musk, “Dr. Fauci is a national hero who will be remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness & many contributions to public health. Despite your business success, you will be remembered most for fueling public hate & divisions. You may have money, but you have no class.”

Sargent stresses, however, that while Brennan and Klobuchar’s defenses of Fauci are “reasonable,” they also “seem fundamentally out of touch with basic realities of how right-wing information warfare really works.”

“This sort of info-warring, at bottom, is what characterizes Musk’s transformation into the world’s richest right-wing troll,” Sargent explains. “Tons of pixels have been wasted on efforts to pin down Musk’s true beliefs, but whatever they are, we can say right now that he’s consciously exploiting fundamental features of the right-wing information ecosystem.”

Sargent adds that offending liberals is the whole point of an “info-warring” tweet like Musk’s December 11 attack on Fauci.

“It’s understandable that Musk’s critics are trying shaming and outrage, in that this could further drive advertisers away from Twitter,” Sargent writes. “But paradoxically, it might also help Musk…. In much of the right-wing info-ecosystem, liberal outrage is a sign of an attack’s effectiveness. It can be only confirmation that the Libs Were Owned. Shaming is useless in such an environment, and in some ways can backfire.”

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mma 12 22

wonder why no longer richest bastard

Supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have celebrated Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeting a phrase that has been regularly invoked in the community, taking it as evidence that he supposedly supports the conspiracy theory in some manner.

On December 12, Musk tweeted, “Follow” next to a rabbit emoji. The wording with the emoji would seem to be referring to the phrase “follow the white rabbit,” a reference to the classic fantasy novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was repopularized byThe Matrixfilm franchise and subsequently adopted as an online rallying cry in the early days of the QAnon movement. The conspiracy theory’s central figure, “Q”, repeatedly referenced the “white rabbit” and the story directly in posts.

QAnon figures, who were already primed to believe that Musk was an ally, hyped Musk’s “clear Q reference” as some kind of green light, along with a follow-up tweet from Musk in response to a scene in The Matrixabout choosing between taking a blue pill and a red pill (which has been embraced in the far-right as so-called “red-pilling,” referring to a process by with individuals come to support far-right ideas). Adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory claimed Musk has been “keeping with the Q Comms” and was “on pace to start posting Q drops to millions of normies,” with some believing the tweet may already be referring to a Q post

[twts]

the QAnon community’s excitement for Musk’s tweet comes asMusk has pushed claims of child traffickingon Twitter and blamed Twitter’s leadership, including targeting Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, who was forced to flee his home due to threats. It also comes as more QAnon accounts have come back or at least attempted to come back to Twitter in the midst of Musk taking over the platform.

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note echo escal amplify tucker, jnx, sucks from vdare swamp Gt replacement booster // tucker

caravan invasion hype fear

no lnx twt

https://www.mediamatters.org/vdare/white-nationalists-embrace-fox-news-bill-melugin

White nationalists embrace Fox News’ Bill Melugin

The network’s top reporter at the US southern border has been promoted and celebrated by anti-immigrant racists

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 12/20/22

White nationalists and other far-right extremists have embraced and celebrated Fox News’ Bill Melugin, the network’s primary correspondent at the US southern border. His reporting is regularly mentioned and praised on racist, anti-immigrant websites including VDARE, Infowars, and other extremist outlets, highlighting the ideological overlap between so-called mainstream conservatism and its more openly racist fringes.

Melugin is a fixture on Fox News, regularly appearing both in supposed straight news programming and during primetime opinion shows. He has been on Fox at least 427 times in 2022, including at least 30 segments on the network’s flagship program, Tucker Carlson Tonight. (Data on Melugin's appearances is current through December 19, 2022, at 12:40pm.)

Drawing clear distinctions between mainstream conservatism and white nationalist extremism is not easy. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, for example, has fully embraced the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, once a fringe position only pushed by overt racists. Melugin has played a key role in much of Carlson’s mainstreaming of that xenophobic idea, so it is not a surprise that his coverage would also appear in far-right media venues.

Bill Melugin / Tucker Carlson / caravan

CitationFox News

One of the racist sites that has embraced Melugin is VDare, a white nationalist outlet founded by Peter Brimelow,a reclusive conservative publisher who straddles the line between the conservative establishment and overt white supremacy. Brimelow endorsed “racial nationalism” at CPAC in 2018, and one year later argued that when it came to immigration policy, “Western elites” were only interested in “repressing the white host nations,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a column for VDare in 2012, white nationalist John Derbyshire argued that, “White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with,” also as reported by the SPLC.

Brimelow recently attended the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala in Manhattan.He was photographed next to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, host of the War Room podcast, further illustrating the porous boundaries between supposedly respectable conservatism and its explicitly racist fellow travelers.

Over the last year and a half, VDare has used Melugin’s reporting as the basis for at least 31 blogs or videos on their site. While it’s true that an individual reporter can’t control what happens to their journalism once it’s out in the world, the pattern that emerges from VDare’s commentary on, and aggregation of, Melugin’s work is clear. The stories Melugin tells, and the way he frames them, fully align with VDare’s white nationalist agenda.

VDare celebrates Melugin’s reporting

On December 12, conservativeedgelordand Twitter owner Elon Musk approvingly responded to a typically sensationalistic tweet from Melugin. “Wow,” Musk replied to a video purporting to show over 1,000 migrants crossing the Rio Grande river without authorization. Musk’s interaction with Melugin’s post amplified its reach significantly. Later that morning, VDare’s official twitter account retweeted Melugin’s original tweet, again signaling the close proximity between conservative provocateurs like Musk and more overtly racist outlets.

BREAKING: A huge migrant caravan of over 1,000 people crossed illegally into El Paso, TX last night, making it the largest single group we have ever seen. The city of El Paso reports Border Patrol now has over 5,000 in custody & has released hundreds to city streets.

CitationFrom the Twitter account of VDare, posted December 12.

VDare’s account promoted Melugin two other times that morning as well, in both cases by retweeting comments added by white nationalist and Infowars contributor Dan Lyman. The account also retweeted Melugin or amplified his work at least nine other times in December, including one instance in which white nationalist and former Trump advisor Stephen Miller used his footage to argue against a spending bill Congress was debating. And in August, VDare celebrated after Musk had responded positively to another Melguin tweet.

Looks like a scene out of World War Z or Elysium The US as we’ve known it is finished. Just a matter of how / when it dies and what comes next.

CitationFrom the Twitter account of VDare.

Not a serious country anymore

CitationFrom the Twitter account of VDare

He's noticed!-- @elonmusk on @BillFOXLA 's daily reports on the Biden Rush at the southern border. #IMPEACHBIDENHARRIS

CitationFrom the Twitter account of VDare

VDare amplifies Melugin’s work even more frequently on their website. In October, VDare published a story based on a tweet of Melugin’s that incorrectly reported a Border Patrol agent had shot and killed a detained migrant after he had gone for the agent’s gun. In fact, as an FBI investigation found just days later, the man, Manuel Gonzalez-Moran, had apparently grabbed an unspecified “edged weapon” off an office desk, after which point a Border Patrol agent shot and killed him.

In July, VDare published a story under the same byline praising Melugin as an “intrepid” reporter “who documents The Great Replacement almost daily on his Twitter feed.” The same credited writer used similar language in February, again referencing “Fox News’s intrepid Bill Melugin, who keeps an eagle eye of Biden’s planned invasion of replacement citizens.” Also in February, a post under a pseudonymous byline said Melugin “has been doing excellent coverage along the border.”

Both Melugin and VDare have repeatedly covered the controversy over a photo that initially appeared to show Border Patrol agents whipping a Haitian migrant named Mirard Joseph in September 2021. Melugin has consistently claimed that Border Patrol didn’t do anything wrong. In October, he revisited the allegations, tweeting out an email obtained by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation sent to Department of Homeland Security head Alejandro Mayorkas that quoted the photojournalist who took the shot. The email appeared to undercut the whipping allegations, and cast Mayorkas in an unfavorable light. VDare embedded Melugin's tweet in a blog that also included criticism of Mayorkas from the Border Patrol Union and Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

The stories Melugin tells, and the way he frames them, fully align with VDare’s white nationalist agenda.

The reality of the story is far more nuanced than either Melugin or VDare want to admit. Melugin’s supposed smoking gun email included a write-up of an interview of Paul Ratje, the photographer, in which said he hadn't witnessed agents whipping any migrants, but later said his comments had been misconstrued as giving Border Patrol “a pass.” Joseph and other migrants mistreated by Border Patrol agents that day filed a lawsuit against the government, claiming agents had “lashed” him. Joseph described his treatment while in U.S. custody as “the worst humiliation I have endured in my life.” An official investigation by Customs and Border Protection didn’t find evidence that whipping took place, but did uncover “unprofessional and dangerous behavior by several individual Agents.” But both Melugin and VDare saw an opportunity to demonize migrants and took it.

Conspiracy theorists at Infowars rely on Melugin's work

Melugin’s support from Infowars extends beyond the recent tweets from Lyman, the white nationalist who VDare retweeted. In September, Alex Jones’ co-host Owen Shroyer repeatedly praised Melugin after Politico reported that the Biden White House had “become increasingly irritated” with the Fox News correspondent. Shroyer claimed, without evidence, that the story was an attempt to “get Melugin shut down and banned and censored from the Internet” to punish him for his journalism.

Video CitationFrom the September 21, 2022, edition of Infowars'The Alex Jones Show, streamed on Rumble

“Now, who’s down there reporting at the border, probably more-so and better than anyone else, that’s Bill Melugin,” Shroyer said to introduce the topic. (Shroyer, never one to sweat the details, pronounced Melugin’s name wrong until a producer appeared to correct him midway through the segment.)

“And so why are they mad at Bill Melugin?” Shroyer asked. “Because he’s down at the border every day with a Fox News crew, with cameras, and they’re showing the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants that come across the border every day. And talking to Border Patrol about the terrorists, and the child rapists that they arrest.”

Like VDare, the Infowars website regularly writes articles based on Melugin’s work. A review of Infowars’ archives show at least 37 posts that include his reporting, typically as the piece’s primary or exclusive source. These stories adopt his anti-migrant framing, treating irregular border crossings as a rolling catastrophe – the frontline in a war zone – that must be addressed with militarized responses.

In many cases, Melugin is mentioned without additional comment, but there are several instances in which Infowars bloggers express their admiration for him. Writer Steve Watson recently celebrated Melugin as a reporter “who has been at the front lines on the border crisis for years now.” Last month, on the day of the 2022 midterms, Lyman characterized Melugin as “documenting the invasion of Maverick County,” in Texas. One month earlier, writer Kelen McBreen praised a tweet of Melugin’s that supposedly “accurately pointed out” the hypocrisy of New York city’s immigration policy compared with Texas’. Watson, weeks earlier, again cheered on Melugin for being “ever present at the border.”

Racists, other far-right extremists praise Melugin’s Del Rio bridge story

Arguably Melugin’s breakthrough story came in August and September, 2021, when he covered an influx of mostly Haitian migrants who had sought refuge under the Del Rio bridge in Texas. Infowars covered the issue by cross-posting a blog from far-right conspiracy site ZeroHedge, written by pseudonymous blogger Tyler Durden. “Melugin has been reporting from the bridge for more than a month,” Durden wrote approvingly that September, also referring to the “stunning drone footage” Melugin had captured.

When the FAA issued a two-week flight restriction over the bridge, Durden accused the Biden administration of trying to kill the story, and praised Melugin for persevering. “The Biden administration’s attempt to cover up the border disaster by blocking drones didn’t stop Melugin and his team who hitched a ride on a Texas Department of Public Safety’s helicopter to capture an aerial view of the migrant crisis,” Durden gushed. In fact, shortly after issuing the restriction, the FAA provided clearance for Melugin about a day later.

The Del Rio bridge story became a national sensation, with Melugin’s implicitly xenophobic coverage leading the way. The story spread to some of the worst parts of the Internet, where the implicit bigotry was abandoned for explicit racism. Neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer referred to the migrants as “invaders,” claiming the United States’ refugee policy was “about making America nonwhite. There’s no other goal.”

The racist site Occidental Dissentalso covered the story. It was “another scene of imperial decline,” according to the site’s founder, Brad Griffin, who uses the pen name Hunter Wallace. “This has been going on ever since Joe Biden was inaugurated in January,” he added. “The only difference now is seeing so many black faces joining the flood.”

What’s most notable about this explicitly racist commentary is how closely it matched Fox News’ own coverage at the time. As Media Matters and others noted, Tucker Carlson – using Melugin’s reporting – fully embraced the racist great replacement conspiracy theorywhile discussing the Del Rio bridge story. Biden’s immigration policy was designed "to change the racial mix of the country,” Carlson said. “In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

Melugin frames himself as a straightforward reporter, just covering the facts as he sees them. But his body of work has been wholeheartedly embraced by far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists, Carlson very much among them. That’s not intrepid reporting – it’s laying the foundation for racist propaganda.

---

ampli echo escalator: hype fear us vs enemy apoc: storm the cockpit or die

A parallel process of line-shifting has been unfolding among conservative intellectuals, most of whom responded to the launch of Trump's presidential campaign six years ago with a mixture of disgust and incredulity. The dismissal didn't last. While many shifted to the center and refused to endorse Trump's hostile takeover of the party, plenty of others went along with it, adjusting their prior positions to bring them into alignment with the nominee on policy and attitude. No commentator did so with more enthusiasm or popular impact than Michael Anton.

A former director of communications for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (where he was briefly my boss) and former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Anton penned the most notorious and rhetorically scalding case for supporting Trump. Published in early September 2016 in the Claremont Review of Books online, "The Flight 93 Election" portrayed Trump as a final, last-ditch opportunity for conservatives to wrest control of the country back from those (like Hillary Clinton) who aimed at nothing less than its thoroughgoing destruction.Rush Limbaugh paid tribute to the power of the argument (and amplified it for a vastly larger audience) by reading the essay aloud, paragraph by paragraph, on his radio show. In doing so, Anton, with Limbaugh's help, gave legions of Trump-skeptical conservatives permission to vote, even to express outright enthusiasm, for the untested right-wing populist.

---

matt g

https://www.mediamatters.org/fake-news/right-wing-ecosystem-created-paul-pelosi-conspiracy-theory

mma 1122 no twt

it took roughly 48 hours for the right-wing media ecosystem to turn a story about a man who committed political violence after becoming consumed by right-wing conspiracy theories about the depravity of the left into another right-wing conspiracy theory about the depravity of the left.

But in the days since the attack, people who get their news from right-wing sources have instead been told an absurd and baseless conspiracy theory. In this telling, there was no home invasion; instead DePape is actually Paul Pelosi’s leftist gay lover, and the police,Democrats, and the press are covering up that the assault was really a lovers’ spat. The tale was quickly adopted by influential right-wing figures – including Twitter owner Elon Musk – and, if past is prologue, will be accepted by a sizable percentage of the GOP base.

The Pelosi conspiracy theory took hold so quickly thanks to the parallel media ecosystem the right constructed over decades. That ecosystem features numerous outlets that generate conspiracy theories for partisan and financial gain; food-chain mechanisms that swiftly distribute them to millions of people; an existing right-wing audience trained to demand such fantasies; minimal internal guardrails within the right-wing press to provide more credible information; and strong external barriers against contrary information from mainstream news sources.

How the right built a Paul Pelosi conspiracy theory

The right’s conspiracy theorists took those four pieces of evidence, mixed in Paul Pelosi’s May DUI charge, and concocted the narrative that he had been the victim of a drunken gay lovers’ spat that was subsequently covered up.

[twt]

those who lack such airs simply claimed, as Dinesh D’Douza did, that “this guy, the assailant, is either a sexual partner or a male prostitute, and this is a sexual rendezvous that went sideways.”

[twt]

eventually, the story reached Musk, a troll beloved on the right with a penchant for conspiracy theories. And on Sunday morning, he blasted it out to his 112 million Twitter followers.

[musk twt]

the website, the Santa Monica Observer, had previously alleged that Clinton died in 2016 and had been replaced by a body double for her presidential debate with Donald Trump.

At the same time, the right-wing media generated nonsensical explanations for why the assailant’s Internet footprint is forged and he’s actually a leftist. They cannot accept that the assailant believed right-wing conspiracy theories without taking on responsibility, so they’ve developed an alternate explanation instead.

Roughly 72 hours after news of the assault on Paul Pelosi had broken, the conspiracy theory had been promoted by a Republican member of Congress and by Donald Trump Jr., and “Pelosigaylover” was trending nationally on Twitter.

The conspiracy-minded ecosystem that fuels the right

The right-wing information ecosystem is built to create and propagate conspiracy theories like the latest drivel about the Pelosi attack.

On message boards and social media platforms, an army of right-wing would-be sleuths looking for political advantage or simple amusement are constantly on the hunt for raw materials that they can spin into these alternate narratives.

Hyperpartisan news sites with no journalistic standards – from local ones like the Santa Monica Observer to national players like Gateway Pundit – trawl those venues looking for stories that they can write up andmonetize.

The conspiracy theories move up the right-wing media food chain, with more and more prominent influencers and outlets picking up the story and running with it, until it becomes pervasive on the right.

Sprawling conspiracy theories like 2020 election denial, QAnon, Pizzagate, and Gamergate – all of which DePape had championed – worked their way through these networks.

The right-wing audience is uniquely vulnerable to these narratives.

The right-wing press spent decades spinning out these politically convenient narratives about the diabolical nature of their perceived enemies [NEWT! fox] until the audience came to demand them. Few on the right – and none with any real degree of influence – are interested in debunking the rampant lies once they get going. Instead, powerful figures at Fox News and elsewhere end up pushing the likes of QAnon talking points and scoffing at its extremism. And decades of right-wing attacks on the mainstream press have created a bubble in which the audience is unlikely to receive or credit contradictory information from those outlets.

The result is that we consistently see the conspiracy theories come to infest the ranks of the movement, from Vince Foster’s death to QAnon.

Credible news outlets will divert resources from covering the rising tide of right-wing political violence or the GOP’s disturbing policy aims if the party gains ground in the midterm elections to pointing out that the right is peddling nonsense about Pelosi.But thanks to the right-wing media bubble, their facts won’t make it to the people inclined to believe it. And so a sizable chunk of the GOP will come to believe an absurd lie.

---

russia hackers amplified or created an amp/escalator?

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-qanon-cyber-idUKL1N2HD00Z

disputed see homegrown?

QAnon received earlier boost from Russian accounts on Twitter, archives show

By Joseph Menn

Nov 2 (Reuters)- Russian government-backed social media accounts nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory in its infancy, earlier than previously reported, according to interviews with current and former Twitter executives and archives of tweets from suspended accounts.

:{:{}:

Researchers said in August that the archives showed Russian accounts had helped spread QAnon in volume beginning in December 2017, reut.rs/2TFWoWc, but that team did not examine the history of specific QAnon promoters. bit.ly/2HTReUh

:{:{}:

A more granular review by Reuters shows Russian accounts began amplifying the movement as it started, early in the previous month.

From November 2017 on, QAnon was the single most frequent hashtag tweeted by accounts that Twitter has since identified as Russian-backed, a Reuters analysis of the archive shows, with the term used some 17,000 times.

The archives contain more than 4,000 accounts that Twitter suspended for spreading Russian government disinformation in 2018 and 2019 but preserved for researchers.

The trove shows that some of the Russian accounts tweeted about QAnon’s most important popularizer even before the anonymous figure known as Q emerged, then rewarded her with more promotion when she put videos about Q on YouTube.

Asked about support for QAnon, the Russian embassy in Washington said Moscow does not interfere in U.S. politics.

“Malicious activity in the information space contradicts the principles of Russian foreign policy, national interests and our understanding of interstate relations,” a spokesman said.

A current Twitter executive said Russian accounts are not driving the present iteration of QAnon, which has expanded to include baseless claims about COVID-19 and other issues.

The original posts associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory appeared in late October 2017, purporting to be from a Trump insider with “Q” security clearance who said Hillary Clinton faced arrest and her allies were running a massive child-sex ring.

The fantasy was confined to a small piece of the internet for a few days until conservative video blogger Tracy Diaz, known online as TracyBeanz, began to post regular videos promoting it. She soon began amassing undisclosed donors and now has more than 10 million video views on YouTube.

A few Russian accounts had been retweeting Diaz as far back as April 2017, according to the archives of suspended accounts. After her first Q video on Nov. 3, the number of Russian tweets pushing Diaz’ handle surged to 40 monthly through the following spring, the archives show.

Diaz did not respond to an email seeking comment.

It remains unclear how much the Russians influenced Diaz before she hit it big. But former Twitter security staffers said a handful of accounts that tweeted to Diaz from mid-2017 illustrated the extreme difficulty of detecting covert influence.

Now suspended for undisclosed reasons or abandoned by their operators, these accounts claimed to be American but displayed unusual interest in Russian issues. The visible tweets between them and Diaz were first flagged to Reuters by open-source researcher Chris Scott.

One account called CrusadersPost retweeted obscure Russian officials and appeared to be the first account to use the term “Q Anon” on social media, on Nov. 2, according to people with access to all public tweets.

CrusadersPost had reached out to Diaz in April to wish her a happy birthday and offer to help her with a new project.

“YOU ROCK,” she replied. The account also encouraged Diaz to publicize MegaAnon, which preceded and resembled QAnon.

Another Diaz fan ran an account called SlicksTweetz, which the banned Russian accounts mentioned 871 times. The day of her debut Q video, Diaz publicly thanked SlicksTweetz for sharing it.

:{:{}:

A week later, as she worked on new videos, she replied to him: “There are so many connections—that’s a good one I hadn’t seen yet :).” (Reporting by Joseph Menn. Editing by Jonathan Weber and Steve Orlofsky)

---

5 22

in wake of the back-to-back mass shootings that have taken place inBuffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, right-wing conspiracy theorists have begun spreading lies and misinformation about the deadly attacks.

According to Axios, a growing "pipeline of misinformation" that spans from "obscure internet platforms to the mouths of sitting members of Congress 'seems to be going a lot faster now.'" Speaking to the news outlet, Bryce Webster-Jacobsen, who serves as the intelligence operations director at the firm GroupSense, weighed in on the narratives he has been seeing online.

"The misinformation narratives that start on places like 4chan or Reddit make it to the public consciousness really quickly," he added.

Jared Holt, a Digital Forensic Research Lab resident fellow at theAtlantic Council, also noted that they are "getting picked up by individuals with more power and louder voices. Holt added, "So the effect of misinformation has felt like it's multiplying."

Many of the conspiracy theories circulating on social media platforms have aligned the mass shooters with politically-motivated narratives. Per Axios:

In Uvalde, misinformation falsely claiming the shooter was transgender appears to have quickly spread from 4chan, an anonymous message board, to the mainstream. The pictures used to support the falsehood were pulled from a user on Reddit. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) tweeted that the shooter was a "transsexual leftist illegal alien," but later deleted the post.

In Buffalo, misinformation falsely claiming that the shooting was a "false flag" operation — an attack disguised to look like it was made by the opposite side in a conflict — spread quickly in the aftermath of the massacre. A conservative Arizona state lawmaker is under investigation by the Arizona Senate for her Telegram post endorsing the theory.

"Often, it strikes me that these kinds of communities or figures ... want to believe a certain thing, and someone on the internet finds something to provide source material," Holt said. "They come up with the concept first and then scour the internet to patch details in there so that it can live on."

The so-called "great replacement theory" is said to have motivated the Buffalo shooter, according to his "manifesto."

"There are some common stories that always get spread, and they’re usually about the shooter's identity — and they usually use the same pictures and names," Webster-Jacobsen also noted.

Caroline Orr Bueno, a behavioral scientist who conducts research on social media manipulation also explained the rise in conspiracy theories. "People want answers, and if they’re not getting them from authorities, they’ll get them somewhere else," said Bueno.

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/russias-invasion-ukraine/conspiracy-theory-about-hunter-biden-and-ukrainian-biolabs-went-qanon

no lnx twt pix vid

a conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden and Ukrainian biolabs went from QAnon supporters and far-right message boards to the Kremlin and Tucker Carlson

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 03/28/22

A version of a false conspiracy theory about Ukrainian biolabs that holds that Hunter Biden is connected to those labs was spread by the Russian government, Chinese state media, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, after supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory and users on far-right message boards pushed the claim.

In late February, a false conspiracy theory spread online -- spurred on by a QAnon-supporting Twitter account known as “Clandestine” -- that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was targeting U.S.-linked labs working to create bioweapons. In reality, the labs are focused on detecting diseases, the U.S. program aims to prevent the development or spread of biological weapons, and the conspiracy theory has its roots in a longstanding Russian disinformation effort. The false claim has spread online among far-right figures and QAnon supporters, and the Russian government has invoked the conspiracy theory to justify the invasion following its spread in parts of the American right.

In the months before the invasion, a separate conspiracy theory circulated online suggesting that Biden was tied to labs involved in potentially nefarious activity around the world, including possibly causing the coronavirus pandemic.Although Ukraine was not the only focus of the conspiracy theory, it was mentioned as one of the countries supposedly involved in these efforts; this claim also followed previous allegations from right-wing media about wrongdoing by Biden in that country.

In particular, a thread from a QAnon-supporting Twitter account called “Blue Canaries” claimed in October that Biden was connected to an effort to manufacture “bio agents under diplomatic cover at ‘secret’ labs” and sell “pandemic insurance and trackers to help countries get ahead of what they are putting out.”

Blue Canaries Twitter

Blue Canaries’ Twitter thread quickly spread among some online conspiracy theorists, including on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board, the forum dedicated to “Q,” QAnon’s central figure. It was shared on-air by Infowars host Owen Shroyer, who hyped the thread as “unbelievable,” as well as by Jeffrey Pedersen, a QAnon influencer and show co-host known online as “intheMatrixxx,” who called it “a very interesting thread/dig.”

8kun Hunter biolabs1

CitationFrom 8kun's “/qresearch/” message board

Soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in late February, and as Clandestine’s biolabs conspiracy theory Twitter thread took off online, the Blue Canaries Twitter thread mentioning Biden was invoked again and began to spread among users on far-right message boards.

QAnon forum Hunter biolabs

It was also featured onPedersen’s MatrixxxGrooove Show(also known as MG Show) just one day after Russia’s invasion began. Pedersen -- who had by that point shared Clandestine’s claim about biolabs as a reason for the invasion -- extensively discussed Blue Canaries’ Twitter thread, linked it to Biden, and suggested “President [Vladimir] Putin and Russia have been worried about this.” Co-host Shannon Townsend added, “This looks like the biggest thing that they would be worried about considering what we’ve experienced in the world for the last two-plus years. Why would he not be afraid that this was going on? And what if we could prove that it was going on all over the country of Ukraine, right next door to him?”

Video CitationFrom the February 25, 2022, edition of the MatrixxxGrooove Show

Following that MatrixxxGrooove Show episode on February 25, both Blue Canaries’ Twitter thread and the claim that Biden was tied to Ukrainian biolabs continued to spread via some social media accounts and on far-right message board site 4chan. On February 28, RedPill78’s Zak Paine, a QAnon show host who participated in the Capitol insurrection, discussed Biden “in regards to those biolabs in the Ukraine” and the “ongoing conversation about biological weapons facilities in the country of Ukraine that were set up by the United States government.”

On March 8, Infowars published an article claiming Biden was “connected to US biolabs in Ukraine,” mentioning some of the same organizations cited by the Blue Canaries thread -- repeating claims that the outlet had pushed on-air months earlier. Two days later, far-right blog The Gateway Pundit came out with its own piece claiming Biden’s investment fund had “provided capital for the firms behind the creation of Biolabs in Ukraine,” citing Infowars’ “excellent article with connections between Hunter Biden” and the supposed biolabs. Pedersen shared both articles and wrote, “You heard it on the MG Show first,” adding that “we also beat infowars” on pushing the conspiracy theory.

Gateway Pundit Hunter biolabs

CitationFrom The Gateway Pundit

Following The Gateway Pundit’s article, the conspiracy theory gained more exposure on some mainstream social media platforms, getting thousands of total engagements on those platforms.

The Russian government invoked this particular version of the conspiracy theory on March 24, with the Ministry of Defense accusing Biden’s investment firm of having a “close connection” to military contractors responsible for “Pentagon biolaboratories around the world” -- similar to what Blue Canaries had suggested those months prior. Russia’s Defense Ministry also released a diagram of supposed connections between Biden, the Democratic Party, George Soros, various U.S. companies and federal agencies, and foreign governments as evidence for the conspiracy theory,and the claim was subsequently pushed by Russian state media. Chinese state media also pushed the claim, citing the Russian government.

Russian and Chinese state media Hunter biolabs

On the evening of March 24, Fox News host Tucker Carlson -- who had previously pushed the broader biolabs conspiracy theory to justify Russia’s invasion -- pointed to a National Pulse article from earlier that day to say that “a private equity firm run by Hunter Biden funded some of the research into pathogens in these biolabs.” The on-screen chyron said, “Report: Hunter Linked To Ukrainian Biolab.” (The MatrixxxGrooove Show’s Townsend had also shared the National Pulse article and claimed that his show found what the article claimed “over a month ago.”)

Video fileCitationFrom the March 24, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

For his part, Clandestine -- the QAnon supporter who caused the initial biolabs conspiracy theory to spread widely online following the invasion -- joined in hyping the Biden angle and cheered Carlson’s points, calling them “digestible doses for the normies” that are “culminating into a mass realization the likes of which the world has never seen.”

THE LATEST

Piers Morgan plugs new show on Fox Nation: “I'm going to lead the charge to save our language to let pregnant people go back to being called women.”

04/01/22 3:32 PM EDT

This far-right website funnels Russian propaganda into the conservative echo chamber

04/01/22 3:17 PM EDT

Joe Rogan: “Imagine” getting “into bed” with White House press secretary Jen Psaki

04/01/22 2:39 PM EDT

Accounts spreading QAnon, anti-vax, and election fraud misinformation are still being hosted by Twitch, despite the platform’s alleged crackdown

04/01/22 2:01 PM EDT

Fox News is using the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account like a wire service for anti-LGBTQ attacks

04/01/22 1:52 PM EDT

Pagination

Current page1

…

IN THIS ARTICLE

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Tucker Carlson

QAnon Conspiracy Theory

Facebook and Instagram have allowed and profited from advertising pushing the false Ukraine-US biolabs conspiracy theory

03/16/22 11:59 AM EDT

YouTube is making money off a false Ukraine-biolabs conspiracy theory that is tied to Russian disinformation and QAnon

03/08/22 3:27 PM EST

QAnon supporters and far-right figures hail Russian invasion of Ukraine as Putin taking down the “cabal”

---

From the IPCC to the SOTU, people are picking up on climate disinformation

Published on March 3rd, 2022

TAGGED: CLIMATE, DISINFORMATION, IPCC, SOTU

Climate misinformation is having a moment! With an ample selection of news stories deserving attention, you might have to look pretty closely to notice. But hey, that’s what we’re here for, right? Because tucked into the latest IPCC report are a few key mentions of climate misinformation. Flipping through to page 2,515, Section 14.3 covers the “perception of climate change hazards, risks and adaptation in North America,” describing how the “consensus that mean global temperature has increased and human activity is a major cause” is “the context for public policy action.”

[tom toles climate change denial fire]

(Cartoon by Tom Toles from the Washington Post – get his book on climate change co-written with Dr Michael Mann, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy)]

By Climate Denier Roundup

But “despite expert scientific consensus,” there is still “ongoing debate… in the public and policy domains,” because “rhetoric and misinformation on climate change and the deliberate undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus.”

And though the report doesn’t use the word “disinformation,” and doesn’t go quite as far as it could to “name names” as Simon Lewis told DeSmog. But it does address it, describing how “vested economic and political interests have organized and financed misinformation and ‘contrarian’ climate change communication.” (If the misinformation is deliberately “organized and financed” by “vested economic and political interests,” then it’s not false content innocently and unknowingly shared as misinfo, it’s intentionally deceptive disinformation!)

As Geoffrey Supran told press, “these two paragraphs in the latest IPCC report are significant because they are the first-of-their-kind, finally throwing the weight of the global scientific community behind the mountain of social science scholarship on climate obstructionism.”

In past reports, “the history of climate disinformation, lobbying, and propaganda by fossil fuel interests has been consistently ignored,” Supran explained.

That’s why the WGII report, meant to summarize the latest climate science, dips back all the way to the mid-00’s when referencing studies about, the report states, how “the journalistic norm of ‘balance’ (giving equal weight to climate scientists and contrarians in climate change reporting) biases coverage by unevenly amplifying certain messages that are not supported by science, contributing to politicization of science, spreading misinformation, and reducing public consensus on action.”

These days the problem is more social media than legitimate outlets, and more up-to-date studies reflect that, the report finds: “Much online social media discussion of climate change … takes place in ‘echo chambers’’ – a social network amongst like-minded people in communities dominated by a single view that contributes to polarization (Williams et al., 2015; Pearce et al., 2019), and the spread of misinformation (Treen et al., 2020).”

The IPCC report’s inclusion of misinformation is important, Supran said, “because the IPCC reports are the most visible climate reports in the world. They frame the climate problem, its significance, and its solutions for the public and policymakers worldwide.”

And indeed, as international negotiators and scientists were in the home stretch of finalizing the Summary for Policymakers for the report (which didn’t happen to fit misinformation into its 36 page summary of the 3,675 page full report) some policymakers in the White House were getting a misinformation briefing of their own.

According to an official press release, the “2-hour virtual roundtable” brought together “White House leaders and 17 scientists and communications experts” in order “to discuss the scientific understanding of why arguments for delaying action on climate change are appealing and how they can be countered effectively.”

Among the participants was Naomi Oreskes, whose studies the IPCC referenced. According to the readout, she noted that extreme weather “made worse by climate change” is making it harder and harder to deny the reality of the climate crisis. “People may say ‘let’s wait and see.’ The truth is, we have waited, and we have seen.”

To put it in decidedly less White House-appropriate terms, thanks to Big Oil’s disinformation, we’ve spent decades fucking around. And now, the latest IPCC report makes clear, we’re finding out.

(Originally appeared at DailyKos)

---

aha: echo is isolation from Earth1, legit press info (ie ideas/info you do not want b/c does not fit your POV) and escalator= AMPLIFY/ BOOST/ PROPAGATE TO MORE PPL AND MORE INFLUENTIAL/INFECTIOUS PPL/ SOURCES

an 2 22 edit bd

On February 15, Bloomberg ran a story about the “freedom convoy” that seemed to illustrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the German resistance to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler’s rise. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, is a meditation on “The Sermon on the Mount” in which Bonhoeffer splits the Christian concept of grace in two.

On the one hand is “cheap grace,” which is “without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

On the other hand, Bonhoeffer said, is “costly grace.” It “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him.”

Indeed, resisting fascism by submitting “to the yoke of Christ” and following him cost him dearly. At age 39, the Nazis hanged him.

His theory of stupidity is featured in a letter written to friends a few years earlier. The letter, which is now known as “After Ten Years,” argues that evil like the Nazis isn’t the worst thing. Stupidity is.

“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force,” he wrote. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”

Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

Bloomberg reporters Jen Skerritt and Robert Tuttle were covering protests of the Canadian government’s requirement that truck drivers delivering freight across the US-Canadian border must be vaccinated.

Protests in Alberta and Manitoba, dubbed the “freedom convoy,” took the form of blockades of bridges and trucking routes, at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of emergency powers.

Skerritt and Tuttle interviewed one trucker. His name is Jake Klassen. His two campers and semi were in the blockade. He said Trudeau’s emergency powers were an attempt to “take everything from us.”

Then there is this part:

Klassen said he hasn’t been able to visit his nine-year-old daughter in months. She is receiving palliative care at St. Amant, a care residence in Winnipeg, but due to restrictions that require visitors to be fully vaccinated, Klassen and his wife can’t see her.

“Yes, that's absolutely stunning and sad,” said Victoria Barnett.

Barnett was director of programs on ethics, religion and the Holocaust at the National Holocaust Museum. She’s the author of many books on interfaith history. She edited a 2017 translation of “After Ten Years.” I asked if Jake Klassen exemplifies Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Maybe, but as part of a bigger phenomenon. “After Ten Years” was his attempt to understand the first 10 years of National Socialism and what had happened to his compatriots, his church, his country.

He's trying to figure out why most Germans caved to Nazi ideology and why they became integral to what happened. The historian Klemens von Klemperer (himself a refugee) called the Third Reich a "consensual dictatorship" -- which is a pretty good description.

Go into that a bit more please. How was it consensual?

His main point is that stupidity is a moral failure, not an intellectual one. He's reflecting on the process by which people willfully become part of a larger movement or political group, etc. As they become increasingly involved, two things tend to happen:

They become isolated(or they isolate themselves) from those who disagree with them or challenge them (and I would say also from news sources that would challenge their worldview) and
They get a lot of reinforcement. One of the things that happened in 1933 after Hitler came to power was that Nazi Party organizations were founded for every demographic group – teachers, housewives, kids, etc. Everyone suddenly had a badge, a uniform, meetings to go to, new friends to meet etc. — and that was a big factor in creating a new sense of a larger German community serving a "grander" purpose (in the Nazi mindset).

A big part of that, of course, was identifying enemies and those who needed to be excluded -- Jewish citizens, political opponents, critical journalists, etc. But that early formation of consensus made life much harder, even by the end of 1933, for people who didn't agree with it.

What you're describing is collectivism, no?

The self-understanding of the German Volk was a collective concept personified by the "Fuhrer.” That's a big part of authoritarian or fascist regimes. Authoritarian leaders can do things without parliamentary approval, because they represent the "true" will of "the people."

But that also created a dynamic in Nazi Germany in which there was this mass adoration – almost a mass hysteria – for the person of Adolf Hitler. There are paintings portraying him as a messianic figure.

Bonhoeffer said there is no defense against stupidity. But if it's a moral failing, wouldn't a defense be private and public morality?

Ideally, yes.

Bonhoeffer's essay is an exploration of why that didn't happen. (Elsewhere, he explores the lack of civil courage) But Nazi Germany is a disturbing case study in the failure of leaders, institutions (such as the church), etc., to stand up in an effective way to National Socialism.

The best and bravest people were either arrested early on or got out. But he's pondering (and I think this is autobiographical) the failure of good decent people critical of the regime to be more effective.

That didn't happen. (Along the way, one must acknowledge that many of them became complicit). But by staying in and working from inside the regime, they also failed to offer a clearer example of resistance.

That's why by 1942 Bonhoeffer believes (as he writes here) that "only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity."

The trucker above says he's seeking liberation, too. Liberation from responsibility. How would Bonhoeffer persuade a man that he has agency and can visit his dying daughter by making the right choice?

One thing DB ignores is the psychology of all this. (He describes stupidity as a sociological problem). In Nazi Germany, we're also looking at the pressures and dynamics within a fascist police state.

In other circumstances, however (eg, the truckers' protests), this gets back to the peer pressures within a group that’s getting its information only from certain sources, in which there is a lot of pressure to conform to the will of the group (and a reward for doing so).

I've studied this in terms of the psychology of group behavior in Nazi Germany, but the literature on personality cults, mob behavior, etc., shows that the longer and more deeply a person gets involved in something like this, the less individual agency they perceive they have.

For Bonhoeffer personally -- he wrote as a theologian and person of deep faith -- that faith has the capacity to make someone see more clearly. But “After Ten Years” is a rather bleak assessment.

I'm reminded of something Michael Josephson said in 1989:

Success can be defined so many different ways but right now it is defined in a kind of how high is your position, how many people work for you, how high is your salary. When you get into that kind of yuppie version of success,you’re going to sacrifice things along the way.There’s not enough commitment to the ground rules of civil virtue.

A society focused on "success" (greed, selfishness) is a society in which a man won't do the right thing to see his dying daughter and as a consequence, will make sacrifices he can’t reverse along the way.

He's making an important point about what we value publicly and how that affects the individual's ethics and sense of responsibility.

I've been very disturbed by some of the very callous reactions during the pandemic – eg, the minimization of the deaths in nursing homes, the rush to get back to normal when thousands of people are still getting sick and dying (and when large sectors of the population -- children under the age of 6 -- can't yet be vaccinated).

But as I saw somewhere, the scale of the callousness has been on display for some time now in how we've dealt with school shootings, the high level of violence in our society and the much higher levels of violence experienced by people of color and the poor.

A society is measured in part by what we are willing to live with and by whether we are willing to change to make life better. Bonhoeffer, in his text, addresses this when he writes about the responsibility we are willing to take upon ourselves for the sake of a different future.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to be doing what Bonhoeffer wished more Germans had done. He called out conservatives in the Parliament for standing with the Swastika and the Confederate flag.

I interviewed a number of Germans back in the 1980s when I was working on my first book (a collection of oral histories from people who had been in the Confessing Church) and I recall Kurt Scharf (a very brave pastor, who would later became a bishop) saying thatif Germans had held mass demonstrations and marched in 1933 in solidarity with German Jews, they might have changed things.

Impossible to know in retrospect, that’s what’s important here (and for understanding Bonhoeffer as well) -- taking a public position not only draws a line for what can be tolerated, but it also serves as a model to others that it is possible to speak out. That's what he was writing about in the section on the lack of civil courage among Germans.

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left says trump is mafia boss psychopath and trumpistas gullible/ not bright ppl who fell into cult; nazi? but some proudly publically are?

qanon says pedos who drink blood adenochrome, so asymmetry? if satan is real then these attrocities are possible/plausible?

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ECHO/ESCALATOR // SOCMED ALGO HYPE --> POLARIZATION

raw story 2 22 https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/trump-cult/

The statement by theRepublican National Committee arguing that the Jan. 6 insurrection was " legitimate political discourse" has sparked a renewed conversation on whether Donald Trump's MAGA movement is a **cult.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell began his examination of the issue with quotes from two Democratic Party leaders.

"You know, the 'C' in RNC doesn't stand for 'committee,' it stands for 'cult.' It's not the Republican National Committee, it's theRepublican National Cult," Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said.

"They seem to have reached rock-bottom with their statement that happened on January 6th was normal political discourse," Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said. "I say to Republicans all the time, take back your party from this cult."

Those quotes raised questions for O'Donnell, who wondered, "Is it a cult or is it stupidity? And what's the difference?"

For analysis, O'Donnell interviewed Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard.

Dodes said, "I think the word cult is probably correct.

"What a cult is — especially a charismatic cult, which is the kind we're talking about here where you have the all-powerful leader, Trump, who is seen as a god-like figure — those cults are self-contained, intentionally," he explained. "If you are in one, you are required to believe the belief system of the group. And a part of that, which is important to understand, is that you are also required to deny or ignore or attack those people who challenge the belief system, which is exactly what we see from many of these Trump followers, who simply act as they cannot hear and they attack those people who challenge it, which is what happened to [Liz] Cheney." [MARXIST CRT]

"The advantage of being ins such a group is that you have an echo chamber of people who are admiring you and affirming you. It is a self-affirming system, everyone agrees on the same things and they all follow and worship the leader," he continued. "On the other hand, to stand up against that, therefore, means that you aren't an outcast, you are a pariah." [BUT AMPLIFY INCREASE DOSE TRUMPIER THAN THOU?]

O'Donnell wondered about the role intelligence plays in susceptibility to joining a cult.

"Doctor, it seems that one defense against cultism, one personal defense that we might all possess — many of us might possess — is intelligence, you're simply too smart to fall for the stupidity of what's the cult is selling," O'Donnell said. "What is the difference between adherence to a cult and stupidity?"

"It helps to be stupid, but I think that they're different because there are intelligent people who are members of cult, you know? As much as some of these people who are republicans that don't seem to care about either democracy or morality are odious to us, they may be intelligent. Unfortunately, intelligence doesn't help you when you've got these enormous internal and external pressures to stay in line with the leader.

"I think it has, certainly, a moral quality. People who have high moral qualities and values do stand up, we sometimes consider them heroic. They finally say this is not right, as Liz Cheney did. I think we have to question the morality of the Trump followers because their morality is not strong enough to overcome their self-interest of staying in the cult," Dodes concluded.

Watch:

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How Trump’s rallies help keep MAGA Republicans in a politically segregated 'bubble':journalist

Alex Henderson January 20, 2022

A common talking point on the right — and even among some Blue Dog Democrats — is that liberals and progressives live in “safe spaces” where they are cut off from conservative, and even centrist, ideas. According to that strawman view of liberals and progressives, politically isolated Democrats need to spend less time on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, or in Downtown Boston or the San Francisco Bay Area and more time talking to “the real America.”

But political bubbles are hardly limited to the left in the United States. Veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove was such an ideologue during the 2012 presidential election that he looked like a deer caught in the headlights when, in the presence of Megyn Kelly on Fox News, he learned that President Barack Obama had defeated GOP nominee Mitt Romney in Ohio — and therefore, would be staying in the White House for four more years. And ten years later, in 2022, one of the most isolated political bubbles is the one inhabited by MAGA Republicans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020.

Journalist Elaine Godfrey takes a look at their political isolation in an article published by The Atlantic on January 20, arguing that their self-imposed segregation is reinforced by the media they consume and the MAGA rallies they attend.

“Before the 2020 election,” Godfrey explains, “Trump and his fans would often ask reporters how Joe Biden could possibly win when he didn’t have rallies as big as Trump’s. Now that Biden is president, Trump-rally goers say things like: Trump couldn’t really have lost. Look at all of these people!”

One such Trump supporter, Godfrey notes, was 51-year-old Tammy Shutts, who attended a recent MAGA rally in Arizona and told the Atlantic journalist, “100%, 1000%, 1 million percent, Biden didn’t win…. I’ve been in Arizona for almost 21 years. There is no way — no way — we went blue.”

Evidently, Shutts obviously doesn’t spend a lot of time hanging out with Latino voters in heavily Democratic areas of Maricopa County.

Godfrey points out that “many American liberals” also “live in political bubbles,” noting that after President Richard Nixon “smashed” Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, film critic Pauline Kael “famously” commented, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon.”

To further illustrate Godfrey’s point, this journalist attended a Walter Mondale rally during the Summer of 1984 outside Queens Borough Hall near the Union Turnpike subway station — talking to Mondale supporters, New York City residents and Democratic activists who were confident that President Ronald Reagan would be voted out of office. In November 1984, Reagan was reelected with 525 electoral votes.

Godfrey writes, “Some people in overwhelmingly blue parts of the country, for example, were shocked to find that Trump got so many votes in 2016…. Some of those same blue-area Democrats were just as confident that Sen. Elizabeth Warren would be the party nominee. But Republicans also live in bubbles…. Trump voters might find it hard to believe that Biden won the election because their neighbors and friends mostly voted for Trump too.”

Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard University, told Godfrey that MAGA rallies validate what Trump voters are hearing in their favorite right-wing media outlets.

Enos explained, “You have the president saying things, your neighbors who you (perceive as) saying the same things — and then, these Trump rallies seem to be almost a social event. Now, you have an element of your social life, not just what you’re seeing on TV, that is caught up in believing these lies.”

According to Godfrey, it’s no coincidence that Trump loves to brag about the size of his rallies.

“For Trump, boasting about his throngs of supporters is about more than just telegraphing his wild popularity to his opponents,” Godfrey writes. “Trump’s boasting reaffirms his voters’ beliefs, and shuts out doubt. It keeps his supporters inside their bubble.”

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aha echo is the opposite of correction, and algo gives incremental DOSE of crazy that builds on previous slightly less crazy:--> earth2 delusional break from reality is phase shift/level up/ tip pt? doom spiral?

12 21 an salon https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/tucker-carlson/

the TV was talking to me. I was in the midst of a delusion that the news anchors on CNN were operatives of a shadow government run by the Clintons. Every time I crossed the living room of my father's dingy basement apartment, their heads followed me and the news anchors interrogated me about my role in the Russia investigation. I believed "Russia investigation" was really code for a global conspiracy to enslave humanity through mind control. President Donald Trump and the Republicans were secretly working to overturn this shadow government and end the deep state programs. Targets of torture like me would be set free.

I turned the channel to FOX News. They repeated over and over that Hilary Clinton was a criminal. Even though I was a Democrat and had voted for Bill Clinton twice, I mailed in the form to join the Republican Party. Then I faxed evidence to the Russian consulate and sent a letter to the CIA offering to cooperate in the investigation.

What I didn't know I was that I was in the advanced stages of untreated paranoid schizophrenia. I was experiencing a psychotic break from reality.

It all seemed so real.

When I was eventually treated, my psychiatrist explained to me, "With paranoid schizophrenia it's just like "The Bourne Identity" — there are people for you, people against you, and somebody always has to be the villain."

I know what you're thinking — thank God they have medication for these people.Now, I wonder, is the average American so different from me? Are we all susceptible to paranoid thoughts, conspiratorial thinking and bias when executive function in the frontal lobes and our ability to reason are disabled by fear?

Terrified by a global pandemic, there are people who believe Bill Gates is an evil mastermind who engineered the coronavirus, with plans to depopulate and microchip the world's population, while profiting in the process. Antivaxxers refuse to take a vaccine they think will alter the structure of human DNA. Our brains seek to impose order. Conspiracy theories can provide answers to people who feel overwhelmed. But ideally the frontal lobes should step in to challenge strange thoughts by asking the question: Is what I am perceiving based in reality?

Dr. Oliver Freudenreich, Co-Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychosis Program, states that there is no generally agreed-upon definition on what constitutes a delusion. From a psychiatric or biological perspective, delusions are driven by excessive amounts of the neurotransmitter dopamine. There is a biological basis to them, and treatment can correct this abnormality. A person with such delusions (e.g., somebody with schizophrenia) is expected to respond to being treated with an antipsychotic medication which blocks dopamine. In other words, one can take a pill and think rationally.

However, many people can't do that if their delusional thinking is part of a worldview that is more an ideology. According to Dr. Freudenreich, when people create their own insular groups — where delusional ideas are never corrected, but simply bounce around in an echo chamber — it is much harder to fight those types of delusions.

Policy divides are now often framed as a battle between good and evil.The most obvious consequence of overheated partisan rhetoric is that someone with an untreated psychiatric illness can go on to commit an act of violence against a person or group that they believe is a perpetrator of their suffering. This is rare. More common is the normal person who goes down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and finds a world that makes sense to them.

On January 6th, 2021, incited by President Trump and believing the election had been stolen, a mob attacked the Capital building. Some in the crowd showed up for the "Storm," which is a QAnon conspiracy theory that posits that Trump was planning mass arrests of a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles and coup plotters, headed by Hilary Clinton and George Soros. Capitol police described the scene as being like fighting a medieval battle.

Social dynamics can propagate conspiracy-based thinking that mimics biologically triggered delusions. But there is no medication that will stop mass violence fueled by conspiracies.

I was a forty-six-year-old filmmaker when I suddenly began to have paranoid thoughts that people were following me. When I lost my day job due to bizarre behavior, I lost my excellent health insurance. I was dumped into America's broken mental health care system that offers substandard psychiatric care to patients on Medicaid, while spending vast amounts of taxpayer money. Misdiagnosed and neglected at the county hospital, I got sicker and sicker … until the TV started talking to me.

Years of my life are now gone. I try not to be bitter that I ended up unemployed, bankrupt and almost homeless, when all I needed was proper medical care. Every day I am grateful that I didn't wind up living on the streets or locked up in prison, like so many people with schizophrenia.

It's easy to mock people who think Bill Gates wants to put a microchip in them with the coronavirus vaccine. But it's much harder to separate conspiracy theorists' larger existential fears from our own. We're approaching the second year of a global pandemic, which is causing mass anxiety and depression. The internet routinely displays images of future roads in major cities as gushing rivers due to climate change. Billions of fish were boiled in the American Northwest and Canada during an unprecedented heatwave this summer. If someone's mind starts spinning with their wildest fears and finds solace in a conspiracy theory, can you really blame them?

Television is a powerful medium. CNN and FOX News repeat the same headlines, the same phrases, over and over in the same news day. Back then, these read to my unhinged mind as coded speech; to the unsuspecting public, it is more akin to propaganda. When I was psychotic, I thought a shadow government had a ministry of propaganda and they colluded across networks. I worry about living in a country where the two major political parties are always at war, unable to get anything done, and the public is fed a delusional world by networks and social media companies competing for viewers.

People with paranoid schizophrenia see patterns that don't actually exist. Just like conspiracy theorists, they are constantly scanning the news for pieces of information to connect the dots about unseen forces controlling events. Both groups believe they are being persecuted by others. I had grandiose beliefs that I was at the center of every news story on TV. My mind was looking to cast a villain to account for the symptoms of a brain disease. The media handed me a culprit to blame. [q or trump sent me]

Dr. Anthony Fauci has complained about the extraordinary divisiveness surrounding the public health crisis created by the pandemic. The current battle is over masks and vaccines. FOX News paints the Democratic Party as a threat to democracy that has invented domestic enemies, such as the unvaccinated, to desperately cling to power. News anchors across CNN repeat the phrase "viral blizzard" to warn the public and scare the unvaccinated about the new variant. Fear mongering is psychologically destabilizing to the most normal person. But this media environment can be toxic to someone with an untreated psychiatric illness. I wish politicians and their media allies would stop contributing to the collective unraveling of the American mind.

---

an 1021

Intelligence expert Malcolm Nance spoke to MSNBC about the ways in which the Russian government are able to wage a war against a country without even firing a shot.

Host Maria Teresa Kumar noted that President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to have taken up the playbook of Russia and created their own propaganda machine. As a Russia propaganda expert, Nance agreed, saying that the plot Russia concocted in the early 2000s, the Gerasimov Doctrine, handed Trump and his team the plan.

Nance explained that it was a tactic Russians used where they combined an information warfare strategy where they flood a country with so much misinformation that a country would welcome an invasion without a war.

"That didn't really happen" in the United States, Nance explained. "What the Russians did in the year 2016 is they created an information bubble in which the Trump campaign was seen as friendly and then, the Trump data team took that information, including stolen information from the Democratic National Committee, and created their own information sphere. Once the Russian bubble was popped after the 2016 election, the Trump team took the ball and ran with it. The Russians barely have to do anything."

Nance explained that the Trump team and their control over conservative television stations like Fox News and OAN enabled them to indoctrinate their own followers into believing some of the most insane things ever crafted, "to the point where they view it."

He talked about a kind of radicalization that gives Trump's supporters the confidence their actions are not only patriotic but that "violence is the only solution and they're carrying out a second Lexington, a second Concord, as your other guests said, 1776 2.0."

"They think they're restoring the United States, despite the fact they are physically attacking the United States, and believe me, the way that ammunition prices went up within the last year on the public market, I think these people really believe they're going to affect the revolution at some point," said Nance.

Earlier in the conversation, Nance addressed Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin holding up the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a "peaceful protest" and treatingitems used in the attack as their own kind of religious relic or a "talisman" as Nance characterized. "As if it's going to give them some connection deeper to Donald Trump."

"It all flies in the face of their own storyline, their story arc in which it was Antifa and Black Lives Matter that carried out the attack," said Nance. "Now, on some signs, we see them actually not only recognizing that they've carried out this event but, as I said in the video, a peaceful protest at the Capitol and now carrying an American flag, which took part in that. It's absolutely disgraceful that any of this is happening. But what you're seeing, it is a strategy by the Republicans and Trump play out where they're now embracing the popularism of that violence."

See his full take in the video below:

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rudy thinks he saw smartmatic on facebook

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aha/doh IT'S SYSTEMIC: shift platform eg telegram, then use bad spelling, it's resilient b/c it's a network

amplify, algo, radicalization,echo/escalator, rabbit holes

https://theconversation.com/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-testified-that-the-companys-algorithms-are-dangerous-heres-how-they-can-manipulate-you-169420

Fo:{rmer Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified before the U.S. Senate on Oct. 5, 2021, that the company’s social media platforms “} harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy :{.”:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"/maxresdefault.jpg):{.”}:

Haugen was the primary source for a Wall Street Journal exposé on the company. She called Facebook’s algorithms dangerous, said Facebook executives were aware of the threat but put profits before people, and called on Congress to regulate the company.

Social media platforms rely heavily on people’s behavior to decide on the content that you see. In particular, they watch for content that people respond to or “engage” with by liking, commenting and sharing. Troll farms, organizations that spread provocative content, exploit this by copying high-engagement content and posting it as their own, which helps them reach a wide audience.

As a computer scientist who studies the ways large numbers of people interact using technology, I understand the logic of using the wisdom of the crowds in these algorithms. I also see substantial pitfalls in how the social media companies do so in practice.

From lions on the savanna to likes on Facebook

The concept of the wisdom of crowds assumes that using signals from others’ actions, opinions and preferences as a guide will lead to sound decisions. For example, collective predictions are normally more accurate than individual ones. Collective intelligence is used to predict financial markets, sports, elections and even disease outbreaks.

Throughout millions of years of evolution, these principles have been coded into the human brain in the form of cognitive biases that come with names like familiarity, mere exposure and bandwagon effect. If everyone starts running, you should also start running; maybe someone saw a lion coming and running could save your life. You may not know why, but it’s wiser to ask questions later.

Your brain picks up clues from the environment – including your peers – and uses simple rules to quickly translate those signals into decisions: Go with the winner, follow the majority, copy your neighbor. These rules work remarkably well in typical situations because they are based on sound assumptions. For example, they assume that people often act rationally, it is unlikely that many are wrong, the past predicts the future, and so on.

Technology allows people to access signals from much larger numbers of other people, most of whom they do not know. Artificial intelligence applications make heavy use of these popularity or “engagement” signals, from selecting search engine results to recommending music and videos, and from suggesting friends to ranking posts on news feeds.

Not everything viral deserves to be

Our research shows that virtually all web technology platforms, such as social media and news recommendation systems, have a strong popularity bias. When applications are driven by cues like engagement rather than explicit search engine queries, popularity bias can lead to harmful unintended consequences.

Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok rely heavily on AI algorithms to rank and recommend content. These algorithms take as input what you like, comment on and share – in other words, content you engage with. The goal of the algorithms is to maximize engagement by finding out what people like and ranking it at the top of their feeds.

A primer on the Facebook algorithm.[vid?]

On the surface this seems reasonable. If people like credible news, expert opinions and fun videos, these algorithms should identify such high-quality content. But the wisdom of the crowds makes a key assumption here: that recommending what is popular will help high-quality content “bubble up.”

We tested this assumption by studying an algorithm that ranks items using a mix of quality and popularity. We found that in general, popularity bias is more likely to lower the overall quality of content. The reason is that engagement is not a reliable indicator of quality when few people have been exposed to an item. In these cases, engagement generates a noisy signal, and the algorithm is likely to amplify this initial noise. Once the popularity of a low-quality item is large enough, it will keep getting amplified.

Algorithms aren’t the only thing affected by engagement bias – it can affect people too. Evidence shows that information is transmitted via “complex contagion,” meaning the more times people are exposed to an idea online, the more likely they are to adopt and reshare it. When social media tells people an item is going viral, their cognitive biases kick in and translate into the irresistible urge to pay attention to it and share it.

Not-so-wise crowds

We recently ran an experiment using a news literacy app called Fakey. It is a game developed by our lab that simulates a news feed like those of Facebook and Twitter. Players see a mix of current articles from fake news, junk science, hyperpartisan and conspiratorial sources, as well as mainstream sources. They get points for sharing or liking news from reliable sources and for flagging low-credibility articles for fact-checking.

We found that players are more likely to like or share and less likely to flag articles from low-credibility sources when players can see that many other users have engaged with those articles. Exposure to the engagement metrics thus creates a vulnerability.

The wisdom of the crowds fails because it is built on the false assumption that the crowd is made up of diverse, independent sources. There may be several reasons this is not the case.

First, because of people’s tendency to associate with similar people, their online neighborhoods are not very diverse. The ease with which social media users can unfriend those with whom they disagree pushes people into homogeneous communities, often referred to as echo chambers.

Second, because many people’s friends are friends of one another, they influence one another. A famous experiment demonstrated that knowing what music your friends like affects your own stated preferences. Your social desire to conform distorts your independent judgment.

Third, popularity signals can be gamed. Over the years, search engines have developed sophisticated techniques to counter so-called “link farms” and other schemes to manipulate search algorithms. Social media platforms, on the other hand, are just beginning to learn about their own vulnerabilities.

People aiming to manipulate the information market have created fake accounts, like trolls and social bots, and organized fake networks. They have flooded the network to create the appearance that a conspiracy theory or a political candidate is popular, tricking both platform algorithms and people’s cognitive biases at once. They have even altered the structure of social networks to create illusions about majority opinions.

Dialing down engagement

What to do? Technology platforms are currently on the defensive. They are becoming more aggressive during elections in taking down fake accounts and harmful misinformation. But these efforts can be akin to a game of whack-a-mole.

A different, preventive approach would be to add friction. In other words, to slow down the process of spreading information. High-frequency behaviors such as automated liking and sharing could be inhibited by CAPTCHA tests, which require a human to respond, or fees. Not only would this decrease opportunities for manipulation, but with less information people would be able to pay more attention to what they see. It would leave less room for engagement bias to affect people’s decisions.

It would also help if social media companies adjusted their algorithms to rely less on engagement signals and more on quality signals to determine the content they serve you. Perhaps the whistleblower revelations will provide the necessary impetus.

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BS big lie GA amplified by trump and bannon

no lnx twt wonkette

It is September 17, 2021, and former President Babyshits is still whining that he wants back in the White House right now. Just look at this pathetic nonsense.

"Large scale Voter Fraud continues to be reported in Georgia. Enclosed is a report of 43,000 Absentee Ballot Votes Counted in DeKalb County that violated the Chain of Custody rules, making them invalid," begins the letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger under a lightly modified presidential seal.

The "report" is an article from the astroturf news site "Georgia Star News." As multiple legitimate news sites have reported, Georgia Star is part of the Star News Network, a group of pro-Trump websites set up to look like local news outlets in 11 swing states. And while Rupert Murdoch's media empire is (at least theoretically) made up of actual journalists, the Star sites are run by political activists with an avowed MAGA agenda.

:{:{}:

Naturally Steve Bannon, everyone's favorite chaos monkey, loves this Star Chamber propaganda shit. NPR reports:

Steve Bannon, a former strategist for former President Donald Trump, described The Georgia Star News in a radio interview as content "you can't get anywhere else."

"We're not Conservative Inc.," he said. "It's very populist, it's very nationalist, it's very MAGA, it's very American First."

Laura Baigert, the author of the piece referenced by the former leader of the free world, describes herself as "a senior reporter at The Star News Network, where she covers stories for The Georgia Star News, The Tennessee Star, The Ohio Star and The Arizona Sun Times."

Here's how Snopesdescribed Baigert, who was a 2016 RNC delegate for Ted Cruz:

Laura Baigert, listed as a Tennessee Star "senior reporter," also serves as the treasurer for a group called the Roving Patriots PAC. Her husband, Kevin Baigert, who was at one point also a writer for the Star, is that PAC's director. On their PAC's website, the couple say they "are a couple of Roving Patriots, and when you get one, you get both of us!" No firewall is apparent between the work of the PAC and the Tennessee Star. For example, on 7 July 2017 the PAC shared an article on their Facebook page written in the Tennessee Star about the PAC's launch. "We are grateful for the work they are doing at The Tennessee Star," the PAC said of the media outlet that both members of the PAC currently or previously worked for.

According to their website, Roving Patriots PAC is "focused on achieving, supporting and maintaining a true conservative majority within the Tennessee House of Representatives."

And if that's not the bio of a trustworthy authority on election law, then what is, right? So when this person tells you that there were chain of custody issues with 46,000 drop box ballots, and the law demands that Georgia simply toss out those votes, you can just take her word for it. Never mind that this is an entirely invented remedy that some blogger from Tennessee just pulled out of her ass. And while we're disregarding objective reality, there's no mechanism to determine who those votes were for, even if we did invalidate ballots 10 months after an election — which we do not.

But back to Trump's lazyass letter!

"I would respectfully request that your department check this and, if true, along with many other claims of voter fraud and voter irregularities, start the process of decertifying the Election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, and announce the true winner," he whined from the golf course.

He doesn't know if it's true, but, like, if it is, he wants Raffy to do something. He's not sure what, but it will totally involve him winning. And if it's not true, well, whatever because, "As stated to you previously, the number of false and/or irregular votes is far greater than needed to change the Georgia election result."

He stated it previously, you blockhead! Why didn't you overturn the election already?

The letter ends with some more abuse of Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who "are doing a tremendous disservice to the Great State of Georgia, and to our Nation — which is systematically being destroyed by an illegitimate president and his administration," before signing off with "Thank you for your attention to this matter."

Because he is one polite motherfucker.

Well! No doubt Secretary Raffensperger will get right on that.

:{:{}:

Meanwhile, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is still investigating whether Trump and his cronies broke the law with their pressure campaign and the infamous phone call where they tried to get Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have" and warned that he was "taking a big risk" by not prosecuting the "criminal offense" which caused him to lose the election.

"What I can tell you is that the Trump investigation is ongoing. As a district attorney, I do not have the right to look the other way on any crime that may have happened in my jurisdiction," Willis told CNN this week. "We have a team of lawyers that is dedicated to that, but my No. 1 priority is to make sure that we keep violent offenders off the street."

And that is not fake news.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/trump-election-claims/

Since the 2020 presidential election, conservative news outlets have been popping up in droves to continue circulating former President Donald Trump's big lie about the election.

So how are outlets continuing to do this? According to NPR, it is more of a trick of the eye. The publication https://www.npr.org/2021/07/02/1011916687/how-pro-trump-local-news-sites-keep-pushing-2020-election-misinformation.

While the publication appears to be just a local news outlet, NPR reports that it is actually flagship of a news syndicate, known as The Star News Network, which consists of several pro-Trump sites. Like The Georgia Star News, the network has created similar sites for states like Arizona, Ohio, and Florida.

Per NPR:

"Its part of the Star News Network - an expanding network of pro-Trump sites seeking to influence local politics with conservative opinion by mimicking the look and feel of local newspaper sites. The group operates eight state-focused news sites, including in key Electoral College states such as Michigan, Arizona, Ohio and Florida."

By focusing on states where Trump is still heavily favored among voters, the network can continue to circulate misinformation since the audience is still focused on what transpired during and after the election.

During a rally in Ohio Las weekend, Trump also added more fuel to the fire with more dangerous claims of voter fraud.

"The biggest tragedy of all is millions of Americans have lost confidence in their vote," Trump said." We can't let that happen. And that's why I say you have to know what took place in 2020 before you can vote in 2022 or 2024."

To name mafter worse, conservative publisher John Fredericksdefended defended sites and the information they share.

"We work very hard to fund our operation through legitimate advertising of all kinds, people that want to reach our expanding audience," he said. "And if somebody needs to reach informed, motivated readers that want the truth, advertising is a great opportunity for them, is a great [return on investment] potential."

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ref

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/02/1011916687/how-pro-trump-local-news-sites-keep-pushing-2020-election-misinformation.

no lnx

How Pro-Trump Local News Sites Keep Pushing 2020 Election Misinformation

July 2, 20215:00 AM ET

STEPHEN FOWLER

FROM

Georgia Public Broadcasting

Georgia election workers begin their recount of ballots after the November election. Despite three recounts of the tally, former President Donald Trump and his allies falsely claim electoral fraud cost him the state.

If you don't follow politics in Georgia closely — or even if you do — you might be forgiven for not knowing much about The Georgia Star News.

Founded just after the November election when President Biden narrowly flipped the state by about 12,000 votes, it looks like a regular news website with a lifestyle section, a widget for the weather and stories about local and national goings-on.

But the site is more than just a local news outlet. It's part of the Star News Network — an expanding network of pro-Trump sites seeking to influence local politics with conservative opinion by mimicking the look and feel of local newspaper sites. The group operates eight state-focused news sites, including in key Electoral College states such as Michigan, Arizona, Ohio and Florida.

Steve Bannon, a former strategist for former President Donald Trump, described The Georgia Star News in a radio interview as content "you can't get anywhere else."

"We're not Conservative Inc.," he said. "It's very populist, it's very nationalist, it's very MAGA, it's very American First."

Pro-Trump media ecosystem

The Star News sites are part of a larger pro-Trump media ecosystem that emerged over the course of his four years in office. Since last year's election, some of those sites have spent months churning out false content suggesting Trump won the election and claiming that massive electoral fraud will be uncovered.

Many of the Star News sites have been around for a while, but the 2020 election — and an intense focus on swing states like Georgia — has helped the sites' stories reach a much a larger audience.

Georgia's fledgling website gets a boost from publisher John Fredericks' talk radio show that has featured numerous figures from Trump's orbit, including Bannon and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. His show also regularly features Georgia Republican politicians who have pushed false claims of election fraud or are challenging those who did not work to overturn the election.

Fredericks, who most recently hosted his talk show from Virginia, came to Georgia ahead of last January's dual Senate runoffs as part of an effort by conservatives (and conservative media) to support then-Sens.Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue's reelection campaign. He alsohosts a TV show on the Real America's Voice networkthat also features Bannon's "War Room: Pandemic" podcast popular with many election skeptics.

So there was a ready-made audience when the Georgia Star published a misleading story mid-June questioning the legitimacy of nearly 20,000 absentee ballots placed in Georgia drop boxes — slightly more than the margin of Biden's victory there.

The story said that Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, could not produce crucial chain of custody documentation for ballots returned in drop boxes, suggesting that the ballots may not have been legitimate.

Days later, county officials were able to find all but eight of those forms, said all the ballots were accounted for — and noted that Georgia's votes were counted three different times in November.

"The most explosive thing" ESCA ECHO

But in the conservative alternate media sphere, the story began to pick up steam. On Fredericks' radio show, Bannon called it "the most explosive thing that I think has happened in the entire process."

From there it ricocheted across the pro-Trump mediasphere to TV networks like One America News and conspiracy sites such as The Gateway Pundit.

But the story was not limited to the fringe of Republican politics: several pro-Trump lawmakers and primary challengers in Georgia demanded an investigation. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — himself a frequent target of misinformation, attacks and death threats because of these sites — did too. That led mainstream outlets to run with Raffensperger's response, pushing the story further into the spotlight.

Just a few days after the original Georgia Star story, Trump issued several statements linking to a One America News segment about the misleading story and praising the Georgia Star writer by name for "the incredible reporting you have done."

The Georgia Star hasn't updated its original story, or several follow-up pieces, with Fulton County's release of the data.

In an interview, the story's author, Laura Baigert, blamed the county for providing incomplete documents and information.

"Not our problem to solve" ~ CORRECTION

"If they can't tell us how many forms they have and how many ballots they have, that's an issue for people who are administering an election," she said. "That's not our problem to solve that for them."

At the time, a Fulton County spokeswoman said that the county followed proper procedures in collecting the drop box ballots and the county was continuing to research the few remaining missing chain of custody forms. The county elections director said that staff spent more than 200 hours that week locating the "missing" forms before they were provided to Georgia Public Broadcasting.

But the story breathed new life into Trump's false claims, which he repeated at length during a rally last Saturday in Ohio.

"The biggest tragedy of all is millions of Americans have lost confidence in their vote," he said. "We can't let that happen. And that's why I say you have to know what took place in 2020 before you can vote in 2022 or 2024."

After the rally, Baigert snagged an exclusive half-hour interview with the former president as he rode back to the airport. The next day, an all-caps headline appeared on The Ohio Star, Georgia Star and sister sites in battlegrounds like Michigan and Arizona, touting the conversation and its key takeaway.

"There's no more important issue than the 2020 election," Trump said.

Fredericks defended the outlet's coverage in an interview and said that the Georgia Star is a credible news service for Georgians that acts as an alternative to "fake news" mainstream media."Our goal is to speak truth to power in the world of fake news, and that's really what we're dealing with, that's why we're here," he said. "That's why we have an audience."

Less than seven months into existence, Fredericks said that the website was profitable, thanks to a crush of advertising from local Republican candidates and conservative groups.

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---

echo escal: hype/ fear wedge

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-right-wing-lies-move-through-fox-cycle-biden-administration

matt g

fhe relentlessly dishonest right-wing press is spending the Biden administration whipping itself into a frenzy over its own lies, fabrications, and distortions. Every day seems to bring a new hysteria: Joe Biden wants to take your hamburger! The left has canceled Dr. Seuss! The stories -- often total nonsense but touching on potent culture war fights -- burn through right-wing social and news media, turn into conservative canon, and are quickly replaced with fresh outrage.

Our late colleague Simon Maloy developed a concept during the Obama years to explain how these sorts of bogus right-wing stories kept turning into national news. He called it “the Fox Cycle”: The right-wing fever-swamps would generate a story; Fox News would give it copious, aggrieved coverage; the network would pressure mainstream news outlets to pick up the story; they would do so, even crediting Fox for being ahead of the curve; and the story would eventually be proved false or misleading -- but only long after the damage had been done. A few years ago, I pointed out that then-President Donald Trump’s habit of live-tweeting Fox supercharged that process: News outlets reporting on his angry responses to TV segments were bringing his Fox-fueled falsehoods to their own audiences.

With a new Democratic administration in office a decade after Simon’s posts, right-wing media are still furiously churning out bullshit that gets amplified by Fox. But the contours of the Fox cycle have shifted due to changes in the mainstream press, the right-wing media, and the Republican Party over the intervening years.

The Fox Cycle in the Biden years follows a pattern that is becoming increasingly familiar:

A right-wing outlet manufactures a bogus story.

The bogus story goes viral.

Fox News picks up the bogus story, reports on it incessantly.

Republican politicians promote the bogus story to attack Democrats.

Responsible news outlets debunk the bogus story.

Repeat.

What’s changed?

The distinction between right-wing media personality and Republican politician has increasingly dissolved. [eg gaetz] The right-wing press celebrated particularly simpatico GOP politicians throughout the Obama years -- none more so than Trump himself. But now, prominent GOP legislators seem driven to build their brands and their power within the party by spending their days trying to create viral content on Twitter and then going on Fox to talk about their posts. Some even have their own podcasts, or openly aspire to right-wing TV gigs. They are incentivized to comment on whatever is stirring up the right-wing press that day, which in turn gives the story more velocity.

Responsible news outlets are now more wary of falling for these bogus stories, and they produce reports debunking them far more quickly than they did a decade ago. Reporters used to interpret incessant Fox coverage as a signal that they were missing out on an important story; now, they seem more likely to correctly view that coverage as a sign to look deeper and figure out how the right-wing press is misleading its audiences.

But thanks to the increasingly impermeable bubble that the right-wing press has created for those audiences, they are unlikely to see those mainstream media debunks. Right-wing outlets may be shamed into pulling down their false stories or offering half-hearted corrections, but by then misinformation has already become conservative canon.

And as my colleague Parker Molloypointed out yesterday, the more responsible news outlets seem unable or unwilling to impose real consequences on the perpetrators. No one is losing their seat on a Sunday show for repeatedly promoting lies or conspiracy theories. Everyone just moves on, and the cycle continues.

Here are three case studies from the last week where this pattern played out over a matter of days.

The lie about Biden banning burgers

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-fantasy/

in the real world, there are real problems that serious people are worried about: global pandemic, climate change, economic inequality, systematic racism, mass shootings, and gendered violence, just to name a few. The problem for Republicans, of course, is that they are, quite literally, on the wrong side of pretty much each of those issues, and spend their time either actively making problems worse or getting in the way of people who want to fix things. Outside of sociopaths, Fox News hosts, and people with "Pepe" memes in their Twitter profiles, however, few people want to look in the mirror and see a villain gazing back at them. So right-wing media, which has always been addicted to selling its audiences on imaginary threats and preposterous fairy tales of conservative victimhood, has only been escalating such nonsense in recent months as the Republican policy agenda has been increasingly exposed to be nonexistent.

If your "team" is on the side of the Capitol insurrectionists and Derek Chauvin, it's hard to suppress the haunting fear that you're the baddies. So Fox News is on hand to spoon out alluring fantasies that recast liberals as the bad guys and conservatives as the long-suffering heroes.Tucker Carlson — a Fox News host who clearly relishes being a cartoon villain (think: "Dan White Society") — coughed up an almost too-perfect sample of the form Monday night, when he encouraged his audience of millions to harass ordinary people minding their own business under the guise of "helping."

Using as cover the recent reports that much of outdoor masking is unnecessary to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, Carlson told his audience that people wearing masks outside are "the aggressors" and that "the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate" to get in their face and demand they remove the mask. Carlson claimed this can be done "politely but firmly," but of course, it's categorically impossible to "politely" boss other people around about choices that simply do not affect you. And no, his story about how masks "prevent intimacy and human contact" is not enough. Strangers on the street do not owe you "intimacy," despite what creeps who follow women around and demand smiles might wish to believe.

Carlson then escalated by asking his viewers to call the police when they see children wearing masks because it "should be illegal." [call cops and cps till they show] Of course, Carlson also knows full well how dangerous such nuisance calls (which are *actually* illegal) can be if the target is a person of color — and likely, he's counting on it, Derek Chauvin defender that he is.

Skipping a mask outside does, indeed, seem to be mostly harmless, which means that the common-sense response is to simply leave other people alone while you also do what you want. But conservatives want revenge because they've been made to wear masks where it is necessary. Carlson is only too happy to feed them a narrative that allows them to pretend to be heroes while continuing to be jerks for no good reason whatsoever.

Over the weekend, we saw another comically over-the-top example of right-wing fake victimhood narratives when a totally fake — and obviously fake — conspiracy theory about President Joe Biden imposing severe beef rations tore through the right-wing media and exploded on social media.

Jon Skolnik explained here at Salon how right-wing media distorted a study about reducing meat consumption to impact climate change, pretended it somehow was part of Biden's infrastructure plan and ran wild with it. But what was truly remarkable wasn't just that the folks at Fox News and other outlets deliberately misled the public with false claims that Biden planned to "limit" beef consumption to four pounds a year. It was how this lie managed to spread rapidly, infecting every corner of the country, in record time.

"It's tempting to dismiss this attack as too absurd to be believed," Dan Pfeiffer wrote in his Message Box newsletter, but warned that, "But too often, Democrats focus on the absurdity of the specifics and ignore the believability of the general impression."

Indeed, watching the "Biden's banning beef" lie spread out over social media, boosted by supposedly "apolitical" Instagram influencers and other such conduits, it was easy to see how this worked. Many people — possibly most — had wholly emotional reactions when they heard or read the lie, and were too focused on lashing out angrily to think critically about the story. So many reactions online were variations of "how dare you criticize me" and "fake meat tastes bad," instead of the more helpful "is this even true?"

The best right-wing B.S. works in this way, by activating people's pre-existing guilt and making them feel defensive. A lot of Americans, even on the right, already feel bad about how much beef they eat. It's not just because it's bad for the environment, but because they know it's bad for their health, and American discourse around food and health tends to be highly moralistic. The Biden beef lie works first by activating that sense of shame and then giving people a story that makes them feel better about themselves, about how they're actually the good guys here. They get so focused on trying to make their defensive feelings go away that they don't stop to search Snopesor Politifact and find out if it's even true.

Carlson is playing the same game with his mask nonsense.

Conservatives obviously have a lot of sublimated guilt over refusing to take the pandemic seriously and are therefore on a hair-trigger for defensive reactions. So they're ready to hear how someone else wearing a mask is a judgment on them, about how they're the "real" victims, and mask-wearers are the "real" bad guys. Truth and common sense are crowded out by these over-the-top emotional reactions, driven by their own — in many cases, completely earned — sense of shame.

As Pfeiffer notes, the only way to push back on nonsense like this is for ordinary people to confront those who are spreading it on social media. The problem is that these right-wing freakouts are fueled by conservatives feeling angry, ashamed, and judged — frankly often because they deserve to feel bad about their behavior. Unfortunately, that means that the smarter reactions are ones that turn the temperature down, not up. It can help a lot for interlocutors to focus on facts, instead of moral judgments about things like mask-wearing or beef-eating, and save the moral discussion for another time, when folks are in a less defensive mindset.

Either way, the amount of culture war debris that the right-wing media will be churning out is going to be immense over the next few years. Conservatives have a lot of guilt for their terrible behavior and beliefs, and therefore will be easy marks for any and every story that lets them believe they're the victims and not the victimizers. Right-wing media, as these examples show, is incredibly good at kicking up fake controversies that feed off those defensive feelings. Conservatives are addicted to these lies, and like most addicts, they need increasingly stronger stuff to get their fix. Be prepared.

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---

ref

https://www.salon.com/2021/04/26/plant-based-beer-and-beef-bans-how-larry-kudlow-set-off-a-right-wing-anti-biden-smear-campaign/

fox Business Network host and former economic Trump adviser Larry Kudlow set off something of a right-wing smear campaign over the weekend when he went on a tirade against President Joe Biden's nonexistent plan to force "plant-based beer" upon the American public, calling Biden an "ideological zealot" intent on scrapping America's most cherished tradition of meat-eating.

In an interview on Thursday, Kudlow erroneously attacked Biden for putting forth a climate plan that calls for the elimination of meat, eggs, and dairy from the American diet. "There's a study coming out of the University of Michigan which says that to meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to…stop eating poultry and fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats," he started. "Ok, got that? No burger on July 4. No steaks on the barbecue. I'm sure Middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those Brussels sprouts?"

Kudlow, notably livid over the thought of grilling vegetables –– let alone *foreign *ones –– continued to rail against Biden's new climate action plan.

"You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag. Call it July 4th Green. Now, I'm making fun of this because I intend to make fun of it. This kind of thing is stupid. It comes from a bunch of ideological zealots who don't care one whit about America's well-being. Not one whit."

It should be noted that beer, generally made from water, grain, hops, and yeast, and barley malt, is already, in fact, plant-based. Furthermore, nothing in President Biden's plan so far calls for a prohibition on meat consumption. The original culprit of this misinformation, a ThursdayDaily Mail article headlined "How Biden's climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH," speculated that Biden intends on "cutting red meat consumption by 90% and animal products by 50%."

The article, quickly feasted upon by Kudlow and amplified by Fox Business News without the slightest fact-check,was then picked up by Republicans in government, including Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who spread the lies to their voting bases.

"Joe Biden's climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030. They want to limit us to about four pounds a year," tweeted Boebert. "Why doesn't Joe stay out of my kitchen?"

"Not gonna happen in Texas!" Gov. Abbott tweeted, with a screenshot of Kudlow's broadcast.

Greene, posting a picture of Biden eating a hamburger with others a table, echoed: "The Hamburglar. No burgers for thee, but just for me."

The misinformation also came into the good graces of Donald Trump Jr., who declared most proudly, "I'm pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday. That's going to be a hard NO from me."

On Saturday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explained how Kudlow's remarks planted the seeds for a concerted misinformation campaign.

"If you read what Kudlow actually said,'' Krugman argued on Twitter, "he's cagey — doesn't say that Biden proposed this, only that some people say this is what would happen. But Fox viewers won't notice, which is the intention. This is what right-wing politics is down to. It's all false claims about evil liberals, which the base is expected to believe because it's primed to believe in liberal villainy. They're not even trying to engage on actual issues."

The White House has thus far released scant information about any formal plan to address emissions. According to the Washington Post, on Thursday, the President made vague remarks about investing in "American infrastructure and American innovation" in order to build "a critical infrastructure to produce and deploy clean technology."

The right's outrage was widely mocked online by the left, who were quick to point out that Biden's apparent political aversion to meat has no factual or historical basis at all. On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., took a jab at his conservative colleagues . "Excited to be watching the Oscars with an ice cold plant-based beer," he tweeted, with a picture of himself holding a beer while watching the Oscars. "Thanks Joe Biden."

JON SKOLNIK

Jon Skolnik is a staff writer at Salon. His work has appeared in Current Affairs, The Baffler, AlterNet, and The New York Daily News.

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aha self-radicalization is combo of echo and escal, algo helps hype fear:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/conspiracy-theories-2649659627/

Far-right conspiracy theorists are not a new phenomenon. The late conservative National Review founder William F. Buckley famously railed against the John Birch Society during the 1960s, denouncing them as extremists who he believed were bad for the conservative movement. But during the Trump era, far-right conspiracy theorists have become increasingly prominent — and experts on domestic terrorism and national security, according to National Public Radio's Hannah Allam, fear that the number of violent attacks could escalate.

"Domestic terrorism analysts are raising concern about the security implications of millions of conservatives buying into baseless right-wing claims," Allam reports. "They say the line between mainstream and fringe is vanishing, with conspiracy-minded Republicans now marching alongside armed extremists at rallies across the country."

Allam notes that during a recent online conference for the group Millions of Conversations, Mary McCord — a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. — warned, "This tent that used to be sort of 'far-right extremists' has gotten a lot broader. To me, a former counterterrorism official, that's a radicalization process."

[twt]

another person who spoke at that online conference was Elizabeth Neumann, a former U.S. Department of Homeland Security official. Although Neumann is conservative, she has become a vehement critic of President Donald Trump and supported former Vice President Joe Biden in the United States' 2020 presidential election. Neumann warned, "Breaking through that echo chamber is critical — or else, we'll see more violence."

Although President-elect Biden enjoyed a decisive victory — winning 306 electoral votes and defeating Trump by over 7 million in the popular vote — the president received 74 million votes. And Allam notes that counterterrorism experts are wondering how many of those 74 million Trump voters are buying into far-right conspiracy theories.

Allam explains, "Political conspiracies drew thousands to last weekend's pro-Trump rally, after which the Proud Boys and other violent extremist groups wreaked havoc in Downtown Washington, D.C…. While it's impossible to pin down the scope of such beliefs, analysts say, the numbers are staggering if even a fraction of President Trump's more than 74 million voters support bogus claims that say, for example, the election was rigged, the coronavirus is a hoax, and liberals are hatching a socialist takeover."

Kori Schake, formerly a senior adviser for the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Security Council, told those attending Millions of Conversations' online event, "It really matters that the president of the United States is an arsonist of radicalization. And it will really help when that is no longer the case."

Arie Kruglanski, who teaches at the University of Maryland and has written a lot about radicalization, is worried as well. Allam quotes Kruglanski as saying, "We don't trustthe government.We don't trust the Congress. We don't trust the Supreme Court. We don't trust now the science. We don't trust medicine. We don't trust the media for sure.So, who do we trust? Well, we trust our tribe. We trust conspiracy theories that tell us what we want to hear."

Kruglanski warned, "Every large political movement started at one point as a small fringe minority. And when it catches on, it can engulf the whole society. So, you know, the danger is there."

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/right-wing-media/

:{:{When the Electoral College met on Monday, December 14, electors officially voted to give President-elect Joe Biden the 306 electoral votes he won in the 2020 presidential election. But in the right-wing media, the myth that President Donald Trump is the real winner and still has a legitimate path to victory persists. New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters, in an article published the following day, points to election coverage as a prime example of the}::{ alternate reality that exists in the right-wing media bubble — where fiction is accepted as fact.}:

"One by one, presidential electors in all 50 states and the District of Columbia formally recognized Joseph R. Biden, Jr. as the president-elect — the latest and most significant rejection so far of Mr. Trump's desperate attempts to undo the will of the voters," Peters explains. "But inside the sprawling and self-reinforcing network of websites, podcasts and video news that has fed some of the most reckless and unrealistic claims about the election, the myth of Mr. Trump's political survival endures."

Peters goes on to cite some specific examples of the type of nonsense that came from the right-wing media on December 14.

"The lead story on the Gateway Pundit, which researchers have identified as one of the major sources (of) pro-Trump misinformation online, floated the idea of a 'BOMBSHELL' ruling in a case on Monday that the site teased as a possible game-changer: 'Will a Small County in Northern Michigan Be the Key to Overturning the Nation's Election Results?,'" Peters observes. "On a podcast hosted by Mr. Trump's former White House chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, a conservative activist vowed to file a new lawsuit seeking to reverse the electors' vote — adding to the dozens of suits so far, nearly all of which have been dismissed."[twt]

another far-right media figure who has been exalting Trump as the real winner of the 2020 election is radio host Mark Levin, who, Peters notes, "was one of the first to give a national platform to the conspiracy theories of the lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, whose various claims of fraud involve a multinational network of saboteurs and domestic enemies of the president both dead — Hugo Chávez of Venezuela — and alive: 'Never Trump' Republican officials."

Peters points out that far-right conspiracy theories have a "lost history in the Republican Party," and he cites the John Birch Society as a prime example of the 1960s. The Times reporter stresses, however, that "the fringe never, of course, enjoyed the support of the sitting president" back then.

Taking Peters' argument a step further, it should be noted that some people on the right didn't hesitate to call out the Birchers as nutcases — most notably, the late National Review founder William F. Buckley. Although the conservative Buckley bashed liberals and progressives on a regular basis during the 1960s and 1970s, he was no fan of the John Birch Society.

But as Peters points out, the "fringe" has so much influence in right-wing media in 2020 that even Fox News' Tucker Carlson "faced a backlash" when he "questioned" Powell's "credibility."

Reflecting on the influence of the John Birch Society during the 1960s compared to the lunatic fringe now, Yochai Benkler — a Harvard Law School professor who has been studying right-wing media — told the Times, "What you didn't get then was the same market exposure. You didn't have tens of millions of voters exposed."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-sister/

Friday morning, filtering his media diet to only include yahoos promoting conspiracy theories and baseless election fraud claims, Donald Trump found a heartwarming story. Posted by a Wayne Dupree, the title clearly caught Donald's eye: "Trump's Alleged Sister Issues Rare and Bold Statement on 2020 Election and Proves How Much She Believes in Her Brother." You might want to grab tissues, especially if you cry when you laugh really hard.

Trump retweeted the story, writing "Thank you Elizabeth, LOVE!" The tweet highlighted by Mr. Dupree is one posted on Nov. 18 from an account @TheBettyTrump, and reads "This election inspired me to break my silence and speak out on behalf of my family. My brother Don won this election and will fight this to the very end. We've always been a family of fighters. We are all so very proud of him and the job he has done for our country. 4 MORE YEARS!" I guess she waited until two weeks after the election to retrofit this inspiration? Well, it turns out that this account ain't Donald Trump's sister.

If one clicked through to the Dupree article, he writes an update saying "This tweet was widely shared online and covered by other publications. While this has not been officially "fact-checked" by social media executives and professionals, we're hearing from many others that this is not actually the account of Ms. Elizabeth Trump, but is actually a parody account." The account seems to have been set up two days ago and is filled with succinct attacks on just about everyone from Michelle Obama to Chris Wallace and Tucker Carlson.

Here are a couple of examples.

Barack Obama is a homosexual.

— Betty Trump (@TheBettyTrump) November 19, 2020

Michelle Obama is a man.

— Betty Trump (@TheBettyTrump) November 19, 2020

So, while this is a parody account and Donald Trump is a dangerous fool, the message is painfully the same as most MAGA accounts.

[twt]

pathetic.

Elizabeth Trump Grau, has stayed out of the press for the most part during her life. By most accounts she has been frequently seen at Trump's Mar-a-Lago, appearing in photos with massage parlor owner and Chinese CEO liaison, Li Yang.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.mediamatters.org/rudy-giuliani/fox-news-figures-lavish-praise-rudy-giuliani-and-sidney-powells-unhinged-press

no twt

Fox News figures lavish praise on Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s unhinged press conference about their plan to subvert the election

WRITTEN BY BRENDAN KARET

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM NIKKI MCCANN RAMIREZ

PUBLISHED 11/19/20

Fox figures are attempting to defend the conspiratorial press conference from President Donald Trump’s legal team, during which his lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell pushed a bunch of conspiracy theories and generally laid out how they are trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election results.

This post will be updated throughout November 19.

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CNN Politics: “At no point did Trump’s legal team offer any proof for their allegations of widespread fraud.” Following Giuliani and Powell’s stunt, CNN’s Tara Subramaniam and Holmes Lybrand offered a fact check noting that the “briefing was overflowing with falsehoods and conspiracy theories” for which they provided no proof. ” [CNN Politics, 11/19/20]

Politico: “Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyers crank out conspiracies as legal challenges implode.” Politico's Quint Forget and Alex Isenstadt examined how “the former New York mayor and his colleagues spun a web of mistruths that made mention of the Clinton Foundation, liberal megadonor George Soros and the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.” [Politico, 11/19/20]

Fox figures lauded Giuliani and Powell

Fox host Lou Dobbs talked up Giuliani and Powell's unhinged press conference [Media Matters, 11/19/20]

Video file

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition of Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight

LOU DOBBS (HOST): President Trump's attorneys say they can prove illegal ballots were used to inflate Biden's vote tally in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. The legal team also expects to file new lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, perhaps even Virginia and New Mexico. That's in addition to the 20 lawsuits that are now being litigated by the campaign or Republican Party attorneys.

Another issue at the center of today's news conference, the use of Dominion voting machines and Smartmatic software. Defense attorney Sidney Powell cited a whistleblower's stunning affidavit. It says Smartmatic's technology was used to rig elections in Venezuela, it is now in the, quote, DNA of every vote-tabulating company's software and system. Smartmatic and Dominion deny those charges. But Sidney Powell argues that algorithms in the Smartmatic software were used to change results in the presidential election.

Co-hosts of Fox’s The Five defended Giuliani and Powell.[Fox News, The Five, 11/19/20]

Video file

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition of Fox News' The Five

On Sean Hannity’s radio show, Fox contributor Ken Starr compared Powell to John Adams.[Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show, 11/19/20]

On Sean Hannity’s radio show, Fox contributor Ken Starr compares Sidney Powell to John Adams

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

Audio file

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show

Media outlets have debunked Rudy Giuliani's conspiracy theories. Ignoring that, Tucker Carlson now demands new investigations. [Media Matters, 11/19/20]

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition ofFox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Fox News legal analyst: “The unabashed arrogance of the media was on full display today, as they were demanding to see the evidence. They’re not entitled to see the evidence.” [Fox News, Hannity, 11/19/20]

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/trumps-coup-depends-right-wing-information-bubble

matt g no graf

Donald Trump and his supporters are actively working to overturn the results of the election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden in order to keep him in power. Their despicable plot revolves around disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Americans, in large part voters of color, on the grounds that their ballots were fraudulent. Their claims have been thoroughly demolished in legal proceedings finding no evidence that widespread fraud took place, because it did not. Top federal, state, and local officials have said that there were no election security problems, and the president’s legal team at times has acknowledged in court that no fraud took place.

But the Trumpist effort to steal the election in broad daylight doesn’t rely on whether its arguments can stand up to scrutiny in court. It is a fundamentally political effort. Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team are propagating a shambling mass of lies and deranged conspiracy theories about the election. They hope to create enough confusion to give cover to Republican officials at the local, state, and federal level working to subvert the will of the electorate and use their power to preserve the president’s. They want local and state Republican officials to refuse to certify election results in key states that Trump lost, in hopes that either Republican state legislators in those states will overturn the results and hand the president a victory or the election is thrown to Congress, where Republicans can grant him a second term.

This seditious conspiracy to shatter American democracy relies on the impermeability of the right-wing information bubble: The facts are not on their side, and the law is not on their side, but the Trumpist media is on their side, so they are banging the table as loudly as they can. They will likely fail -- in no small part because the key players in the would-be coup are incompetent loons -- but the cost America pays will be high nevertheless.

GOP leaders spent decades building an elaborate disinformation network of partisan media outlets and telling their supporters not to believe reporting from mainstream news sources. It worked -- polls show that Republicans overwhelmingly trust right-wing outlets with low or nonexistent journalistic standards and scorn more credible news outlets, and the president’s most fervent supporters are Republicans who trust Fox News. A vast swath of the public is now firmly ensconced within an alternate reality, making decisions about not only politics but their personal health and safety based on propaganda and conspiracy theories.

Within that right-wing information bubble, it is virtually uncontested that Trump is correct that the 2020 election was rife with voter fraud and that he actually won if you only count the “legal votes.” The result is that polls show a majority of Republicans say that the election was stolen from Trump.

Fox declared Biden the president-elect on November 7. But since then, both its news and opinion sides have pushed conspiracy theories about the election and cast doubt on its results hundreds of times

[graf]

Fox hosts, contributors, and guests have claimed that “manyare trying to steal this election from President Trump”; asserted that “many Americans will never again accept the results of a presidential election”; declared that “there's good reason here not to have confidence or not to believe this is fair”; argued that “this is a war, this is a battle for the control of our government and for the future of this nation”; attacked Republican officials for being insufficiently committed to Trump’s scheme; called for the arrests of election workers; suggested that Republican state legislators in states Trump lost should “appoint aclean slate of electors” who support him; and demanded lawsuits and congressional investigations. The network has aired promos that hype its prime-time line-up casting doubt on the election.

Fox’s work to systemically delegitimize the election is important not only because the network remains the largest and most powerful entity within the right-wing media machine, but because Trump himself frequently watches its programming and amplifies it to his Twitter followers. The president has cast doubt on the election dozens of times in response to Fox’s coverage, including by promoting deranged conspiracy theories the network’s stars pushed about computer systems changing votes to benefit Biden.

In spite of this barrage of attacks on the democratic process, Fox has actually been under fire from the president’s supporters for not going far enough. The network’s cable and digital competitors are even crazier and more propagandistic. And the social media channels bombarding Republican users are completely unhinged.

The Republican officials targeted by the president's scheme are likely to be either swimming in that fever swamp or dependent on those who do.

At the low end they look like William Hartmann, the Republican member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers who temporarily blocked certification of the county’s election results and subsequently signed an affidavit seeking to rescind the certification. His social media feeds are filled with conspiracy theories about the election from OAN and other far-right sources.

Further up the food chain, Republican members of Congress are going on Fox to promote Trump’s election theft.

At every step in the process, at the local, state, and federal level, Republican officials can be pressured by the president’s supporters consuming this disinformation. Those are GOP primary voters who likely believe Trump actually won and can threaten the jobs of any politician who takes action to prevent him from staying in office.

This coup is likely to fail; Biden’s lead is too great, Democrats hold key offices that can foil the attempt, and the plotters are too nutty. But the Republican base is being primed to treat Biden as illegitimate -- and to question the results of any future elections the party loses. If this behavior is normalized, the next time the right-wing media machine pushes for an anti-democratic solution to an election defeat, the margin may be narrower, the playing field more favorable to Republicans, and the plotters more disciplined.

Our democracy is fragile, and it is under attack. If the truth of the election results can't break through the right-wing information bubble, it may not survive for long.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fake-news/right-wing-disinformation-about-electoral-fraud-wisconsin-got-its-start-site-disguised

parker m

The march of election-related disinformation continues unabated. On Wednesday, an article published at a website called Milwaukee City Wire falsely claimed that a number of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wards were reporting more votes than registered voters. Though untrue, the article spread widely across social media among supporters of President Donald Trump in search of evidence to back up baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

Nothing about the numbers in the article added up. For example, the article claimed that voting ward 274 in Milwaukee was home to 640 registered voters, but received 1,290 votes, a turnout of an impossible 202%. The actual numbers, according to the Milwaukee County Clerk’s office, showed 611 out of 702 registered voters cast ballots.

On Thursday, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe addressed this claim during a public briefing:

Every ballot cast in the state of Wisconsin has a paper audit trail. Every voter registration and absentee request is maintained and available during that public process. And to address some of the questions head-on, Wisconsin does not have more votes cast than registered voters. There were no absentee ballots found in the middle of the night. There were lawyers and observers from both parties on site and involved the entire time.

Wisconsin ABC affiliate WISN investigated the claims made in the City Wire article. When reporter Hillary Mintz reached City Wire publisher Brian Timpone,he tried to play it off as an honest mistake. When confronted with the fact that his numbers appeared to be completely invented, he defended the post and said, “The change in the records doesn't change the story's point materially at all.”

Milwaukee City Wire is part of a growing trend in which right-wing propaganda is packaged to look like it’s coming from a legitimate local news source.

The site is one of dozens of locally branded conservative content farm sites run by Timpone’s Metric Media. In October 2019, The New York Times reported on the sudden emergence of a number of Metric Media sites in Michigan in June of that year. Metric Media’s outlets often have anodyne-sounding names like The Kalamazoo Times, Waterford Today, and The Grand Rapids Reporter. If you didn’t know better, you would assume that these were the names of local newspapers -- this is by design.

The Columbia Journalism Review published its own profile of Metric Media and similar companies that December. CJR called these “pink slime” outlets, a reference to the meat byproduct often found in fast food-quality ground beef. The article criticized these entities as “partisan outlets masquerading as local news organizations” and a source of electoral disinformation.

Though the Milwaukee City Wire article was updated with more accurate information after WISN’s investigation, it had already served its purpose as a catalyst for right-wing conspiracy-mongering.

Josh Hammer, the editor of Newsweek’s increasingly right-wing opinion section and co-author of a note defending the once-respectable news outlet’s racist “birther” smear aimed at Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, was one of the fairly prominent Twitter users to share the article. Hammer has previously praised Trump’s attacks on institutions like legitimate news organizations, and shared articles making unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

Washington Examiner reporter Mike Brest shared the story on his Twitter account. Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel shared the story on Twitter, though she would later delete it, explaining that there were “discrepancies” between the fake story she shared and actual data. Unfortunately, other right-wing opportunists regurgitated the fictitious report in their own work, spreading it even further.

Pro-Trump former CNN commentator Jeffrey Lord posted a blog to his personal websitecentered around the story, incorrectly calling the false City Wire numbers “a data graph from the Milwaukee County Clerk,” which it assuredly was not. Fox News host Sean Hannity tweeted multiple links to Lord’s blog.

Another story that cited the City Wire story, written by Michael Anton at American Greatness, was tweeted out by Republican Party national spokesperson Elizabeth Harrington. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, tweeted out another version of Anton’s blog post published by the conservative Claremont Institute as well as the original City Wire story.

Predictably, dumbest man on the internet Jim Hoft cited the invented data in a post at his Gateway Pundit blog.

This surely won’t be the last time a “pink slime” news outlet is used to launder a narrative into the conservative media ecosystem, but it serves as a case study about how freely disinformation spreads online, leaving readers and reputable journalists to fight it.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/boris-epshteyn/dead-voter-conspiracy-theory-quickly-spread-4chan-trump-campaign-strategic-advisor

no lnx twt

A dead voter conspiracy theory quickly spread from 4chan to a Trump campaign “strategic advisor”

WRITTEN BY TIMOTHY JOHNSON

PUBLISHED 11/05/20 3:10 PM EST

boris-goback.png

A deranged conspiracy theory promoted on Twitter by Trump campaign strategic adviser Boris Epshteyn is illustrative of how quickly conspiracy theories about voter fraud can spread from the cesspools of the internet to social media and then to high-level figures in President Donald Trump’s campaign.

In the wake of Election Day, Trump has been attempting to steal the election by claiming he has won in states that he has not and by making numerous baseless claims that election results that are unfavorable to him are the result of voter fraud. Trump supporters have already responded to the president’s claims by attempting to disrupt election procedures in Michigan and Arizona.

Of the many false voter fraud claims being used as grist, one centered on Detroit indicates just how quickly far-right trolls and extremists can guide the Trump campaign’s messaging.

On November 4 at 7:44 p.m. CST, an anonymous user of 4chan’s /pol/ message board, which is known for promoting bigotry and anti-Semitism, posted an image that purported to be from a vote-counting location in Detroit. The image supposedly showed that eight people with birth dates 1/1/1900 had successfully voted in the 2020 election -- at the age of 120 years. In reality, 1/1/1900 is the “default date” used by Michigan for instances where the state does not have a registered voter’s birthday. Voters with incomplete registration information can have their votes recorded by providing photo identification at the polls. Furthermore, simple internet searches of the names observed in the image posted to 4chan indicate the individuals’ actual ages are within a typical human lifespan.

4chan post claims to show evidence of dead voters in Detroit

Just 12 minutes later, at 7:56 p.m. CST, a Twitter user who goes by the name of Eric Block, posted a cropped photo from the 4chan post with the message “Dead voters in Michigan. Look at the birth date. @realDonaldTrump.” Block’s Twitter profile, and the tweets he has sent, indicate that he is an enthusiastic supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which includes many anti-Semitic elements, has been labeled a potential domestic terror threat by the FBI, and has been tied to acts of violence, including murder.

Approximately four hours later, Block’s dead voter claim wasretweeted by Trump campaign “2020 Strategic Advisor” Boris Epshteyn, who is known for having pushed ludicrous pro-Trump propaganda while working for Sinclair Broadcast Group in between 2016 and 2020 Trump campaign stints.

Boris Epshteyn promotes dead voter conspiracy theory

Block’s tweet is no longer available on Twitter; it is unclear whether he deleted it or Twitter took it down. The original image posted to 4chan is still available on Twitter from the account of Mike Coudrey,who is known for spreading far-right disinformation, including other bogus claims of fraud about election results this week. Coudrey’s tweet has been retweeted more than 4,000 times.

Although Block’s tweet is no longer available, Epshteyn has continued to promote other disinformation about voter fraud and election results on Twitter.

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aha/doh: --> echo bubble (and amp); US polarized for big long term structural reasons? but soc media accel/ampl, and now w/ covid we are more physically isolated from ppl who could modulate qanon BS?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/historian-warns-america-is-already-in-its-own-slow-motion-reichstag-fire/

no lnx audio

Historian warns America is already in its own 'slow-motion Reichstag Fire'

Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 18, 2020

Donald Trump continues to make it clear that he does not intend to leave office peacefully if he is defeated by Joe Biden and the Democrats on Election Day. Moreover, Donald Trump considers any election in which he is not the "winner" to be null and void. Trump's appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court is an obvious quid pro quo to secure his "reelection" if his attorneys and other agents can sufficiently sabotage the vote on Election Day and beyond.

On Thursday, Trump again followed the authoritarian's playbook when he bragged to his supporters at a rally in North Carolina that U.S. Marshalls essentially executed Michael Reinoehl, an anti-fascist activist accused of killing a right wing paramilitary member during protests in Oregon last August.

:{:{}:

Celebrating the extra-judicial killings of one's political "enemies" is a common feature of fascist authoritarian regimes and the types of leaders admired and imitated by Donald Trump.

:{:{}:

Donald Trump's commitment to and use of political violence is a matter of public record. Two of the most recent examples include how Trump's followers in Michigan allegedly planned to kidnap and possibly murder Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. During his debate with Joe Biden, Trump also commanded white supremacist paramilitaries to be prepared to attack his and their "enemies" if he loses on Election Day or is otherwise removed from office.

Trump also wants Joe Biden and other leading Democrats imprisoned and perhaps even executed because he deems them to be "guilty" of "treason" and a "coup" attempt against him. Donald Trump and his Attorney General William Barr have also threatened to use the United States military against the American people if they dare to protest the outcome of the 2020 Election if Trump somehow finds some extra-legal (if not outright illegal) way to stay in office.

Because he is a political sadist and master of misery and pain, Donald Trump is using the coronavirus pandemic as a weapon to physically and emotionally abuse the American people in order to make them more compliant and subservient to his regime. Like other autocrats and authoritarians, he is also using the economic and human devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic to personally enrich himself, his family, and allies as a way of guaranteeing the latter's loyalty.

In all, as with his obsessive rhetoric about "law and order," like other fascist authoritarians Donald Trump and his regime define the "law" in ways that benefit themselves and disregard the law when it does not serve their interests. Through that logic democracy is a tool for the Trump regime to stay in power indefinitely if they "win" and to disregard the outcome on Election Day and beyond if they are voted out of office by the American people.

Trump's strategy of attacking America's democratic norms, institutions, and culture is a constant torrent where the targets are corrupted, weakened, and then finally routed through sheer exhaustion.

In a new essay at The Bulwark, senior Democratic Party strategist James Carville summarizes this existential moment of crisis for the United States as:

Very seldom in American history have there been periods when people can nobly wage a crusade to create real and lasting change. But when these crusades do occur, when those moments arrive, what we do to vanquish the threat to freedom builds something everlasting into the framework of our society.

:{:{}:

The American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, Seneca Falls, Stonewall, and Selma, were all historical flashpoints where Americans displayed their patriotism against oppressive forces in a resounding way. These movements overthrew an empire, ended slavery, staved off totalitarianism, and paved the way for the establishment of fundamental civil rights and liberties for women, LGBTQ+ and black Americans.

We find ourselves again at such a turning point. Donald Trump's authoritarian presence behind the Resolute Desk is amongst the gravest threats America has ever faced from within. And Americans have risen to meet this threat.

The Trump regime has created a defense in depth against the American people. A key part of Trump's defensive strategy consists of how those Americans and others who are expecting one dramatic and climactic assault on the country's democracy have been lulled into a type of complacency and surrender.

As wielded by Donald Trump and other fascist authoritarians, the poison they have injected into the country's body politic and democracy is actually quite slow acting, where the victim becomes used to chronic pain before finally succumbing.

:{:{}:

Why does America's mainstream news media continue to avoid describing Donald Trump and his regime as fascist authoritarians? What are they afraid of? How has that evasion helped to empower and normalize Trumpism?

In what ways have Donald Trump and his regime used the coronavirus — and the pain and social injustice it has revealed and made worse — as a weapon against democracy and the American people?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Timothy Snyder. He is a Professor of History at Yale University and the author of the bestselling books "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" and "The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America." His new book is "Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary."

At the end of this conversation, Timothy Snyder warns that the United States is in the midst of a years-long slow-motion Reichstag Fire emergency that Election Day 2020 may not resolve.

You can also listen to my conversation with Timothy Snyder on my podcast "The Truth Report" or through the player embedded below.

Donald Trump's attacks on democracy are escalating. He continues to say that he will not respect the outcome of the election if he loses to Joe Biden and the Democrats. There are some public voices who have been warning about Trump and authoritarianism and fascism for several years. You are foremost among them. Why did more people not listen to the warnings?

It is structural. At present it is harder to reach people who do not already agree with you. This is true even for those of us with a public platform and big audience. More contact is virtual and less in person. It is also harder to surprise people. Ultimately, it is very hard to reach people before an algorithm does. By then a person's mind is already made up one way or another.

The second answer is that many Americans really like authoritarianism.Sure, the conventional wisdom says that Americans like freedom. Some of them do. Some of them do not. The Americans who do not like freedom are not going to be reached or otherwise have their minds changed. It is as simple as that....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-trump-is-once-again-colluding-with-russia/

no lnx twt

how Trump is once again colluding with Russia

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2020

Almost two weeks ago, a story circulated that Portland protesters were burning Bibles and American flags. It spread via social media and was picked up by conservative outlets, such as the Washington Examiner. Of course, several Republican leaders joined the bandwagon.

tp kirk --> djt jr?]

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ted cruzretweet: This is who they are.

Ian Miles Cheong

@stillgray

Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland. https://twitter.com/Shelldrayk/status/1289481822414413827/video/1

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don jr

Now we move to the book burning phase. I’m pretty sure ANTIFA doesn’t actually stand for what they say it stands for. Maybe just remove the anti part of them name and it’s perfect.

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tpkirk

BLM inc arsonists just burned a stack of Bibles in Portland

The activist media won’t report on this because it’s likely they support it

Our faith is under attack.

If you vote for Biden—you vote for Bible burnings

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Two reporters at the New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg and Julian Barnes, decided to look into the story and found Vladimir Putin’s fingerprints all over it. As is often the case with effective propaganda, this story contains a kernel of truth. Apparently, some group was handing out Bibles to protesters that night and one of them was used to start a fire. An American flag was also burned. But a local paper covering the protests that night devoted just one sentence to that story in a lengthy piece about what happened.

The video news agency connected to Russia Today (RT) was regularly streaming a live feed of the Portland protests. They edited the clip of the fire and made it the focal point of their protest coverage that night. Then, RT did an entire story about it. Social media took it from there and the next thing you know, outlets like the Washington Examiner were picking it up. Here is how Rosenberg and Barnes summarized the process:

The Russian technique is a kind of information laundering, akin to money laundering.Stories originate with Russian-backed news sites, some of them directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts said. They are then picked up by Americans on social media or in domestic news outlets, and their origins quickly become obscured. Often, by the time a story reaches most of its American audience, there is little to indicate that it was created to fuel grievances and deepen political divisions.

Following Trump’s press briefing on Wednesday, Hunter Walker tracked down another example of Russia’s attempt to get their propaganda in the news. He wrote about the question OAN reporter Chanel Rion asked the president.

Rion: In the last hour or so, if you googled antifa.com. it would take you straight to Joe Biden’s website, his official campaign website. Odd situation. We don’t know who’s behind that. But it raises an interesting leadership question. Should Joe Biden, the Democrat party, Kamala Harris– should they publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?

Trump: They should. I think they’re afraid to. It’s– in my book it’s virtually a part of their campaign, Antifa. The Democrats act like, gee, I don’t know exactly what that is.

Take a look at Portland. Take a look at any place you want to take a look at, and they’re all over the place. They were here.

Basically Rion gave Trump the opportunity to claim that Antifa is part of the Biden campaign—which is, of course, a blatant lie.

Walker looked into what actually happened with the antifa.com website. Once again, as Pelosi said, “all roads lead to Putin.”

:{:{}:

Records for “antifa.com” in the domain name database Whoisology.com show the site was registered in the Russian Federation from 2013 through last July. Starting last November, the site’s registration was moved to Panama, The website has always been anonymously registered and its owners could not be reached for comment.

Russia set up the antifa.com website and eventually redirected it to Biden’s campaign page, allowing the president to claim that the group was involved politically with Democrats. Of course, this raises the old question of whether this was all coordinated with the president or if Trump is simply taking advantage of Putin’s efforts. The same questions are raised about the role of OAN in these kinds of Russian propaganda efforts.

So there you have two examples of how Russia is currently interfering in the 2020 election to support the reelection of Donald Trump. One thing worth noting is that if these examples are reflective of their efforts, Vladimir Putin has calculated that his best bet is to inflame the so-called “culture wars,” something that has been the bedrock of the Republican strategy for decades. The Bible burning story was especially useful for the Christian nationalists who want to scare their followers into thinking that, as Trump has suggested, Joe Biden is against God and the Bible.

It is important to keep in mind that the only reason we know about these Russian efforts is because some reporters put in the time to track down the story. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who has seen what our intelligence services know about Russian interference, said that the 2020 efforts “make Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.” But the Trump administration is keeping that information from the public, while the attorney general hypes the antifa story and puts all of his energy into accusing the Obama administration of “spying” into the Trump campaign. That strikes me as the definition of collusion.

---

aha: trump whisperer, fox feedback loop? alt fact post truth there's an alternate reality made of images on Fox (videotape editied, which is a futher subset of story, which is a further subset of POV of that story, which is in turn a subset of other stories/ bigger context; recall also seattle autonomous zone with camo guy superimposed/photoshopped, when called on it call a "collage" tho only 2 pix?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/heres-why-the-white-house-is-sending-stormtroopers-into-portland/

In one of the most alarming developments of Trump’s presidency, dozens of federal agents in full camouflage seized protesters and threw them into unmarked cars, taking them to locations unknown without specifying a reason for arrest. It appears that at least some of the agents involved belonged to the US Customs and Border Protection (colloquially known as Border Patrol), an organization that obviously has no business whatsoever conducted counterinsurgency tactics against peaceful American protesters in Portland, Oregon. Neither the mayor of Portland nor the governor of Oregon wanted them there; in fact, they specifically requested that they leave. And now a U.S. Attorney for the State of Oregon is calling for an investigation into the arrests, even as the Acting head of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, is vowing to ramp up these actions both in Portland and reportedly elsewhere.

Needless to say, this is a chilling step toward police state authoritarian rule in the United States, one that was presaged by Attorney General Barr’s approval of an pre-curfew assault on protesters instigated in Lafayette Square to clear the way for a presidential campaign photo op. Few took it seriously when leftist organizers were warning that the border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were being culturally and structurally converted into stormtroopers for the Trump regime, equally ready to be deployed against politically inconvenient American citizens as against undocumented immigrants seeking a better life. Those warnings should be heeded now.

We should not allow ourselves to become numb to this. It is helpful psychologically–even if tired and stale as a rhetorical device–to remind ourselves what the reactions would be if a Democrat were acting similarly. Imagine if President Obama had sent in in military-garbed federal stormtroopers to round up Tea Party protesters into unmarked cars, over the top of the objections of local governors and mayors. It’s unthinkable. It’s the sort of thing that drove bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories like Jade Helm, but that if any shred of them were true would instantly have embroiled the country in a civil war.

So why is Trump doing it?

many theories abound—none of them entirely convincing on their own, but all of them deeply disturbing. One explanation is that it’s a trial run for future police state actions, partly to push the window of the possible, partly to desensitize the public to further abuses, and partly to see precisely what they can get away with and what Americans will tolerate.

This is no doubt true to a certain extent, but the challenge is that it also carries enormous downside risk. If Trump doesn’t win re-election he has less than six months left in his presidency–hardly time enough for a deeply unpopular and divisive president to engineer a police state coup. And just as with the outrage in Lafayette Square, the mere action itself will likely make Trump even more unpopular with the few undecided voters who remain.

Another convergent explanation is that making a show of supposed toughness in conducting military counterinsurgency in Democratic-controlled cities that want no part of it will thrill Trump’s base. This is reasonable to assume, since Trump’s base takes no greater joy than in seeing authoritarian cruelty exercised against their political enemies. And it’s likely true, since Trump is obsessed with his base to the exclusion of all else beyond his own personal profit. But the problem is that almost everyone in the Trump campaign’s immediate orbit beyond the president himself knows that Trump must expand beyond his shrinking base to have any chance of winning re-election. The more Trump gives aging bigots dopamine hits, the more the rest of the country falls away from him. Camouflaged stormtroopers used against American citizens will almost certainly lose him more votes than he gains.

But there is a third explanation, simultaneously dumber and yet more convincing: the Fox News effect. Trump spends endless hours watching garbage cable television, specifically One America News (OAN) and Fox News. Judging from Trump’s tweets, his entire political universe revolves around Fox News–and, more recently, the even more bizarrely propagandistic OAN when even Fox News fails to adequately toe the line.

Ever since the beginning of the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Fox News has been portraying liberal American cities as hellscapes of violence in which the police and the Trump Administration played the role of hero against rampaging hordes. Most Americans, of course, didn’t see it that way. But if you live entirely in the Fox News bubble, then this narrative is as self-evident a truth as the rising of the sun in the east. Most recently, Fox News has been describing Portland in particular, in the words of former Media Matters for America contributor Oliver Willis, as if it were Baghdad circa 2003. This is not the case, of course. Crime rates in Portland have been on a steady decline for decades, with the last month being no significant exception. In fact, the worst Acting HHS Secretary Wolf could point to was literally a few instances of graffiti. No kidding.

But if Fox News were the sum of your reality, you would believe that emergency action needed to be taken before the residents started to erect a Thunderdome and the services of Snake Plisskenwould be required. You would send in the troops despite the potential cost out of a belief that relieved Americans would be desperately grateful for your embrace of “law and order” (even if it were heavy on the “order” and light on the “law.”) You would do whatever it took to bring the situation to heel, and figure the public approval would follow from the new Pax Trumpiana. After all, Fox News declared it must be so.

This last scenario is admittedly ridiculous. But it’s also likely closest to the truth. While figures like Stephen Miller no doubt have a laser focus on instituting an authoritarian apartheid regime to save white supremacist Republican rule the demographic tsunami preparing to overwhelm them, they are not the president.Donald Trump is. Trump is a man of impulse, not of plans. His head is not set on the next 20 years of power, but on tomorrow’s cable news ratings. The constructed reality of Fox News is his reality. The rest of the authoritarian project follows from there.

And that more than anything else likely explains why the president is precipitating a constitutional crisis by sending stormtroopers into Portland.

aha: gop/rt busted so many times for dark $/corruption that it needs whatabout so soros = kochs and actblue = dark $/scam

plus they need to neutralize blm demand for justice, and it's a scam than racism not real

note chan origin then moves up escalator to dobbs

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6/20

https://www.mediamatters.org/fake-news/debunked-conspiracy-theory-about-black-lives-matter-actblue-and-democrats-can-be-traced

no lnx many pix

A false money laundering conspiracy theory regarding the Black Lives Matter movement's use of a payment processing company for donations has gained traction online among right-wing figures and can be traced back to far-right message boards.

The conspiracy theory alleges that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is some kind of a front to launder money to Democrats because the BLM website uses ActBlue to process its online fundraising payments. ActBlue is a payment processor used widely by progressive groups and organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party has an equivalent processing company called WinRed. As the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has noted, “many candidates use [ActBlue] to process donations but that money isn't pooled to be shared across candidates or groups,” and “a donation to BLM through ActBlue goes just to BLM, not any other group.” But the conspiracy theory still has earned well over a million shares and views on social media and has been amplified by a Fox Nation host.

A review by Media Matters found that before it gained traction, the conspiracy theory had been circulating for days on far-right message boards. The earliest mention our review found was at the beginning of June on Twitter, when an account that has pushed the slogan for the QAnon conspiracy theory repeatedly tweeted the claim on June 1 and June 2. The account claimed it had sent the conspiracy theory to the FBI and President Donald Trump, and it urged the Ohio Police Department to investigate the claim.

@OneVoiceUS

The conspiracy theory popped up days later on June 5 on TheDonald.win, a new forum for the subreddit “r/TheDonald,” which was known for violent rhetoric and was ultimately quarantined by Reddit. On TheDonald.win, a user wrote that “when you go to donate on the blacklivesmatter.com website,” you are redirected to ActBlue, which means entities “donating to Black Lives Matter are actually donating to ActBlue.” That means, the user wrote, that the donations may be “just going straight to fund the Democratic presidential campaign.”

The next day, another user on the forum wrote in a post that “BLM is a bait and switch fundraising scam” for the Democratic National Committee “by laundering money through Act Blue.” The user urged others to “tell everyone you know.” This post gained more traction on the forum than the first one, which it directly referenced in the comments. Similar language made its way to Facebook minutes later.

The Donald subreddit forum ActBlue1

Over the next few days, the conspiracy theory also began circulating on 4chan’s “/pol/” message board, a known hotspot for white nationalists, where users pointed to ActBlue to claim Black Lives Matter was “a fundraising apparatus” and a “slush fund” for Democrats. One 4chan user pushing the claim on June 8 used nearly the exact same language as the June 5 post from TheDonald.win.

4chan ActBlue claim

The conspiracy theory also continued to circulate on TheDonald.win on June 8 and reached the subreddit “r/conservative,” where a user called Black Lives Matter a “money laundering scheme” for Democrats via ActBlue. That post was later shared in a YouTube video.

The following day, on June 9, The Gateway Pundit, a far-right blog that has a history of publishing misinformation, posted that the BLM site “appears to be aninternational money laundering scheme used by the Democrats to raise money from an international audience,” claiming ActBlue appears to be “a funding arm of the DNC.” (The site’s owner Jim Hoft shared the post on Twitter, calling it an “exclusive.”) The post gave a “hat tip” to TheDonald.win for the claim. The post was picked up by multiple far-right figures, including by a QAnon-supporting former congressional candidate on Twitter, another QAnon Twitter account with a major following who keeps evading his Twitter ban, and by trollMilo Yiannopoulos on Telegram.

Gateway Pundit ActBlue claim

On June 10, right-wing pundit Candace Owens quote-tweeted an Instagram video pushing the conspiracy theory and accused Black Lives Matters of being a “shell company” for Democrats via ActBlue(Owens also posted the video on Instagram, where it received well over a million views). Minutes later, “Q,” the central entity of the QAnon conspiracy theory, posted a link to Owens’ tweet on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board. Owens’ post has been retweeted more than 64,000 times so far.

Candace Owens ActBlue claim

Following Owens’ post, the conspiracy theory began spreading to other conservative figures, such as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch; a Florida Republican congressional candidate who has given credence to QAnon; Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier (who, like Owens, incorrectly called ActBlue a “Democrat super PAC”); Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; and former editor-in-chief of Breitbart’s London bureau Raheem Kassam.

Additionally, two major conservative TikTok accounts, @therepublicanhypehouse and @conservativehypehouse, both posted videos pushing the conspiracy theory, getting more than 370,000 views combined (even though TikTok has an anti-misinformation policy).

The conspiracy theory also apparently reached Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, who has a history of pushing claims from message boards. She tweeted, “When you donate to BLM you’re donating to the Dems.”

Tomi Lahren ActBlue claim

These tweets and videos combined have gotten hundreds of thousands of shares and views and have amplified the conspiracy theory far beyond fringe message boards.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-is-on-the-verge-of-repeating-a-historic-disaster-by-pushing-the-wuhan-lab-hoax/

There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.

This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 — maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue — was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.

Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet. But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.

Iraq Redux?

Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans. It was dedicated tofabricating intelligence on Iraq.

Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory,” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 book, A Pretext for War.

In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state.” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s first national security advisor.

To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview with Bannon’s Breitbart News.

To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel. He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.

Following that, the president re-named Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back, awaiting likely confirmation.

It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.

The Wuhan Lab Lies

As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.

On January 24th, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece that had appeared inLondon’sDaily Mailthe previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic,” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website ZeroHedge ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.

A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in, laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton — appearing on Fox, of course — agreed that China might indeed have created the virus.Then the idea began to go… well, viral. (Soon Cotton was even tweeting that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.)By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the Global Disinformation Index.)

Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted on referring to it as the“China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, whilehe began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the New York Times broke the story that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”

Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”

On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement, saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.

A Finger on the Scale

The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, andbioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.

Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.

There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down, saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree that it was not generated in a lab.

Among America’s allies — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.” Australia, in particular, rejected what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.

Finally, according to Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.

John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” he said. “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it’s just not there.’”

Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following clarion calls from China and the World Health Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide — warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.

Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.

By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.

Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

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