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Biden suspended his campaign and right-wing media responded with conspiracy theories

Conservatives demanded proof the president was still alive, claimed Biden was a “hostage” in a “soft coup,” and even suggested his decision was part of an “inside job” to assassinate Trump

WRITTEN BY JACK WINSTANLEY

PUBLISHED 07/26/24

Following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was suspending his 2024 reelection campaign, right-wing media figures pushed wild conspiracy theories alleging that the president did not make the decision himself or that it was a backup plan to defeat Donald Trump after the failed assassination attempt against the former president. Conservative media figures repeatedly asked for “proof of life,” claimed Biden was being held “hostage,” and even suggested that Biden's withdrawal letter was forged.

* Sean Davis, CEO and co-founder of conservative outlet The Federalist, commented that Biden has “made no public appearance” since he dropped out of the race, adding, “Also: do we have any evidence Biden is even alive right now?” His post then claimed, “This is banana republic insanity.” Twitter/X, [7/21/24]

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/meet-the-twitter-verified-maga-influencers-spreading-the-qanon-gospel/

no lnx twt pix

Meet the Twitter-verified MAGA Influencers Spreading the QAnon Gospel

By Adele M. Stan | October 26, 2020

In July, Twitter—after years of unheeded warnings—removed from its platform more than 7,000 accounts that were tweeting conspiracy theories from the QAnon universe, a move estimated to have affected more than 150,000 accounts related to those that were purged. National Public Radio called it “the most wide-reaching and aggressive response to the pro-Trump conspiracy theory that any social media platform has ever undertaken.”

And yet, QAnon’s presence remains robust, thanks in part to the work of Trump-enabling hard-right “Twitter verified” influencers who advance QAnon talking points, often minus overt QAnon branding.

To you, James Woods may just be that actor who’s played a bunch of creepy roles. But to people on the hard right, Woods is a digital warrior, and maybe even a friend of Q,the mysterious entity whose cryptic messages on far-right message-board channels form the core of the central QAnon conspiracy theory—the false claim that top Democrats and Hollywood figures are running a Satanic child-sex-trafficking ring, and that President Donald Trump is working behind the scenes to “save the children.” Woods has 2.6 million followers on Twitter, to whom he has tweeted messages remarkably similar to those of QAnon adherents. Consequently, his is the favorite among Twitter-verified accounts of those posting from QAnon-related accounts. The non-profit research group, Advance Democracy, Inc., found that more than 50,000 QAnon-related Twitter accounts either mentioned or retweeted Woods approximately 1.6 million times between Jan. 1 – Aug. 2020. The research organization says that, as of September, all of those 50,000 accounts remained active.

And Woods is not the only Twitter presence with more than a million followers who plays this game. ADI identified five key players in Twitter’s million+ club who are involved in the propulsion of false claims embraced by the QAnon community.Each account bears a blue checkmark badge next to the tweeter’s name—Twitter’s signal to its users that the account is somehow significant. Twitter executives define the blue checkmark in a more understated manner: “The blue verified badge on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic.” Twitter users tend to view it a sign of prestige and credibility. After all, by Twitter’s own criteria, the blue-checkmark account is “of public interest.”

In addition to Woods’, the accounts of Donald Trump Jr., Turning Point USA Executive Director Charlie Kirk, radio personality Dan Bongino, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton and BLEXIT Foundation principal officer Candace Owens are all Twitter-verified, have more than 1 million followers and advance QAnon messaging. With the exception of Trump Jr., each has been mentioned or referenced in a “Q drop,” one of the messages left by the enigmatic Q on the 8kun internet message board, a haven for those who wish to post anonymously. (Hence the “Anon” part of the movement’s name.)

Here are some of the public-interest bon mots offered by Woods:

Funny thing about that tweet: It’s a lot like a tweet linked to in a Q drop, and Woods’ tweet was made only an hour after the Q post appeared.

The Twitter link in that Q drop goes to this:

Then there’s Bill Mitchell, theTrump superfan with an online video show who got permanently booted from Twitter for creating a new Twitter identity in order to evade a previous Twitter suspension.He may not have had a million followers, but he had more than half that many, according to The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, and he regularly regaled them with QAnon conspiracy theories—and, unlike others, freely bandied about the QAnon name. 

The QAnon community returned the favor, ADI found, yielding Mitchell thousands of retweets from QAnon-related accounts. One tweet featuring disinformation about the coronavirus—which Mitchell dismisses as a hoax—garnered more than 3,100 retweets from accounts in the QAnon community. Another favorite topic of Mitchell’s among QAnon adherents is the billionaire philanthropistGeorge Soros, whom Mitchell tars with the usual tacit anti-Semitic smears one finds elsewhere on the right-wing internet.  In a June 20 tweet no longer available on the internet, Mitchell wrote:

Arrest Soros, seize his records and freeze

his assets and 99% of this chaos you see on

our streets ends tomorrow.

Retweet if you agree.

That one got 1563 retweets from QAnon-related accounts. Until Twitter threw him out, Mitchell was a blue-checkmark tweeter.In July 2019, he was invited to Trump’s White House “social media summit,” which  The New York Times’ Kevin Roose described as a gathering of “right-wing trolls.”

QAnon claims are so easily dismissed as too crazy to be believed that the danger posed by the movement, designated by the FBI as a potential domestic terrorism threat, is often overlooked. To understand the threat, one needs to focus on the second part of the narrative—the part that promises that all of these Democratic and Jewish leaders smeared by Q and Q’s followers will meet with bloody vengeance on the day that the hero Trump rounds them all up in mass arrests and executes them. Consider the impulses of some of the most unhinged of the conspiracy-minded. Remember Pizzagate? That was the internet conspiracy theory that posited a child-sex-trafficking ring involving top Democratic leaders that was ostensibly run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. A man drove up to the nation’s capital from North Carolina to rescue the non-existent victims, having armed himself with an AR-15 assault rifle and a pistol. He shot a round into an interior door as the families who had been eating inside fled for the exits.

And those are just QAnon’s central claims. The QAnon network is a transmitter of all manner of conspiracy theories, many of them part of right-wing lore for years or even decades: The purported war of the “deep state” against Donald Trump, the anti-Semitic trope of Soros as a puppet-master, and of “spygate,” a fantasy about a “deep state” that had it in for Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, the evidence for which is the fact that the FBI was keeping tabs on conversations between agents of the Russian state and Americans; some of those Americans, it turned out, were working with Trump campaign.Another common theme is that America is headed for civil war because of the savagery of the left.

Woods also advanced a phantasmagoric QAnon claim that the liberal Twitter influencer Chrissy Tiegen is linked to Jeffrey Epstein, and is a pedophile. The online assaults consequently endured by Tiegen  made her “worried for my family,” she wrote on Twitter, so she deleted 60,000 of her own tweets, she said, and blocked some 1 million accounts from engaging with hers. (The QAnon spreaders had gone into her Twitter archives and pulled out tweets in which Tiegen stated her disgust with such exploitive television programs as TLC’s “Toddlers and Tiaras” in a sarcastic manner, promoting them as to be taken literally.)

With 2.4 million Twitter followers of his own,Dan Bongino is the fourth-most popular verified Twitteraccount within the QAnon community, according to ADI. (He also claims more than 3 million followers of his public Facebook page.) On Feb. 14, a tweet with a link to his show appeared in a “Q drop.” The research group found that between Jan. 1 – Aug. 1, some 4,700 QAnon-related accounts either mentioned or retweeted (or both) tweets from Bongino’s account.

Bongino, radio personality and coauthor of “Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump,” is a favorite commentator of the president’s, who gifted Bongino with a blurb for his book:

‘Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump,’ is terrific. He’s tough, he’s smart, and he really gets it. His book is on sale now. I highly recommend!

—President of the United States, Donald J. Trump

In 2016, the president took to Twitter to declare his appreciation of Bongino, as chronicled by The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani, Asawin Suesbsaeng and Lachlan Markay.

With 1.1 million Twitter followers, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton is a top influencer in the hard-right realm. Dating back to 2016, Fitton, who helms a non-profit organization that takes in tens of millions in donations each year, has been flogging the main claim of “Spygate,” with allegations that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign on behalf of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, who is the top target of QAnon adherents. They want to see her executed.

Fitton has a knack for advancing exactly the kind of narrative that QAnon enthusiasts build upon. As far back as November 22, 2016, Fitton was calling on Trump to arrest the candidate who won more of the popular vote than he did. In fact, he claimed on Fox News that the Justice Department was “broken” for not having done so already.

In February 2017, Fitton took to the CPAC stage to claim that Michael Flynn—the retired general and Trump national security adviser who was fired after being accused of lying to Vice President Mike Pence regarding Flynn’s communications during the presidential transition phase with Sergey Kislyak, who was then Russia’s ambassador to the United States—had been done wrong. Flynn, it was learned, had been coaxing Kislyak not to respond to sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration in response to the federation’s intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential race—with the inference that the Trump administration would lift them once Trump was inaugurated.

Flynn himself is a QAnon buff,even recording a video of Flynn family members and the retired general himself reciting the QAnon slogan, “Where We Go One, We Go All.” (Julian Feeld of the investigative QAnon Anonymous podcast tweeted it here; CNN has the full video and some backstory here.)

Travis View, who hosts the QAnon Anonymous podcast, noticed this tweet from Fitton, who accused Facebook of “censoring QAnon” in its purges of QAnon-related accounts.

In the time period studied by ADI (Jan. 1 – Aug. 1, 2020), more than 39,000 QAnon-related accounts either mentioned or retweeted Fitton some 721,000 times. Those accounts, the research group says, remain active (as of September).

The president himself retweets Fitton or @JudicialWatch with some regularity. Tweets by Fitton have also been linked in at least three Q drops.

Charlie Kirk is another favorite of the president’s;Trump gave him a shout-out during a rambling speech he delivered at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor, Md. Kirk is said to be close to Donald Trump Jr., and a 2018 fundraiser Kirk held at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort, is reported to have reaped $5 million in a single night with the help of Trump Jr., according to ProPublica’s Mike Spies and Jack Pearson. “Over the last year, the president has delivered remarks at the organization’s conferences three separate times,” they write, also noting that Kirk’s book, “The MAGA Doctrine,” was promoted by both the president and Trump Jr.

Conceived as a right-wing presence on college campuses, Kirk’s Turning Point USA has become a full-on Trump-boosting organization. It is also a tax-exempt non-profit. For Kirk, the Trump train has proven to be a gravy train. At TPUSA’s 2012 founding, his annual salary was $27,000; he’s now paid $300,000, according to ProPublica. Kirk is 27 years old.

Among Twitter accounts that are part of the QAnon infrastructure, Kirk’s is the third most popular Twitter account, according to ADI. And, as of August, his account was following some 557 QAnon-related Twitter accounts. Kirk’s name and image appeared on a flyer for Q Con Live!, a QAnon conference that was to have taken place in Fresno, Calif., this month, but appears to have been canceled.

rww

> Twitter-verified MAGA Influencers Spreading the QAnon Gospel

October 26, 2020

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/internet-rips-wight-wing-radio-host-for-proving-he-doesnt-understand-4th-grade-math-with-idiotic-attack-on-dem-fundraising-site-actblue/

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/01/politics/anthony-fauci-security-detail/index.html

dr Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's top medical expert on the coronavirus pandemic and a member of President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force, is facing threats to his personal safety and now requires personal security from law enforcement at all times, including at his home, a source confirms to CNN.

A law enforcement official told CNN that the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General, the agency's law enforcement arm, asked the US Marshals Service for assistance following threats to Fauci. The Marshals then deputized HHS officers to act as personal security for the doctor.

The Washington Post first reportedthe threats to Fauci and the increased security.

A source also confirmed to CNN last week the presence of several members of the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department stationed at all times around Fauci's home in the district. The source added the stepped up visible police presence was a response to growing threats to Fauci's safety, though the source of the threats was not identified....

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ref nyt

After Threats, Anthony Fauci to Receive Enhanced Personal Security

Dr. Fauci has become a target of online conspiracy theorists after advocating social distancing rules.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, 79, is a longtime scientist and civil servant who has served presidents of both parties.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, 79, is a longtime scientist and civil servant who has served presidents of both parties.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Katie BennerMichael D. Shear

By Katie Benner and Michael D. Shear

April 1, 2020

WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, who has become a regular at President Trump’s coronavirus briefings, will receive enhanced personal security after receiving threats following his repeated pleas for Americans to help slow the spread of the deadly pandemic, officials said on Wednesday.

Dr. Fauci has been the Trump administration’s most outspoken advocate of social distancing rules that have shuttered the nation’s schools, forced businesses to close, kept people in their homes and battered the United States economy.

That has made him a target of online conspiracy theorists who have accused Dr. Fauci, a longtime scientist and civil servant who has served presidents of both parties, of trying to undermine Mr. Trump during a year in which the president is fighting for re-election.

The Department of Health and Human Services granted the enhanced personal security for Dr. Fauci, 79, after the Justice Department signed off on a request for extra agents to guard him, officials said. Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, had grown worried that the threats against the doctor were increasing as more of the country shut down in response to the coronavirus.

“Yesterday, upon the recommendation of the U.S. Marshals Service, the department approved the special deputization request from H.H.S. for nine H.H.S.-O.I.G. special agents to provide protective services for Dr. Fauci,” the Justice Department said in a statement, referring to the Office of the Inspector General at the health department. The Washington Post first reported the news of the enhanced security.

Caitlin Oakley, a spokeswoman for the health department, would not confirm Dr. Fauci’s enhanced security but called him “an integral part of the U.S. government’s response against Covid-19,” referring to the disease caused by the coronavirus.

“Among other efforts,” she added, “he is leading the development of a Covid-19 vaccine and he regularly appears at White House press briefings and media interviews.”

The coronavirus could kill 100,000 to more than 200,000 Americans in the coming weeks. Dr. Fauci, along with a fellow task force member, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, encouraged Mr. Trump to extend the amount of time that the country would remain shuttered through the end of this month. Some states, like Virginia, have issued stay-at-home orders that do not expire until further into the spring.

The idea that Dr. Fauci is responsible for the country’s hardship — and for whatever political damage Mr. Trump might suffer as a result — was fueled in part by a moment during a news briefing in which Dr. Fauci dropped his head and touched his forehead as the president was speaking. The image went viral online and right-wing supporters of Mr. Trump cited it as evidence that Dr. Fauci sought to undercut the president.

One anti-Fauci Twitter post last week said, “Sorry liberals but we don’t trust Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

The hashtag #FauciFraud has been used by more than 70 Twitter accounts, some posting hundreds of times a day, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Criticism of Dr. Fauci has also come from leading conservative voices and supporters of Mr. Trump, including Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group; Bill Mitchell, the host of the far-right online talk show “YourVoice America”; and Shiva Ayyadurai, who has falsely claimed to be the inventor of email.

But Mr. Trump himself has praised the doctor. During Wednesday’s briefing, when a reporter asked about Dr. Fauci’s personal security, the president said: “He doesn’t need security. Everybody loves him.”

In fact, Dr. Fauci has earned plaudits from many medical experts and public health officials for his often grim assessment of the threats facing the United States from the coronavirus — even sometimes contradicting the president’s rosier outlook.

For weeks, Dr. Fauci’s remarks on television and at the White House stood in sharp contrast to the commentary from Mr. Trump’s fiercest supporters on Fox News, whose leading hosts repeatedly claimed that Democrats, the news media and public health experts were inflating the threat of the virus.

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After the viral video of Dr. Fauci lowering his head, online attacks against him increased. A seven-year-old email that he wrote to an aide of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s was posted online by The American Thinker, a conservative blog. In the email, Dr. Fauci praised Mrs. Clinton for her stamina during hearings into the 2012 attacks on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya. The blog suggested falsely that the email proved that Dr. Fauci was part of a secret group who opposed Mr. Trump.

Ironically, in the past several days, the president has largely adopted Dr. Fauci’s more dire warnings about the dangers of the rapidly spreading virus. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump called it a “great national trial unlike any we have ever faced before” and echoed Dr. Fauci’s language about the need to minimize its spread.

“It’s a matter of life and death, frankly,” Mr. Trump said, offering a sober assessment of the pandemic’s effect. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

The Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: A Conversation With Dr. Anthony Fauci

“We are in a war. I mean, I actually think this is exactly what generals or leaders in real, you know, violent combat wars feel.”

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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/22/inside-fringe-internet-coronavirus-bubble-142960

for nearly two months, President Donald Trump downplayed the looming coronavirus threat before finally acknowledging the crisis at hand. But by the time the president shifted hisstance, many of his supporters on the fringes of the internet had already adopted—and amplified—his initial skepticism, framing the pandemic as just another flu bug or a liberal media hoax.

Now that the virus has circled the globe, killing thousands of people and crashing the stock market, what are these people, who live off a steady diet of perceived grievances and conspiracy theories, thinking? Are they, like Sean Hannity and other prominent Fox News hosts, no longer dismissing the novel virus as an overblown, politicized event, or are they steadfast in their denial—and even coming up with more fanciful theories as time goes on?

Given the dire situation, it seems worth knowing if the severity of the pandemic finally has penetrated the bubble of the most extreme coronavirus scoffers; if these people and their followers are ignoring safety measures because they believe the pandemic is a false flag to take away their guns or a Deep State plot to take down Trump, then they risk contributing to the disease’s spread. So, this past week, I created a faux Twitter account and set about building my own information bubble. My objective: Inhabit the world of far-right figures and conspiracy fanatics, survey the landscape and see where it leads me. I wanted to not just look into, but live in, the information universe seemingly giving comfort to people who want to believe this is all just an overreaction.

Initially, my guiding principle for choosing which accounts to follow was they had to have expressed skepticism about the seriousness of the virus and the need for an all-out response. I started by following a few highly trafficked personalities that I was already familiar with, such as pro-Trump acolytes Bill Mitchell and Sidney Powell, as well as Jordan Sather, a “professional shit stirrer” (as Rolling Stone put it) in the bizarre QAnon conspiracy movement, which holds that Trump is doing battle with nefarious Deep State forces.

Every time I punched in a new name, Twitter helpfully recommended like-minded souls to follow. I was served up names both less familiar (like a former CIA officer on a “mission to expose the Deep State/Shadow Government”) and very familiar (hello, LauraIngraham and Sebastian Gorka). Some of them occupied very different parts of the info-verse from each other, but they seemed united in the urge to defend the president and his handling of the crisis. I stopped adding to my bubble when it hit close to 70 accounts.

Over the week, I could see a clear line emerging between people who live within the conservative landscape broadly speaking—like Ingraham and Mike Huckabee, who can’t resist trolling liberals, but really aren’t questioning the risks of COVID at this point—and the people who’ve left the mainstream world behind for good. The former are looking for ways to pick holes in mainstream-media consensus and criticisms of the president, but they’re still reality-based. With the others, though, it’s impossible to imagine what combination of circumstances might pull them back to reality.

After spending long stretches in this fevered silo, I’m sorry to report that even a devastating pandemic can’t dent the human appetite for conspiracy ideation. Given the anxious, uncertain times we find ourselves in today, perhaps this is not surprising. Scholars say that people who feel a lack of control in their lives sometimes turn to conspiracies to help make sense of random, unfathomable events. “When disasters and tragedies take place, conspiracy theories may be more appealing—or less terrifying—than the reality of what has taken place,” Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan explained in an email.

That said, I was surprised to learn that some of the most notorious conspiracy promoters, likeInfowars’ Alex Jones, did not deny the severity and spread of coronavirus. (He is banned from Twitter, but people I followed managed to lead me to his website, where I could watch his streaming broadcast.) To be clear, Jones, who is notorious for erroneously suggesting that numerous mass shootings were staged, has not changed his ways; he is still spewing ridiculous conspiracies about the pandemic’s origins and impact.

Jones’ acknowledgement that the virus is more serious than an ordinary flu bug stands in contrast to some other far-right figures and QAnon promoters in my bubble who furiously argued otherwise—even after Trump’s own reality check. This divergence highlighted something else that struck me: just how many conspiracy narratives are being floated in response to the pandemic, as if they’re being tested to see which ones stick.

***

It was on Tuesday, March 17, hours after a White House press conference about the virus, that I launched my faux Twitter account. One of the first retweets that flashed across my laptop screen was from a libertarian activist (@erasethestate), who misleadinglycompared flu and coronavirus statistics, something Trump had previously done numerous times. But this was also the same day that the president shed his cavalier approach to the pandemic. Would coronavirus minimizers like @erasethestate take their cue from Trump and abandon that disingenuous tack?

Hardly. Bill Mitchell, a vocal Trump supporter with 547,000 followers, showed up often in my feed to bemoan thecoronavirus “fearporn.” He was emblematic of many in the far-right sphere of my bubble who faulted the media for “hyping” the pandemic. Mitchell, like @erasethestate, also frequently conflated the high number of flu deaths and hospitalizations with those for coronavirus—failing to mention that the latter is believed by medical authorities to be more contagious and lethal. It will be interesting to see when or if Mitchell ever revisits his obstinate stance, illustrated vividly in this tweet:

I don't care if I'm the last pundit on Earth saying the wild over-reaction to #COVID19 is bullsh*t, it's bullsh*t.

100%, pure grade A, solid gold bullsh*t.

History will agree with me.

2,356

9:34 AM - Mar 18, 2020

not everyone in my feed was as adamant as Mitchell. For example, Sara Carter, a Fox News contributor Twitter suggested to me, wanted to have it both ways on her podcast. “I don’t know if it’s just me,” she started out saying in a recent episode. “I almost feel like there’s this strange overreaction.” Then in the next breath, she noted, “Italy is really suffering,” before equivocating again: “We are overreacting, maybe for good reason, but there’s also this issue where it has been politicized.”

Carter’s fuzziness made it hard to understand where she stood. But to some extent, it’s understandable if some of her listeners and followers feel confused about what to think. If you’re obsessively following the outbreak news, watching the panic among real-world doctors, the anxiety of people watching their jobs and 401(k)s vanish, senior citizens and even 30-somethings struggling for life on ventilators, it can be infuriating to read tweet after tweet intimating that this isn’t a big deal at all. But if you haven’t been hit by the disease yet and don’t want to stay inside for the sake of people you’ve never met, there’s a measure of relief in occupying a world in which the situation is under control and the response has gone too far.

1.

While both MAGA types and QAnon enthusiasts in my bubble were suspicious about the pandemic and its root cause, they expressed different reasons. Mitchell intimated that the virus’ spread was a form of bioterrorism by China. Some in the QAnon crowd, seeing the rush to develop a vaccine to fight the virus, fingered profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies as the culprits. While he loathes Big Pharma, Jordan Sather blamed other black hats closer to home after seeing this tweet from Trump:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The world is at war with a hidden enemy. WE WILL WIN!

564K

12:31 PM - Mar 17, 2020]

most people likely understood that Trump was referring to a microscopic pathogen as the “hidden enemy.” But Satherdeciphered the real meaning on his YouTube show. “What could he mean?” Sather asked with a grin, as he stroked his chin. “I think you know exactly what he means. He’s talking about the Deep State cabal infecting our planet right now—quite obviously.” The QAnon movement—which spun off the deranged Pizzagate episode during the 2016 election—is obsessed with rooting out supposed Deep State actors and A-list pedophiles, who according to QAnon belief, control Hollywood and the real levers of government power.

When I was in my bubble, an anonymous, QAnon adherent alleged on Facebook that Oprah Winfrey was arrested for running a child sex ring. It was preposterous and easily debunked, but the rumor circulated so widely on the internet that Winfrey felt compelled to respond on Twitter. Even crazier, according to several news reports, the Facebook post alleged that other celebrities, such as Tom Hanks, had also been arrested, but that a covert intelligence operation triggered the coronavirus epidemic to distract the world from bringing them and a Satanic cabal to justice.

Toward the end of my time in the bubble, a retweet flashed across my laptop screen that contained a screen grab of something Alex Jones had said on his Infowars show. Jones helms a lucrative multi-media empire that has trafficked in outlandish conspiracies for two decades; he has been successfully sued by parents of Sandy Hook shooting victims for suggesting that the tragic event didn’t actually happen. After one of my followers tweeted a blurb from his show, I clicked on Jones’ livestream just as he was beginning of one of his trademark stream-of-consciousness monologues.

“The world is going into martial law,” he says in his raspy voice, playing off the travel restrictions that have been enacted to quell the pandemic. “Criminals, armed robbers, rapists, they are all being let out of jail by the tens of thousands.” Every word of this is false, of course, as is what he says a few minutes later: “If your neighbors sees you cough, you’re being taken away for six weeks. … This is how the West dies. This is how America dies, this is how it all unfolds.”

No wonder Jones isn’t denying the severity of the coronavirus; he’s using it to frighten his listeners witless—to his own advantage.

Wearing a blazer and sitting behind his faux TV studio in Austin, Texas, Jones broke off from his rants every 10 minutes or so to hawk his line of dietary supplements and other products. He sells everything from toothpaste and coffee (called “Wake Up America”) to sleeping aids (“Knock-out”). I tried to listen to two of his shows on consecutive days, but I couldn’t get very far in, especially after I heard him plug his supplements as a life and death necessity for people to survive the pandemic. “Folks, they want to train you to sit there and die in your house,” he said. “Get the boost you and your family need. A lot of stuff is selling out, a lot of stuff coming in. We have the supplements now. You better get your orders in. Do not wait.”

Agitated by his shamelessness, I slammed my laptop shut and reflected on the upside-down world I had created for myself on Twitter and YouTube. I felt unsettled by the realization that not even a monumental humanitarian crisis can keep some charlatans from exploiting people’s fears for profit.

If you want to hear that the virus is no big deal, maybe even fake, you don’t have to build your own bubble. Here’s your shortcut: At the moderate end, among the media-skeptic pro-Trump crowd, the virus is real and it’s scary, but so are liberal overreach, open borders, government spending, breathless public-health fearmongering and criticism of Trump. At the extreme end, let’s call it Full QAnon, the outbreak is engineered by Chinese scientists, Big Pharma or criminal celebrities, and may or may not be real.

This weekend, I peeked back at my Twitter bubble one last time to see if events on the ground had changed any of the hardened minds I’d been following for days. But everyone seemed ensconced in their altered or alternate realities. There was not a dent in the cocoon—for now

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expertise

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/this-researcher-wrote-the-book-on-presidential-failure-shes-never-see-anything-like-trumps

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-right-wing-coronavirus-deniers-want-to-kill-expertise-and-they-could-entice-trump-to-court-disaster/

no lnx

The right-wing coronavirus deniers want to kill expertise — and they could entice Trump to court disaster

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly March 31, 2020

Back in 2012, Donald Trump tweeted this:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

67.6K

12:15 PM - Nov 6, 2012

Twitter Ads info and privacy

109K people are talking about this

Paul Krugman is right to suggest that we might experience a bit of déjà vu when we watch how the president and his enablers are responding to the coronavirus.

Let me summarize the Trump administration/right-wing media view on the coronavirus: It’s a hoax, or anyway no big deal. Besides, trying to do anything about it would destroy the economy. And it’s China’s fault, which is why we should call it the “Chinese virus.”

Just as there are climate science deniers, there are a whole range of coronavirus deniers out there as well. They come in many different shapes and sizes, but the most common are those who simply deny the scope of the problem. While they accept that the virus exists, they tend to believe that Democrats, the media, or the “deep state” (pick your villain) are simply exaggerating the problem in order to make Trump look bad.

The more perverse of these folks started the Twitter hashtag, #FilmYourHospital. They take videos of the outside of hospitals and claim that the lack of activity indicates that the hype is all a hoax.

DeAnna Lorraine????

?

@DeAnna4Congress

Just went to 2 hospitals in LA to check out these “War Zones” the MSM keeps telling us about.??

They are very quiet & EMPTY.

We are not being told the truth. Why?? Let’s get #FilmYourHospital trending. We ARE the news now. We can’t trust the news. Post pics of ur hospital here!

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One of the most prominent coronavirus deniers is radio talk show host Bill Mitchell. His most recent schtick has been to rail against the “stay at home” orders being issued by governors.

Bill Mitchell

@mitchellvii

I promise you, when we granted Governors these emergency powers, no one envisioned them shutting down their state for months at a time and imposing martial law.

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But it was Mitchell who initiated the right wing attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci. It all started back on March 3rd.

Bill Mitchell

@mitchellvii

So this Dr. Anthony Fauci is pushing the panic button today.  Always helpful. Talking about closing schools and businesses?

Hell, why don't we just shut down the whole country over 104 sick, 6 dead?

Sorry President Trump, but replace this crackpot.

Almost immediately Fauci was accused of being a Democratic plant. The idea that he was a member of the so-called “deep state” took hold and eventually an email from Fauci surfaced among those that had been released by WikiLeaks. In it, the doctor had praised Hillary Clinton for her testimony before the House Benghazi Committee. Now the deniers were off to the races. They were soon doing the same thing to Dr. Deborah Birx.

Bill Mitchell

@mitchellvii

EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Birx's Connections with the Clinton Foundation and Obama Unfortunately Indicate Conflicted Loyaltieshttps://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/exclusive-dr-birxs-connections-with-the-clinton-foundation-and-obama-unfortunately-indicate-conflicted-loyalties/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=PostTopSharingButtons&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons …

EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Birx's Connections with the Clinton Foundation and Obama Unfortunately Indicate...

Is Dr. Deborah Birx, the doctor with the scarf, a voice of reason or another Deep State doctor pushing economic disaster and suffering? Her past unfortunately provides the answer. Dr. Deborah Birx...

thegatewaypundit.com

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Isaac Stanley-Becker makes the important point about all of this (emphasis mine).

[T]he disregard for expert guidance being pushed by some conservative and libertarian voices goes further — aimed not simply at proving Fauci wrong but at painting him as an agent of the “deep state” that Trump has vowed to dismantle. The smear campaign taking root online, and laying the groundwork for Trump to cast aside the experts on his own coronavirus task force, relies centrally on the idea that there is no expertise that rises above partisanship, and that everyone has an agenda.

This is something we’ve seen over and over again from right-wingers. Whenever someone says something they don’t like—especially if it challenges “dear leader”—all they have to do is find a remote connection to a Democrat (preferably Hillary Clinton), and the opposing opinion can be discarded as nothing more than partisanship. That is how the right is attempting to kill the whole notion of expertise—be it on anything from climate change to coronavirus. The mainstream media provides an assist to those efforts when they assume a “both sides” approach to every issue instead of prioritizing the truth.

Over the course of the last three months, Donald Trump has dallied in many of the opinions espoused by these coronavirus deniers. His decision to extend the guidelines calling for social distancing and other measures to mitigate the virus indicate that at this point, he’s still listening to the experts—even if it is merely for his own self-interest. But we’re not out of the woods yet. The deniers are waiting in the wings with their conspiracy theory guns loaded for the moment he grows impatient with the experts.

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impeachment?

Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson, a serial plagiarist, claimed the complaint has “no evidence,” is “unverified” and “uncorroborated,” and is being “used to launch a fraudulent investigation.”

Conservative radio host and QAnon supporter Bill Mitchell claimed that “this whole thing is hearsay” and addedthat “we are witnessing the end of the Democrat Party as we know it.”

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iheart.com › podcast › 105-behind-the-bastards-29236323 › qa...

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QAnon - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org › wiki › QAnon

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:{:{QAnon:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged "deep state" against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Lionel (radio personality) · ‎Q clearance · ‎Deep state in the United States · ‎Q (novel)

Inside the COVID-Denialist Internet Bubble - POLITICO

www.politico.com › inside-fringe-internet-coronavirus-bubble-142960

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Trump Superfan Bill Mitchell Raised Money to Move to D.C. ...

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Team Trump Wrestles With Its 2020 QAnon Problem

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:{Sep 12, 2019 - They love the president, and appear at Trump rallies in their favorite merch. Now believers in the mega-conspiracy theory are posing a ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Trump's Encouraging QAnon May Result in Violence—Just ...

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Bill Mitchell Sees 'No Downside' to the QAnon Conspiracy ...

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:{Aug 5, 2019 - On Friday's episode of his “YourVoice America” program, ardent pro-Trump commentator and right-wing conspiracy theorist :{Bill Mitchell:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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Here are the extremist figures going to the White House social ...

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:{Jul 9, 2019 - The Trump administration has invited multiple right-:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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