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CONSPIR 4

3/20 COVID

see alt fact Earth2

see stop the steal cyber ninja

see disinfo  2

see misinfo

see false flag = last phase?

prolly some neglect but follow filaments, so so many

aha: when real story/reality not acceptable, does not fit Story 1, rw must manufacture alternative fact/story = conspiracy eg (many )

antifa -->

https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmax-host-suggests-democrats-may-have-set-january-6-insurrection

booktv BS

JUNE 29, 2021

The War on Small Business

Former investment banker Carol Rothargued that government bureaucrats used the COVID*19 pandemic to crush small businesses and make Wall Street richer. This virtual event was hosted by the Pacific Research Institute in Pasadena, California.

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MCCARTHY AND SOME HSE SUPPORT

3 22

Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is at the center of controversy amid the discovery of incriminating text messages she sent as part of a scheme to overturn the presidential election.

Per The Daily Beast:

"In her messages, published Thursday by CBS News and the Washington Post, Thomas urged then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to look into the claims of Steve Pieczenik, a little-known conspiracy theorist whose ideas are often too crazy for even Alex Jones."

Now, details are emerging about Pieczenik, the far-right conspiracy theorist and so-called election fraud "guru" she embraced.

“If you believe what Steve Pieczenik has to say, you have completely lost all touch with reality,” said Jordan Holmes, a comedian who tracks the right-wing site InfoWars and its conservative guests, on his own podcast platform, Knowledge Fight.

Pieczenik reportedly has a long history of circulating false claims and often references his career working in the national security bureaucracy, including, The Beast reports "in classified positions, all of which makes it difficult to discern what’s true about his identity."

Although Pieczenik was known for his work back in the 1990s, his perspective appeared to have shifted drastically when he began making guest appearances on the conspiracy-drivenInfoWars platform. Holmes explained the extent of Pieczenik's rhetoric and how far he tends to veer from reality.

“Pieczenik goes on to hit the ball out of the fences every single time, which means he goes too far sometimes,” Holmes said. “And when that happens, he winds up getting put on the backburner for a little while."

The Beast political reporter Will Sommer noted: "His stories were so wild they even became too much for Jones. After he claimed the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 60 people was fake, for example, Jones appeared to temporarily block him from appearing on the outlet. All that has given him a reputation as a loose cannon even by the already outré standards of the InfoWars green room."

But despite his wild claims, this is the individual Thomas reportedly referenced when expressing her concerns about the outcome of the presidential election.

an 3 22

Conspiracy theorists in the United States and around the world appear to have anew obsession: the "New World Order."

Ever since Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, politicians and political pundits on cable have tossed about the phrase while predicting that Vladimir Putin's war, however it concludes, has reshaped the geopolitical landscape. In their shorthand, that equates to the dawning of a "new world order."

As Vice News points out, President Joe Biden name-checked the “new world order” conspiracy in a mid-March to the Business Roundtable. “Now is a time when things are shifting,” Biden said when asked about the United States’ response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.”

The “New World Order” is solidly ensconced in American conspiracy theory culture. To those who believe, those three words represent a multitude of dystopian horrors, such as forced depopulation programs, a secretive ruling class of reptiles and “elite globalists” on a satanic mission to bring about the “end times.”

References to the “New World Order” have been frequent on some of the large Telegram channels dedicated to the “freedom convoy” movement that started in Canada in January. “Ukraine falls, and it will, it is the end of the New World Order,” wrote someone on that Telegram channel. “Believe it or not, Putin is a white hat and working to take down Satanists, corruption, bioweapons sites, and the New World Order,” wrote another. “Mainstream media is not your friend.” “Vladimir Putin is a traitor to the NWO!” someone else wrote in another convoy channel. “That's why we like him.”

At least one far-right U.S. politician appears to buy into the theory. Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who was censured by her colleagues for participating in a white nationalist conference, recently listed the names of people she believes are part of “one big happy New World Order club.” Her list, shared to Telegram on Tuesday, included top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Mark Zuckerberg, the Clintons, and the Bush family. She also called the European Union “New World Order tyranny.”

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

no lnx twt

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

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

WRITTEN BY CYDNEY HARGIS

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 03/09/22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human Events’ Ian Miles Cheong:

Human Events’ Jack Posobiec:

Far-right conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich:

The Epoch Times’ Hans Mahncke:

Big League Politics:

Far-right commentator Chuck Callesto:

an 2 22 bill blum

...The political scientist Robert Paxton, one of the world’s leading authorities on fascism, has identified five stages of fascism:

  1. The initial creation of movements;
  1. The rooting of the movements in a political system;
  1. The acquisition of power;
  1. The exercise of power; and
  1. Radicalization or entropy, the stage at which movements reach their most extreme heights, or exhaust themselves and fizzle.

We are well beyond the first two phases. We flirted with the third and fourth during Trump’s first term, but our democratic institutions—weak and tattered as they are—were able to resist.

The election of Joe Biden offered only a temporary reprieve. Now, with Biden’s coalition fraying, the GOP and Trump have another opportunity to impose their will and vision, and deal a death blow to what remains of our diminished democracy.

As I have written before, fascism is a loaded term, but if used correctly, it aptly applies to Trumpism.

In his seminal study, “The Anatomy of Fascism” (Harvard University Press, 2004), Paxton offers an instructive definition:

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great Italian writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism:

As the current situation demonstrates, fascism is by no means a foreign phenomenon restricted to South American banana republics or failed European states. As University of London professor Sarah Churchwell explained in a June 22, 2020 essay published in the New York Review of Books, fascism has deep roots in the United States, spanning the decades from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s,the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues like Huey Long, and the election of Trump in 2016.

Churchwell’s article is aptly titled, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here.” In it, she offers another working definition of fascism, noting that while fascist movements differ from nation to nation, they are united by “conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared.” These include:

...

SEE UMBERTO ECO DEF OF FASCISM ON SCHIZO ENEMY:

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-ads-tucker-carlsons-hungary-vs-soros-documentary-have-been-viewed-millions-times

NO LNX PIX TWT

Facebook ads promoting Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization -- the season finale of Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation “documentary” series -- have garnered more than 5.2 million impressions.

A new Media Matters analysis has found that Fox Nation -- the streaming service for Fox News “superfans” -- has run at least 56 ads since January 27 promoting the episode, which relies on antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories to attack George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor. The ad data is not available through the Facebook Ad Library because Fox Nation isn’t running these promotions as political ads, which is the only type Facebook’s Ad Library archives or provides data for. However, external data from Pathmatics reveals that Fox Nation spent more than $48,000 on the ads, earning more than 5.2 million impressions.

Hungary vs. Soros is the latest installment in the “Tucker Carlson Originals” series, which has a shameful record of using shock and awe tactics to push antidemocratic propaganda. Despite Tucker Carlson’s white nationalist brand, the streaming service has heavily relied on the prime-time host to promote and grow the platform.

The “documentary” calls upon antisemitic stereotypes to demonize Soros and puff up the far-right nationalist government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has embraced authoritarian tactics and faces reelection in April. Carlson simultaneously pushes many of the same talking points about Soros that Orbán used in his 2018 election campaign. As my Media Matters colleague Nikki McCann Ramirez noted, Carlson portrays Soros in the series “as an insidious, unseen political kingmaker who seeks to destroy the national sovereignty of Hungary and transform its culture by leveraging his money and control of the media" against a backdrop of menacing synth chords and black and white images of Soros.

Facebook is allowing Fox Nation to run ads promoting Hungary vs. Soros despite its authoritarian and antisemitic undertones. In fact, Fox Nation has run at least 56 ads related to the episode, with at least 44 still active at the time of publication. (The other 12 ads are no longer shown in Facebook’s ad library.)

The ads, which have been seen millions of times by Facebook users, include one of four texts that attack Soros for “unchecked political power” and/or praise Orbán for being Soros’ “newest foe.” Additionally, all the ads link to Fox Nation’s website, where users can subscribe to watch it.

Fox Nation_Hungary vs. Soros_ads_2

Fox Nation_Hungary vs. Soros_ads_1

Some of the ads also include a promotional 15-second video of the episode.

CitationFrom the February 11, 2022, Facebook ad from Fox Nation

Before Fox Nation started running paid advertisements for Hungary vs. Soros, several Fox Facebook pages shared posts promoting it, including pages associated with The Five, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Fox Nation.

It was also repeatedly promoted on Fox News itself, not only on Carlson’s show, but also during his interviews on The Five and Fox & Friends.The Fox News website featured an ad for it on its homepage and published an article on the piece. Fox Nation also sent out a promotional email that said, “George Soros is waging cultural and political warfare on the West, but he’s met his match in Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.”

The right-wing fixation on Soros is a problem across the Fox brand. According to a transcript analysis from Kinetiq video database, Fox News mentioned “Soros” a total of 435 times between January 1, 2021, and February 8, 2022, with the coverage ramping up starting in November. With Facebook’s long history of profiting from the spread of harmful content, it is unsurprising that the platform is enabling the promotion of this production to millions.

this rachets up on builds on d'souza BS about how dems are predatory on POC AA?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/free-base-pipe/

no lnx vid twt?

Right-wing website made up viral fake claim Republicans like Marco Rubio are now pushing: report

[Marco Rubio embarrasses himself again by doubling down on false attack of defense secretary]

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement February 10, 2022

This week Republican lawmakers and voters have had a great time pushing a false claim that the Biden administration is spending tens of millions of dollars to pay for "free crack pipes" for drug abusers. The claim came from a report by the right-wing website Washington Free Beacon, including a quote falsely attributed to an HHS spokesperson, according to The Daily Beast.

It's no surprise The Daily Beast is calling "a lie" made its way to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. Senator's Twitter account.

"The Washington Free Beacon seemed to take a big leap to assert that free crack pipes would be part of a harm reduction package," The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberg reports, calling it "a lie rocketed around conservative media."

The report, published Monday and titled “Biden Admin To Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To Advance ‘Racial Equity,’” cited an HHS spokesperson as confirming that a sweeping harm reduction package “will provide pipes” to smoke, quote, “any illicit substance.”

The Free Beacon's article reads: “A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and ‘any illicit substance.’”

The Daily Beast reviewed the email chain between the Washington Free Beacon and HHS. It's unclear how the Free Beacon made the "any illicit substance" claim, given the HHS email specifically states no federal laws would be broken.

In fact, The Daily Beast reports the HHS spokesperson says the Free Beacon “omitted the information shared with him about the grantees needing to comply with federal, state, and local laws—the very language that would prohibit crack pipes.”

The damage has already been done. The "free crack pipes" claim is now one more myth in conservatives' false reality.

Arizona far-right Republican U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Lesko made the false claim on the floor of the House of Representatives:

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Florida Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, linking to an article literally titled: "Biden administration denies funding programs that hand out crack pipes to prevent infection and promote 'racial equity'" says in a video posted to his Twitter account, "The Biden administration is going to be sending crack pipes and meth pipes, targeting minority communities," a claim he knows is a lie.

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Fox News entertainers Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity both made the most of the claim, with The Daily Mail reporting: "Tucker Carlson slams policy to hand out free crack pipes and needles warning it 'will result in addicts shooting up on the streets.'"

The genie is out of the bottle, and no one on the right has any intention or desire to put it back.

an 1 22  https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/gretchen-carlson/

no lnx vid

Watch: Former Fox News anchor explains how network's viewers have been brainwashed into believing conspiracy theories

Meaghan Ellis January 28, 2022

Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson offered a damning assessment of the network as she explained just how bad its spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation has become.

During an appearance on the CNN segment, "Democracy in Peril," Carlson discussed many aspects of Fox News' critical role in the spread of misinformation and falsehoods. Since former President Donald Trump took office, conspiracy theories have been on the rise and Fox News has become a driving force for it.

Conservative primetime news anchor Tucker Carlson has been at the center of misinformation and the power of his opinion has begun to influence Republican members of Congress.

:{

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“This is the result of fake news,” Carlson said. “You know, we're seeing not only the fallout from fake news during the Trump era, but what happened with the insurrection on January 6th. Now it's moving into other areas. Not just news, now it’s hitting science with vaccines, and now it’s into Cold War politics.”

Carlson also touched on another significant topic as she shed light on the actions of herformer Fox News colleagues, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. While they reportedly sent pleas to the White House for the violence to stop on Jan. 6, they still put up a united front on-air and circulated a completely different narrative about the series of events that unfolded.

“I think the bigger story coming out of that is how disingenuous it was to be sending those texts of warning while then going on the air to the American people and doing a complete injustice and disservice by saying something completely opposite,” Carlson said, “and ginning up this whole reaction that it was just fine and patriotic for people to be there on January 6th.”

She went on to express concern about the journalistic state of her former network since the rise of Trump. Carlson also noted how conspiracy theories have become a fallacious replacement for opinion.

“Slowly but surely, this has morphed into eradicating any other point of view since the Trump era that is not just opinion,” Carlson said. “It's gone from an opinion, which was fine, to completely devolving into non-fact-based conspiracy theories and outright dangerous rhetoric, in my mind, and I think it’s a complete disservice to our country.”

Noting the dangers of biased journalism, Carlson explained how dangerous it is to only get information from one news source. She also stressed how imperative it is for Republican leaders and lawmakers to use their platforms to offer clarity regarding some of the dangerous false narratives perpetuated by Fox News.

“For the safety of the Republican Party and for our democracy, I wish more would, because this is not going to end well, in my mind,” Carlson said. “It's really hard to change people's opinions because they're only watching what they want to hear, you know? And that's the other problem that we have in society with the media right now, is that we're so siloed into only watching what we agree with. And so every day that thought process just gets reinforced time after time.”

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Carlson also conceded that conservative media has changed considerably over the last five years as there is no longer a clear line between opinion and conspiracy theory. “Conservative television news is certainly not the conservative news that was out there even just five years ago,” Carlson said, later adding, “There’s a big difference between having a conservative opinion and having one that supports conspiracy theories.”

SPYGATE DEUX

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/durham/ dismisses consp; wonder if that will damp dn fox

hannity on defam suit: bring it on [interesting // to Palin NYT?]

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/sean-hannity-on-hillary-clinton/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/fox-news-hillary-clinton/

fox played sp many x but cut coup plot

djt word salad

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/trump-2656686160/

badash ncrm an

In an “exclusive” Fox News interview Donald Trump, the failed, disgraced, one-term twice impeachedformer president, suggests he’s read the legal filing from John Durham,a special counsel secretly installed in 2020 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr, who revealed the attorney’s status weeks before resigning from office, just before the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Trump referred to him as “Robert Durham”in a statement when the news of the filing broke, and now is suggesting that he has both read the legal filing and predicted its contents “a long time ago.”

The problem is Fox News and many other far-right-wing media outlets, have gotten it wrong, mostly wrong, or all wrong.

==

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/maga-or-antifa-the-right-wing-war-for-control-of-the-insurrection-narrative/

no lnx many vids

MAGA or Antifa? The Right-Wing War for Control of the Insurrection Narrative

Kyle MantylaBy Kyle Mantyla | January 4, 2022

In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, a battle broke out for control of the narrative regarding the events of that day. The battle was not between the left and the right, but rather between varying factions of the right-wing movement, as a variety of MAGA activists sought to shape the narrative about what had unfolded at the Capitol. Would they take pride in the Trump loyalists storming the Capitol, or would they baselessly blame the insurrection on left-wing insurgents?

To objective outside observers, it was clear that supporters of former President Donald Trump had violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to intimidate members of Congress into refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Threats of violence had filled social media and calls for war and revolution were ubiquitous at right-wing rallies in the days and weeks leading up to Jan. 6. As such, it was no surprise when MAGA activists immediately began praising the “patriots” who stormed the Capitol in the days after Jan. 6.

For example, just two days after the insurrection, radical right-wing anti-Islam activist John Guandolo praised the insurrectionists for showing remarkable “restraint” by not summarily executing the “traitors” in Congress.

A few days later, Guandolo asserted that those who condemned the insurrection were “enemies of the republic” and should be “swinging from a rope because these are traitors to the country.”

QAnon conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine was equally proud of the “patriots” who ransacked the Capitol. Lorraine, who had been covering the Jan. 6 events for radical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars network, filed a report on her way back to Texas in which she gushed that she had “never felt more pride in my heart and soul than yesterday.”

Lorraine lashed out at those in the MAGA movement who were already trying to distance themselves from the insurrection by falsely blaming the attack on the Capitol on left-wing activists. “No one should be blaming antifa for what happened,” Lorraine said. “American patriots did this. And it’s a good thing. It’s not a bad thing.”

Likewise, Brandon Straka, a speaker at the Jan. 5 so-called Stop the Steal rally who has since pleaded guilty to joining the mob storming the Capitol, took to Twitter on Jan. 6 to shame conservatives who weren’t supporting “freedom loving Patriots” storming the Capitol.

“Be embarrassed & hide if you need to- but I was there. It was not Antifa at the Capitol. It was freedom loving Patriots who were DESPERATE to fight for the final hope of our Republic because literally nobody cares about them. Everyone else can denounce them. I will not,” Straka wrote on Twitter, according to a criminal complaint.

Not everyone agreed with Lorraine and Straka’s assessment. Even as Trump loyalists fought Capitol police, right-wing conspiracy theorists like Lin Wood and Mark Burns took to various social media platforms to claim that “antifa”—conservatives’ shorthand for anti-fascist activists—was behind the attack. Fox News personality Laura Ingraham—whom the House select committee revealed to have pleaded with Trump’s chief of staff to get Trump to tell his supporters to go home on Jan. 6—went on her show in the hours following the attack to claim “antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson echoed similar messages.

Perhaps nobody better illustrates the “blame antifa” camp than former Rep. Michele Bachmann. Just hours after the insurrection, Bachmann was baselessly declaring those who breached security and ran loose through the Capitol were actually left-wing “rabble-rousers paid to put together a coup.”

In the following weeks, Bachmann repeatedly insisted that the attack on the Capitol was actually carried out by “the progressive left.”

“It is my opinion that this was a theatrical event that the progressive left put on,” Bachmann said. “The individuals who were the instigators, who brought this about, these were agitators brought in to create this problem. I believe it was specifically done to rebrand Donald Trump as being an insurrectionist and a leader of a terrorist movement. I also believe that this was done to rebrand the Make America Great agenda—because remember, that was considered extremely popular by about 80 million Americans—so they wanted to rebrand Make America Great as an evil thing and those of us who supported Donald Trump and that agenda as evil and terrorists.”

By July, Bachmann was claiming that MAGA activists had nothing to do with the events of Jan. 6 and that left-wing activists dressed in black clothing had been bused in to attack the Capitol.

“There were some bad actors who had climbed up … and they actually were pounding on the glass,” Bachmann claimed. “Now, a normal person doesn’t do that. A normal person would never think to pound on the glass. I’ve seen the videotape of the first 14 people who went into the building. They were all dressed in black. They look like they’d been trained as warriors, the people who went in. This was clearly a planned event; that was not the Trump supporters who were around the building. What my conclusion was on-site is that this was nothing short of a coup.”

Despite the initial elation experienced by many MAGA activists in the wake of the insurrection and the endless praise for the “patriots” who had carried it out, the right-wing narrative about the events of Jan. 6 eventually solidified once the reality of the situation began to set in. As hundreds of Trump-loving activists began to face arrest and conviction stemming from their actions on that day and the disgrace the insurrection began to stain the MAGA movement, parts of Trump’s base and the former president himself collectively embraced the baseless belief that the entire thing had been a “false flag” orchestrated by left-wing groups.

So complete has the collective brainwashing been that even those who had initially celebrated the attack on the Capitol reversed course.

John Guandolo, who initially praised the insurrectionists for showing remarkable “restraint” by not summarily executing the “traitors” in Congress, now claims that he was outside the Capitol during the events on Jan. 6 and saw “several busloads” of “antifa people and non-patriot hostiles” mixing with the crowd and entering the Capitol.

“It makes you wonder what is actually going on,” Guandolo said. “We know what’s going on. What happened on Jan. 6 was the surrender of the republic and the takeover of the republic.”

John Guandolo | ReAwaken America Tour Dallas

Likewise, DeAnna Lorraine, who was on the ground at the Capitol during the insurrection and initially declared that she could not have been prouder about what happened, completely changed her tune and began insisting that the insurrection was a “false flag” operation set up to “trap” Trump supporters and provide justification for their persecution.

Lorraine eventually so thoroughly repudiated her initial support for the “patriots” who carried out insurrection that she ultimately began spreading a conspiracy theory that police officers who had been in the Capitol that day—several of whom have since died from suicide—were being murdered by the “deep state” to cover up the truth about the events of Jan. 6.

A new NPR/Ipsos poll released Monday shows how deeply this narrative has burrowed its way into the public’s beliefs.. According to the poll, nearly one-third of Republicans falsely say the attack on the Capitol was carried out by “opponents of Donald Trump, including antifa and government agents.”

Of course, this entire narrative shift regarding the events of Jan. 6 raises the question of why MAGA and the GOP have been intractably opposed to the efforts by the House select committee to investigate the attack. After all, if Jan. 6 was nothing but a “false flag” operation carried out by left-wing operatives for the purpose of discrediting Trump and his supporters, wouldn’t Trump and his supporters want that truth to be exposed?

Tags: Brandon StrakaDeAnna LorraineJohn GuandoloMichele BachmannCapitol Insurrection

an 1 22

 Utah-based technology company’s founder and chairman who is also a big GOP donor is falsely :{claiming the highly-effective COVID-19 vaccines are part of:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{ a plot by “the Jews”:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: to “euthanize the American people,” while insisting to a local reporter, “Some of my closest friends are Jews.”

David Bateman, who founded Entrata, a property management technology company, sent the email title “GENOCIDE” to fellow tech company CEOs and to political leaders including the Governor of Utah. Some subsequently shared it with Fox 13. Bateman has admitted to sending the message, while claiming he “loves” Jewish people.

“I write this email knowing that many of you will think I’m crazy after reading it. I believe there is a sadistic effort underway to euthanize the American people. It’s obvious now. It’s undeniable, yet no one is doing anything. Everyone is discounting their own judgment, and dismissing their intuition,” Bateman wrote in his email, Fox 13 reports.

The missive gets wildly antisemitic and conspiratorial.

==

12 21 an salon

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.

nice pix sign: evil vaccine agenda]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/personality-traits/

ME

a new study explains how a number of dark personality traits are connected to the ideology of conspiracy theories. According to PsyPost, a study recently published by Personality and Individual Differences was conducted by Sara Hughes and Laura Machan. It indicates that "Machiavellianism, primary psychopathy, and collective narcissism" are traits that appear to coincide with the beliefs of those who buy into conspiracy theories.

Science Direct reports that the study, which focused on 406 participants from the United Kingdom, was based on an assessment of a number of personality measures. It also delved into individuals' "susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs and the mediating role of Covid related conspiracy beliefs on links between personality and intentional dissemination of Covid-19 conspiracies and willingness to obtain a Covid-19 vaccine."

The study focused on the characteristics of those who possess the dark triad traits and how they have a tendency to hold more hostility toward other groups. Participants completed a questionnaire to assess conspiracist ideation where they had the opportunity to provide their opinions with answers like: "There is no hard evidence that COVID really exists."

"To assess intention to be vaccinated against Covid-19, participants were asked what they would do if a vaccine were tested and approved and they had the opportunity to be vaccinated next week," the study indicates.

READ: 'You were gullible': Federal judge torches Trump's election lies — and a rioter who believed them]

Per PsyPost, their findings indicate the following:

"Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and collective narcissism have been previously linked to conspiracy mentality. Machiavellianism is concerned with the strategic manipulation of others. Primary psychopathy is characterized by callousness and lack of emotion, while secondary psychopathy is characterized by impulsivity and antisociality. Collective narcissism refers to an inflated sense of superiority extending to one's in-group."

Their research also highlights three potential limitations.

"First, rather than obtaining behavioral measures, participants were prompted to provide self-report ratings of their intentions to disseminate COVID-19 conspiracies. Second, given participants' knowledge relating to COVID-19 was not assessed, it could be the case that those with greater beliefs in Covid-19 conspiracies were lacking in factual knowledge. Lastly, given the cross-sectional nature of this work, the researchers do not make causal inferences about their findings."

11 21 an

at Fox News, far-right opinion host Tucker Carlson has not only been a supporter of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán and promoted the racist, anti-Semitic Great Replacement theory — he has also been an apologist for the insurrectionists who violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6 in the hope of stopping Congress from certifying now-President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over then-President Donald Trump. And Carlson's coverage of January 6 is so beyond the pale that two conservative journalists, according to National Public Radio, have left Fox News because of it.

Those conservatives, NPR's David Folkenflik reports, are Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes. Goldberg is known his years as a National Review editor.And Hayes was with the now-defunct Weekly Standard, whose Bill Kristol started The Bulwark with fellow Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes following the Standard's demise.

"Two long-time conservative Fox News commentators have resigned in protest of what they call a pattern of incendiary and fabricated claims by the network's opinion hosts in support of former President Donald Trump. In separate interviews with NPR, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg pointed to a breaking point earlier this month: network star Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the January 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol that relied on fabrications andconspiracy theories to exonerate the Trump supporters who participated in the attack."

Goldberg and Hayes, Folkenflik notes, became "mainstays" of Bret Baier's "Special Report" when Fox News hired them in 2009. And together, Goldberg and Hayes started the conservative website The Dispatch.

Goldberg, interviewed by NPR, said of "Patriot Purge," Carlson's three-part series, "It's basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country, and this is the War on Terror 2.0. It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That, for me and for Steve, was the last straw."

Speaking to NPR, Hayes was vehemently critical of Fox News for airing promotional videos for Carlson's "Patriot Purge" series.

"I thought it was irresponsible to put that out into the public airwaves," Hayes told NPR. "The trailer (for the series) basically gave people the impression that the U.S. government was coming after all patriots — half of the country, in the word of one of the protagonists in the piece. And that the federal government was going to be using the tools and tactics that it used to go after Al-Qaida. And that's not happening. That's not true."

Hayes continued, "It's a narrative that's contradicted by certainly the vast collection of legal documents charging those who participated in January 6, the broad reporting by a wide variety of news outlets on what happened on January 6 then and in the time since — andcontradicted in part by Fox News' own news site and the reporting that people on the news side have done."

READ:Trump lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election gets named to US Election Assistance Commission cleta

Goldberg also told NPR,"Being a Fox contributor is kind of a brass ring in conservative and right-wing circles, and I was well-compensated. I'm not looking to be a martyr or ask for pity or any of that kind of stuff. But it's a significant financial hit, for sure.And it's also cutting yourself off from a very large audience. We don't regret the decision, but we found it regrettable that we had to make the decision."

kraken spec ops rescue haspel? 11 21 trms

jkf and jr dallas numerology prophet fail/punt 3x?

11 21

no lnx twt pix

QAnon MAGA cult refuses to leave Dallas after JFK Jr. no-show

Walter Einenkel and Daily Kos November 09, 2021

On Nov. 22, 1963, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Many people believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, who was arrested and charged with Kennedy's murder, was not the only person involved in the assassination. Since that time there have been myriad conspiracy theories that run the gamut from a belief that director of the CIA Allen Dulles colluded with organized crime and Lyndon B. Johnson to get rid of Kennedy to the idea that JFK faked his own assassination in order to better fight against some shadowy New World Order from below the radar of the public eye.

The one consistent touchstone in most, if not all, JFK conspiracy theories is that Kennedy himself (and his brother Robert) were creating giant upheavals in the established order of the U.S. government. It is the belief that the Kennedys represented a light in the dark and shadowy world of true power and elitism that drives the conspiracy theory's staying power. At the beginning of November, QAnon Trumpists descended on Dallas and Dealey Plaza under the impression that one of the many Q-conspiracy theories would be realized: the resurrection of John F. Kennedy, or at the very least the resurrection of his son, John K. Kennedy Jr., who died in 1999 in a plane crash off of Martha's Vineyard. The MAGA-conspiracists went down to Dealey Plaza on Nov. 2 with the assumption that something big was going to be revealed. It wasn't.

They don't care. They're staying.

Reporter Steven Monacelli and VICE reporter David Gilbert have been following this QAnon crew in Dallas, and found that they've been led by an antisemitic QAnon activist, Michael Brian Protzman, to the grassy knoll in downtown Dallas for a reappearance of one of the deceased Kennedys. And while nothing happened to support the wild conservative Christian eschatological theories on JFK and/or JFK Jr. anointing Donald Trump the "king of kings," their belief in Protzman has not wavered.

But unlike most influencers, Protzman has effectively built a cult within the QAnon movement, where his followers refer to him as a godlike figure, are willing to travel across the country to see JFK resurrected, and most of all, continue to praise Protzman even when the miracle fails to materialize.

His rise within the QAnon world has been rapid. Back in March, his Negative48 Telegram channel had around 1,700 members; today, it has over 105,000 members. But aside from the number of followers Protzman has, what makes him stand out from other QAnon influencers is the loyalty and worship he has engendered in those people.

According to VICE, Protzman has promoted content to his audience like thefilm Europa: The Last Battle, which purports to explain how Jews created communism and orchestrated both World War I and its sequel, World War II, in order to get Israel created at the expense of the Nazis. True story. Anyways, this asshat has also been able to take advantage of the fact that President Joe Biden recently delayed the public release and declassification of thousands of remaining government documents related to the JFK assassination, which has not helped. Of course, the fact that Donald Trump first delayed the release of these documents in 2017 does not seem to have registered with this MAGA-adjacent QAnon crowd.

The motivations for the assassination in all of these conspiracy theories lead to the same the thing: the protection of a secret world power establishment. In these theories, whether Kennedy's death allows the escalation of war into Vietnam and Cambodia or it is simply the outgrowth of a sexual jealousy between Kennedy and organized crime boss Santos Trafficante is immaterial in the end. The important thing to understand is that in the end, the government and other secret establishment officials covered up the "truth" about the Kennedy assassination in order to protect their world order.

This unbelievably general and truly unsophisticated view of global power dynamics is at the center of these cult-level conspiracy theories. Are you ready for this? Hold on to your socks!

And after JFK Jr. didn't appear at the site of his father's assassination, QAnoners moved their goal post to the Rolling Stones concert that was In town. The irony that these QAnon folks are heading to see a rock and roll group that openly hates Donald Trump is lost on them, of course. In fact, it almost wouldn't be a story about QAnon if the logic wasn't so truly wrong-headed.

Guess what? They totally saw all kinds of people you thought were dead, including Michael Jackson, Prince, and Aaliyah. Plus, these QAnon music fans saw the original not dead musician, Elvis!

Sounds like a truly amazing concert. The most important thing to realize here is that while this sect of QAnon seems to be a bit more acutely delusional in their views of reality than maybe other QAnon conspiracists who are a little more shrewd in how openly ridiculous their theories are in practice, the results are the same: The concert these QAnon folks went to was a lot more exciting than the concert that the rest of the people enjoying the Rolling Stones saw.

And that's the point.

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also false flag

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-promotes-his-revisionist-january-6-special-interviewing-writer-who

:{ Carlson promotes his revisionist January 6 special by interviewing a writer who called a DC police officer a crisis actor:(style="box-sizing:border-box;fill:#ffffff;"):}:

11/02/21 9:02 AM EDT

11 21 an

CNN's Jake Tapper on Monday expressed astonishment at a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that found most Republican voters believe the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

While discussing the report, Tapper brought on PRRI CEO Robert P. Jones and asked him to comment on why white evangelical Christians are the only major religious group in the country that believes Trump actually won the election.

"They're all in for Trump," he said. "They believe this... this is a religion that not that long ago talked about itself as the moral values of the country, that kind of, 'turn the other cheek,' and all that stuff. And yet here we are, a major mainstream religion that's been all in for Trump, and we have among those whobelieve the election was stolen, which is most of them, nearly 4 in 10 saying they can imagine it being justified to resort to violence."

Tapper then turned to some of the even wilder conspiracy theories that a significant minority of Americans believe.

"One in six believe that the U.S. government is controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking operation," Tapper said. "I mean, what?"

"I know," Jones replied. "Let me tell you, as a social scientist, I never thought I'd be in a position of actually writing that question."

badash n c r m

an 10 21

stuart Stevens is calling out News Corp founder and chief Rupert Murdoch as a "domestic threat" in response to a stunning preview clip from Fox News' top personality, Tucker Carlson, that falsely paints Donald Trump's January 6 insurrection as a false flag operation by Democrats.

"If Rupert Murdoch were applying for American citizenship today, there would be ample evidence to classify him as a domestic threat and deny citizenship," Stevens says of Murdoch, an Australian-born naturalized U.S. citizen. "He's a dangerous man who should be treated as the anti-democratic propagandist he is."

Stevens is known as one of the top Republican strategists who became a never-Trumper and co-founded The Lincoln Project. Murdoch owns News Corp, the parent company of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, and numerous other outlets across the globe. He became a U.S. citizen in 1985 to meet the requirements to purchase and own TV stations.

The clip of Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the January 6 insurrection (below) is being called "fucking insane" by fellow never-Trumper Tim Miller, a former GOP strategist.

"I'd like to focus in on the fact that Fox is hosting one of the main architects of the Stop The Steal insurrection Ali Akbar Alexander for this 1/6 special," Miller adds. "Going full Newsmax."

In a scathing strike against Carlson, former Obama HUD deputy assistant secretary Brandon Friedman compared the Fox News personality to a radio station**known for helping to incite the Rwandan genocide**in which more than one million people died and up to half a million women were raped.

Here's the clip, which is loaded with falsehoods and anti-American, anti-democracy propaganda:

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.

1021 an

According to New Hampshire Public Radio, New Hampshire GOP state Rep. Ken Weyler is now facing bipartisan calls to be stripped of leadership — including from GOP Gov. Chris Sununu. According to the accusations, the state house Finance Committee chairman circulated a series of bizarre COVID-19 conspiracy theories laced with attacks on the Catholic church.

"Sununu's statement comes after Weyler, 79, emailed colleagues materials full of COVID conspiracy theories, including a discredited, false report that claims COVID deaths are driven by a plot orchestrated out of Vatican City, Washington D.C. and London," reported Josh Rogers. "'It's all one huge puppet theatre, where the majority of the people — even most of those who are complicit — haven't got the slightest clue what is going on, and how everyone is being played,' the report states. Among other false claims, the report says some COVID vaccines include 'living organism(s) with tentacles.'"

According to WMUR's Adam Sexton, Weyler also called the Catholic church a "criminal network" full of "Satanists" and "Luciferians" dabbling in "dark ancient spiritual practices."

Weyler also spread COVID-19 conspiracy theories in a hearing in September, where he flatly refused to believe the state health commissioner's data that 90 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state were unvaccinated.

"Rep. Mary Jane Wallner, the ranking Democrat on the House Finance Committee, also criticized Weyler in a statement," said the report. "'The continued dissemination of disinformation on COVID from Rep. Weyler is a danger to public health in New Hampshire and to the credibility of the legislature as a whole,' she said."

no lnx vid

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/murdochs-want-tucker-carlsons-blood-soaked-conspiracy-theories

The Murdochs want Tucker Carlson’s blood-soaked conspiracy theories

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 09/23/21

Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show is a toxic combination of Infowars-style conspiracy theories and Stormfront-esque xenophobia because that’s what network founder Rupert Murdoch, parent company CEO Lachlan Murdoch, and network CEO Suzanne Scott want in their 8 p.m. hour. Fox executives keep making excuses for Carlson’s malignant commentary, he correctly interprets their defenses as a green light to be ever more extreme, and all the other stakeholders in the network are willing to go along with it. 

Amid a gleefully dishonest Wednesday night screed, Carlson accused Democrats of wanting “to change the racial mix of the country” through immigration, adding, “This policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.” That is, in fact, what white supremacists call that conspiracy theory.

Video file

CitationFrom the September 22, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

When Carlson similarly claimed in April that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the Third World,” the Anti-Defamation League called for his firing, with ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt noting in a letter to Scott that Carlson was invoking a “classic white supremacist trope” that has “lit the fuse in explosive hate crimes.” But Lachlan Murdoch sent a letter in response claiming that Carlson had actually “decried and rejected replacement theory” and been simply talking about voting rights. Carlson responded by putting the “great replacement” theory at the center of his show, creeping closer and closer to the line until last night’s broadcast, which definitively destroyed Murdoch’s defense.

Fox’s response thus far has been to promote Carlson’s latest invocation of the bigoted conspiracy theory his boss had previously claimed he rejected.

Also on Wednesday, Carlson hosted a guest, Navy Cmdr J.H. Furman, who suggested that the vaccines for COVID-19 might be more dangerous than the virus that causes it. Furman has written a memo arguing that mandating the COVID-19 vaccines “may compromise U.S. national security due to the unknown extent of serious vaccine complications,” which was picked up by right-wing media outlets. During his appearance, he told Carlson’s audience that the coronavirus “has a harm rate, or a mortality rate of 0.001%. Compare that with the VAERS harm rate where COVID vaccination harm over the last 20 months has taken almost half of the total harm's totals in the VAERS database, the 20-years long VAERS database.”

Video file

CitationFrom the September 22, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

In May, Carlson began promoting the lie that thousands of Americans have died in the “single deadliest mass vaccination event in modern history,” citing data from VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. When journalists debunked his claim, noting that VAERS data is publicly sourced without verification,Lachlan Murdochstood by him, falsely claiming that Carlson was saying “nothing the CDC itself isn’t saying.” Carlson’s program has continued peddling the VAERS falsehood ever since as part of what seems like his single-minded devotion to limit vaccinations. His campaign, and that of his right-wing media colleagues, has had devastating consequences.

The Murdochs or Scott could have stepped in after Carlson started parroting blood-soaked white supremacist conspiracy theories or lying to his viewers about the safety and effectiveness of a safe, effective vaccine that Rupert Murdoch and more than 90% of Fox full-time employees have apparently taken. But this is the kind of network that they want to run, so they’ve made him its face.

There’s no signal from the Fox Corp. board, including former House Speaker Paul Ryan, that the network should change course. And chief political anchor Bret Baier and the rest of Fox’s “news” division seem content to look the other way and continue cashing their paychecks.

omfg

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/biden-trump/

A recent Washington demonstration supporting those charged with crimes for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol fizzled, with no more than 200 demonstrators showing up. The organizers had promised 700 people would turn out – or more.

But the threat from far-right insurrectionists is not over.

For months, my colleagues and I at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats have been tracking insurrectionist sentiments in U.S. adults, most recently in surveys in June. We have found that 47 million American adults – nearly 1 in 5 – agree with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president." Of those, 21 million also agree that “use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency."

Our survey found that many of these 21 million people with insurrectionist sentiments have the capacity for violent mobilization. At least 7 million of them already own a gun, and at least 3 million have served in the U.S. military and so have lethal skills. Of those 21 million, 6 million said they supported right-wing militias and extremist groups, and 1 million said they are themselves or personally know a member of such a group, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.

Only a small percentage of people who hold extremist views ever actually commit acts of violence, but our findings reveal how many Americans hold views that could turn them toward insurrection.

A solid survey

[method grfx]

extreme beliefs

This polling found that 9% of American adults say they agree with the statement that “Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency." And 25% of adults either strongly or somewhat agree with the statement that “The 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president."

Overall, 8% of the survey participants share both of those views.

The margin of error of this survey was plus or minus 4 percentage points. So when calculating the number of the 258 million adult Americans who hold these views, we looked at the range of between 4% and 12% – which gave us between 10 million and 31 million. The best single figure is the middle of that range, 21 million.

People who said force is justified to restore Trump were consistent in their insurrectionist sentiments: Of them, 90% also see Biden as illegitimate, and 68% also think force may be needed to preserve America's traditional way of life.

The fringe moving into the mainstream

Combined with their military experience, gun ownership and connections to extremist groups and militias, this signals the existence of significant mainstream support in America for a violent insurrection.

This group of 21 million who agree both that force is justified to restore Trump and that Biden is an illegitimate president has two additional views that are also on the fringes of mainstream society:

Some people with insurrectionist sentiments hold one of these political views but not the other, suggesting there are multiple ways of thinking that lead a person toward the insurrectionist movement.

Broader support

This latest research reinforces our previous findings, that the Jan. 6 insurrection represents a far more mainstream movement than earlier instances of right-wing extremism across the country. Those events, mostly limited to white supremacist and militia groups, saw more than 100 individuals arrested from 2015 to 2020. But just 14% of those arrested for their actions on Jan. 6 are members of those groups. More than half are business owners or middle-aged white-collar professionals, and only 7% are unemployed.

There is no way to say for sure when – or even whether – these insurrectionists will take action. On Jan. 6, it took clear direction from Donald Trump and other political leaders to turn these dangerous sentiments into a violent reality. But the movement itself is larger and more complex than many people might like to think.

Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science, **University of Chicago**

see Qanon

domestic violence FBI

https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/420379775-fbi-conspiracy-theories-domestic-extremism.pdf p, dl 720

vax is never ending fever swamp howard stern BB reverse psych not NOT VAC, //

921 ah

Fox News' Tucker Carlson has a new conspiracy theory about the United States armed forces and COVID-19 vaccine. On Monday, September 20, Carlson voiced his disapproval about the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. According to Carlson, the vaccine mandate appear to be an attempt to rid the armed forces of individuals who do not share President Joe Biden's political views.

On Tucker Carlson Tonight, the primetime host also criticized U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin's order requiring all active-duty members to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19.

"The memo directs the Secretaries of the Military Departments to immediately begin full vaccination of all members of the Armed Forces under DoD authority on active duty or in the Ready Reserve, including the National Guard, who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19," the August 25 release said.

Carlson argues that the order is "specifically designed to separate the obedient from the free."

"Can't have any of the latter category," Carlson said as he described vaccination as a "political purity test" being incorporated despite "zero scientific basis."

The Fox host also attempted to push back against the military's vaccination requirement arguing that most service members are "young healthy people" who have an "extremely low risk of dying from COVID."

"The point of mandatory vaccination is to identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anyone else who does not love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately," Carlson said. "It's a takeover of the U.S. Military."

i forgot that he came out of MMA. cf BTB

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/ivermectin-conspiracy-theories/

Proponents of ivermectin as a treatment for covid are now in damage-control mode after a series of stories about people overdosing on horse paste and sheep drench from feed stores.

Such luminaries as Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Brett Weinstein and United States Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) stoked demand for the dewormer, only to have the craze blow up in the faces when the ginned-up demand outstripped the pharmaceutical supply and people started self-medicating with horse paste.

The zeal of the ivermectin prophets was self-defeating. The whole point of being an Ivermectin Guy is that you can indulge in antivaxx conspiracy theories while sounding smarter than the Microchip Guys. That's why they get so mad when you call it "horse paste."

Internet tough guy Joe Rogan will have you know that the ivermectin he (supposedly) took for his (supposed) covid was (supposedly) from a doctor. "Bro, do I have to sue CNN?" Rogan grumbled. "They're making shit up. They keep saying I'm taking horse dewormer." It's an image thing: Rooting for Team Horse Paste pushes you over the line from "bold independent thinker" to "utter crackpot."

The Basic Ivermectin Conspiracy Theory goes like this: There's a cheap cure for covid butBig Pharma doesn't want you to have it, because it's a generic drug. A more elaborate version, shared by the host of the aptly-named Dark Horse podcast on Tucker Carlson's show, posits that the government is refusing to acknowledge ivermectin as a safe and effective treatment for covid because to do so would somehow undercut the Emergency Use Authorizations for covid vaccines.

This makes no sense, given the government is funding an ivermectin trial. But it's not about the logic. It's about feeding the anti-vaxx fantasy that vaccine mandates will evaporate if we go all in on ivermectin. Human prescriptions for ivermectin soared from fewer than 4,000 a week pre-pandemic to nearly 90,000 a week in August.

Surging demand has caused shortages in pharmacies and feed stores alike. Docs and vets worry the fad will keep the drug out of the hands and off the hides of the creatures who really need it.

The hype beasts of the Intellectual Dark Web dangle a miracle cure in front of their credulous audience and pretend to be shocked when they hit up the feed store. Ivermectin boosters know that ethical doctors won't prescribe ivermectin for covid because there's no evidence it's a safe or effective against the virus. Indeed, the American Medical Association strongly advises against prescribing ivermectin for covid outside of a clinical trial.[so does mfgr]

Ivermectin kills the covid virus in a Petri dish, but only at concentrations that will never be matched in the human body — even if you take enough to choke a horse. The most famous clinical trial purporting to show benefit in humans waswithdrawn after it was determined the authors plagiarized the text from pro-ivermectin press releases and fabricated their data.The data are so implausible some experts question whether the trialever happened. Pro-ivermectin trials have a funny habit of appearing as pre-prints making fantastical claims before being retracted amid allegations of fraud or conflict of interest.

Ivermectin has a good safety record when it's prescribed by a doctor or a vet to treat parasites, but ivermectin-related calls to the nation's poison control centers have quintupled, because people are guesstimating doses of livestock meds. It's a fool's game. No safe or effective dosage has been established for covid because there's no good evidence it works. Ivermectin partisans are always reminding us that some guys won a Nobel Prize for using ivermectin to treat something else. They're showing their ignorance of medicine. The drug, the dose, and the diagnosis actually matter.

However, the real harm of the ivermectin craze is not the relatively rare—though completely pointless—horse paste ODs. It's the much larger group of people who are using ivermectin as an excuse not to get vaccinated, whether they're currently taking the drug or not. If you're on the fence about vaccination, the myth that ivermectin cures covid makes it easier to skip your shot.

Some pundits have chided irreverent commentators for poking fun at people who eschew a free, safe and effective vaccine and pay for animal drugs that won't cure covid. Americans aren't eating horse paste because it's a noble rural tradition to self-medicate from the tractor supply. Grifters played on people's hopes for a quick covid fix and their fear of vaccines, and now their fans are paying the price.

BS trifecta:

an 721

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) suggested on Sunday that Joe Biden's administration may use "computer-generated graphics" to fake the president's speeches.

Nunes made the remarks during an appearance on Fox News after he was asked about Biden's performance at a recent CNN town hall event.

"You know it's getting bad when the propaganda machine that the Democratic socialists control in this country -- they control 95% of the media or so," he opined. "And then you take the big tech oligarchs that control and censor what we receive via social media. When that poison gets to the average independent American, that propaganda, you know it's bad when they can't even find a 15- or 30-second soundbite out of a full-hour town hall that they can plug into their own propaganda machine."

Nunes added: "I mean, it's getting really bad. It's not just the president. They can't get any soundbites from the vice president either."

The Republican lawmaker claimed that deep state actors are "almost to the point where they're going to have to start using computer-generated graphics in order to give to the propaganda machine because they can't get good clips to sell what they're trying to sell here in Washington, which are policies that are running the country into the ground."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

morph/meld memes?

also some wacko zip tied principal for masks, does not have kids (at that school?]

mask and vax meld?

921 NO LNX an

Seminole County, Florida school board has been holding a marathon meeting on masks, which started Thursday at 8:30 AM, and is still going on after nearly nine hours. While there were many anti-science extremists, one parent's speech stood out.

A man who identified himself as Jeff James declared "there are more variants planned," the vaccine is "not a vaccine it's an experimental drug," called mask mandates "charades," and falsely claimed that "masks don't work."

"Masks are pretty much a device to enslave children, make them obedient,so they just learn to obey and not think for themselves. We need critical thinking. We don't need children that are going to be little puppets that don't say anything to speak out for themselves. We need leaders not followers."

But James did not stop there.

"The deep state medical establishmentwants all of us to be depopulated," he declared, before announcing his support for far right wing doctors whose anti-vaxx and science denialism have been repeatedly debunked. "I know you guys think that's a conspiracy theory but it's not. It's a conspiracy fact, they're all in cahoots with each other, to depopulate us, they want us divided. They want all of us to fight each other so they can win," he said, without actually explaining who "they" are....

see soc media bias BS

Unhinged' GOP congressman claims Google 'absolutely' changed its algorithm to 'move 15 million votes' to Biden

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

July 09, 2021

**U.S. Rep Ken Buck** (R-CO) says Google flipped 15 million votes away from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Buck last year, on tape, as the chair of the Colorado GOP, allegedly tried "pressuring an El Paso County GOP official to falsify election results in the State Senate District 10 race."

"Google, by the way, changed its algorithm, in ...

tucker // jnz

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/cnn-infowars/

gOP's Jim Jordan outraged after DOJ refuses to investigate bizarre Italian space laser election fraud theory

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/jim-jordan-2653413213/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/wuhan-lab-leak/

an salon

Last month, seemingly spurred on by this column from a controversial former science reporter for The New York Times, it became suddenly fashionable in some journalistic circles to scold the mainstream press for dismissing or ignoring something called the "lab leak theory" regarding the origins of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

To be sure, the possibility that the coronavirus was released in a lab accident in Wuhan, China, has never been fully discounted by the scientific establishment but long treated as less likely than that it emerged from a purely natural origin. Still, led by Matt Yglesias from his (sigh) Substack blog, a narrative started to form in May that the mainstream media was deliberately ignoring a scientifically valid hypothesis because of a, heaven help us, bias against conservatives. Otherwise reputable opinion writerslike Jonathan Chait of New York, eager to demonstrate that they are Not Biased© and Care About Hearing All Sides©, took up the mantle, scolding the mainstream press for supposedly dismissing the "lab leak hypothesis" out of hand, simply because Donald Trump and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., were fond of it.

The scolding worked.

As Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review wrote earlier this month, "we've seen a gusher of opinion essays in the same vein, indicting the mainstream press and prominent experts for characterizing a plausible hypothesis as a conspiracy theory for essentially political reasons." This, in turn, resulted in a slew "of news articles asserting that the lab-leak theory has 'gone mainstream,' and is getting a 'second look.'" Here at Salon, we addressed the sudden surge of interest in this theory by highlighting the basic reality: Scientists do not think it's likely, plus there is no new evidence that would suggest that it's become any more likely than it was before the pearl-clutching about "bias" began. Soon, however, President Joe Biden gave in to the pressure and ordered an intelligence investigation into the theory.

The problem with all this moralizing about "bias," however, is that the original reason that the media wasn't doing more to hype the "lab leak" hypothesis had little to do with politics and everything to do with science. As science educator Rebecca Watson explained in a video responding to the controversy last week, "There is currently no evidence that COVID-19 originated in a lab. None." And, as Justin Ling of Foreign Policy argued Tuesday, "Despite proclamations to the contrary, there has been scant new, hard evidence pointing to the lab leak theory," and, in fact, the hype around the idea is literally "just speculation."

Indeed, the finger-waggers had it backwards. The media isn't biased against the right but biased in favor of the right.

If it weren't for conservative pressure, there would probably be no substantive media interest the "lab leak" hypothesis. Typically, news outlets are loathed to publish speculation that emerges from fringe conspiracy theory boards that have offered little in the way of real evidence for their claims. But when the conspiracy theorists are politically motivated right-wingers, they tend to get more of a media hearing than say, Bigfoot enthusiasts.

Wednesday morning, the "why won't the media do more to indulge this evidence-free right-wing speculation" crowd got egg on their face with a new report from the Washington Postthat wreaked havoc on claims that the "lab leak hypothesis" failed to get a fair hearing. On the contrary, there has been "an ongoing, sometimes politicized and so far fruitless effort inside the U.S. government to determine whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, could be the result of engineering or a lab leak."

The report documents an extensive hunt for evidence of the "lab leak" theory throughout the federal government. Much of it driven by Donald Trump's desire to blame someone else, ideally China, to divert attention from his own failures. But more responsible actors in the federal government, including prominent health officials like Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci also gave the "lab leak" hypothesis a good deal of time and attention. But while the White House was heavily pressuring every bureaucrat in sight to give them something, anything, they could use to push this "lab leak" hypothesis, the evidence simply wasn't there.

The report doesn't completely rule out the possibility of a lab leak, to be clear. But it is a reminder that it was incredibly irresponsible of mainstream media to hype an unevidenced theory simply to prove they aren't "biased" towards Republican actors like Cotton, Trump, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, people who have proven time and again that they will lie through their teeth for political gain.

The people with unsavory political motivations in this situation are not journalists who hesitated to run stories about a theory that has no real evidence to support it. It's Trump and his Republican enablers who, as Lindsay Beyerstein of Alternet explains, feel that if they "can convince his supporters that COVID is China's fault, they'll forget the parts that were his fault."

Attention journalists: The way to avoid political bias in media is to, well, avoid political bias. Which means avoiding giving life to poorly evidenced ideas, simply because they're being hyped by the right. What happened instead is that the press gave into right-wing bullying. In doing so, the press ignored the usual journalistic standards for weighing facts and evidence. Now it's likely most Americans have heard more about lab leaks than they have about the far more plausible theory that the coronavirus pandemic emerged from nature.

To make it all worse, the hyping of the "lab leak" hypothesis meant politely ignoring the fact that Trump, Cotton, and Pompeo were winking at an even less plausible conspiracy theory that holds that China deliberately manufactured the coronavirus as a bioweapon. People who have heard this bioweapon conspiracy theory and see headlines or cable news chryons touting the "lab leak" theory will assume that's what is being discussed, and assume that it's now been proved. And once that kind of misinformation is out there, it's pretty hard to claw it back.

A lot of critics who accused the media of ignoring the "lab leak" hypothesis claim to be interested in putting facts before political bias. They worry that mainstream journalists are disregarding good information simply because the sources are conservative or even because they have a history of lying. (As if credibility isn't an important consideration in sourcing information!)

But what this debacle shows is that the mainstream media has the opposite problem. They all too often give in to Republican bullying and allow themselves to be used as conduits for right-wing disinformation campaigns. Yes, prioritizing truth over politics often leads to news stories that have a "liberal" feel to them. That's because the American right is wholly committed to lying and disinformation. But journalism should put reality before the tender feelings of lying right-wingers. Especially when it comes to scientific disputes where we all supposedly agree it would be better if politics were kept out of it.

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an 621 igor salon

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., is returning to her QAnon roots to push a conspiracy theory suggesting that the Clintons may be behind the death of a journalist who is believed to have died by suicide.

Boebert suggested on Twitter that the "Clinton Crime Syndicate" may be behind the death of local Alabama news anchor Christopher Sign, who broke the story about former President Bill Clinton's tarmac meeting with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch during the 2016 presidential campaign and FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, which itself has been the target of countless Republican conspiracy theories. Local police have given no indications of foul play in Sign's death and told NBC News that the death is being investigated as a suicide.

"Why is it that so many who cross the Clinton Crime Syndicate end up dead?" Boebert tweeted along with a clip of Sign promoting his book about the meeting during a 2019 interview on Fox News. Sign said in the interview that he left his job in Phoenix to move back to Alabama because he and his family "received significant death threats shortly after breaking this story." [twt vid?]

it's not the first time Boebert has pushed conspiracy theories about Clinton. Asked during a town hall in March about whether Hillary Clinton and the former heads of the CIA and FBI would be arrested, the freshman congresswoman echoed QAnon-style conspiracy theories claiming that "with that information that I have, I believe we will see resignations begin to take place and I think we can take back the majority in the House and the Senate before 2022 when all of this is ended."

Boebert has previously expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory but denies being a follower. QAnon conspiracy theories have long targeted Clinton, baselessly alleging that she is part of a globalist child trafficking ring that cuts the faces off babies and wears them on video.

Donald Trump Jr., who has a long history of spreading conspiracy theories himself, also suggested that Sign's suicide may be some nefarious plot.

"Has anyone ever seen so many suicide coincidences EVER???" he wrote on Instagram while sharing a screenshot of a headline about Sign's death.

Trump Jr. similarly pushed long-debunked conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed in Washington D.C. in what police suspected to be an attempted robbery. Conservatives pushed conspiracy theories that Rich was killed because he was somehow connected to the release of stolen Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign. The conspiracy theories were also promoted on Fox News, which ultimately retracted its reporting and settled out of court with Rich's family.

Debunked conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons' "body count" date back to Bill Clinton's days in the White House, when right-wingers claimed that many of those connected to the Clinton's had died under "suspicious" circumstances even when they hadn't. Many have focused on the suicide of Vince Foster, Clinton's former deputy White House counsel who died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head in 1993. Multiple investigations, including the infamous Ken Starr probe, concluded that the death was a suicide but Republicans like Trump Jr. have continued to refer to in the decades since. Former President Donald Trump and others renewed the conspiracy theory in 2019 after the suicide of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump shared tweets alleging that the Clintons, longtime associates of Epstein, were behind his death even though Trump also frequently hung out with the disgraced financier.

"This conspiracy just sort of hung around," Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami professor and author of the book, "American Conspiracy Theories," told NBC News. "Mainly because the Clintons have been in power for so long and because she's the most recent face of the Democratic Party. She's a good boogeyman for Republicans to use now still."

Uscinski said the conspiracy theory has become especially popular with "QAnon" followers, who have gone even further than the nutty conservative claims in the 1990s.

"Q also absurdly implied that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible for the tragic plane crash that killed JFK Jr. in 1999," Travis View, a podcaster who tracks QAnon, told NBC. "A minority sect of QAnon followers believe that Clinton merely tried and failed to kill JFK Jr, and he is still alive today."

Clinton recently responded to the decades-old conspiracy theories in a video with "Borat" star Sasha Baron Cohen."It's hurtful, I'll be really honest with you," she said. "It's hurtful not just to me and my family, but, you know, to my friends, and other people who know that this is not just false, but you know, sometimes painfully false."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/scientists-lab-leak/

==

aha: conspiracy is magical thinking ghost dance, at least in trumpista quanon phase, fear, hype, polarization

see also primary election as ampl fdbk

aha note amplif;  big lie stop steal are ghost dance, magical thinking that will restore the dear leader to rightful place and //quanin banish the evil-doers?

sparked by:

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/end-of-enlightenment/

common dr robt freeman

The Enlightenment was a time of intellectual ferment in the Western world following the Middle Ages. Its ideas gave birth to the modern world.

We know the Enlightenment from the names of its most brilliant expositors: Francis Bacon, John Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and others. We know its ideas as the foundation of our social world: the social contract, the rule of reason, the rule of law, consent of the governed, natural rights, constitutionalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, and others.

The Republican agenda is a direct assault on all of that. It literally aims to return America to the pre-modern, pre-Enlightened darkness of the Middle Ages. If it succeeds, it will reverse more than three hundred years of human progress.

The most egregious of Republican assaults on the modern world is its rejection of Reason. Reason is the way we know what we know. It is not through revelations from God, or the pronouncements of priests or monarchs as had been the case before the Enlightenment.

Reason as a process for discovering Truth started in the Scientific Revolution around 1550. It was so powerful a way of knowing the physical world, the philosophers of the Enlightenment adopted it for knowing—and improving—the social world. It became the foundation of all subsequent Enlightenment thought, and all modern institutions.

The Republican broadside against Reason was on display in the first days of the Trump administration when Trump asserted that his inauguration crowd size was the largest in history. Presented with facts to the contrary, in photographic evidence, his assistant, Kellyanne Conway, proclaimed the existence of "alternative facts." It's been downhill since.

Republican discourse is a never-ending torrent of lies, idiocies, and absurdities—the very antithesis of Reason. The Muslim invasion. The caravan bringing murderers, rapists, drugs, and disease. Democrats eating babies. A satanic cult of pedophiles running the "Deep State." A pandemic that would "disappear, like a miracle." The greatest economy in the history of the world. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head being canceled. Biden's hamburger ban. A rigged election. Massive voter fraud. Terrorists who were really just tourists handing out hugs and kisses. It never ends.

The Republican assault on Reason is an attack not just on truth itself, but on our very capacity to think at all. With their base, Republicans address not the neo-cortex—the thinking part of the brain—but the amygdala—the lizard-brain seat of fight-or-flight. The amygdala subordinates logic, facts, reason, and deliberation to deceit, conspiracy, hysteria, and fear.

It's easier to trigger hatred and fear than thinking and logic. That's why Republicans do it. That's why their base—and increasingly, their "leaders"—sound like zombies, like robots, like members of a cult when they're interviewed for the evening news. They are. They've been programmed to fear and hate and blame, and the reinforcement is unending, [feedback? amplif?] because, to work, it has to be. Otherwise, they become unprogrammed.

It doesn't matter that none of the endless effusion of lies ever turn out to be true or that they are routinely, repeatedly abandoned in favor of newer lies for the next news cycle. What matters is that the lies incite indignation, and that the dopamine high that follows gets its constant, programmed, ever-increasing reinforcement.

Trump's 35,000 documented lies are the embodiment of it all.It is a leprous, insidious disease, an inability to deal with reality, but literally the one by which Republicans define themselves. Glandular excretions are the Republican formula for generating voter turnout: inciting Pavlovian rage based on a torrential fantasmia of lurid lies. It works, but it is the living, suppurating antithesis of Reason.

Another Republican assault on the legacy of the Enlightenment is the attack on Democracy. It was John Locke who, in 1689, wrote that people who were able to think could not be bullied like ignorant people could. If government wanted thinking people's cooperation it could no longer rely on the medieval divine right of kings. It needed to obtain "the consent of the governed." This, of course, became a sacrament of the American political order.

The opening words of the Constitution are, "We the people of the United States…" That is not a paean to monarchy, or to dictatorship. It is a statement that the consent of the people—and only that consent—provides a government its legitimacy. But Republicans are working feverishly to overturn the consent of the governed, to destroy Democracy.

Their assault on the Capitol on January 6th was the most conspicuous effort to overthrow the legitimately elected government of the United States but it was not the first and will certainly not be the last.Republicans insist that their reason-denying mobs, their goons, their Brownshirts will tell the rest of us how we will be governed. No consent involved, only submission: ours. You can see this in their fevered efforts at voter suppression, explicitly preventing majority rule and the consent of the governed.

Republicans cannot win power on the strength of their ideas and policies. They lost the presidency, the Senate, and the House. Large majorities favor policies backed by Democrats. So, they need to destroy Democracy itself to gain power. To do that, they need to destroy Reason as the way we know what we know. That is the core, the essence, the modus operandi of the Republican enterprise.

Constitutionalism is a third Enlightenment ideal that Republicans are intent on destroying. A constitution defines how a country is to be governed. Before constitutions, it was autocracy that called the shots. Think of Louis XIV's notorious declaration: "I am the state." Decisions were made by caprice, by the rich and powerful, in their own interests, everyone else be damned. Constitutionalism embeds the Rule of Law—another Enlightenment ideal—into a society, making "equal treatment under the law" a modern treasure, however badly it may be realized.

Besides losing all of the branches of the federal government, Republicans failed over and over and over to persuade the judicial branch to sanction their usurpation of the Constitution. So, they resort to performative charades like the farcical ballot laundering farrago in Arizona to try to undo the Constitutionally-ordained process for the peaceful transfer of power. Now, they're taking it to other states. It will not end.

We could go on. Republicans want to destroy the social contract—another Enlightenment ideal—that says you get ahead on the basis of hard work. They insist, instead, that privilege should be based on race, with the best spots reserved for whites. This violates the Enlightenment ideal of equality for all.

Remember the opening words of the Declaration of Independence? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Pure Enlightenment. In the Republican world, however, like in Orwell's Animal Farm which was an allegory of the degradation of Soviet totalitarianism, all men are created equal, but some—whites—are more equal than others.

We should be clear. This is not about peripheral protests over policy preferences. It is a broadside against the foundation, the institutional undergirding of our civilization. It is an attempt to destroy the conceptual milieu that has survived for centuries and that, however flawed it may be, has delivered the greatest freedom, expansion of rights, material progress, and human opportunity the world has ever known.

The measure of our alarm should be that Republicans, with the help of a complicit media, have managed to normalize rampant public lying, the unrestrained desecration of Reason, are carrying out an open, unabashed attack on our democracy, are carrying out notorious, savage assaults on Constitutionalism, the Rule of Law, Equality, and more. Our nation is literally under attack by anti-Enlightenment zealots determined to tear it down and it's not at all clear that they will not succeed.

It is indicative that the Republican party's highest priest is a thrice-married pathological liar, an admitted sexual assaulter, a draft dodger, a six-time filer for bankruptcy, a man who inflicted hundreds of thousands of excess deaths on the country, was twice impeached, who lost two successive popular vote counts, and who then attempted to overthrow the government. Read that sentence again and think about its implication.

The Republican hero, the man they model themselves on, the one they want us to bow down to, is a failed business man, a failed reality TV star, a failed president, a career con man who is the most corrupt, certainly the most craven and creepy individual ever known to American politics. This is the best Republicans have to offer. That is who they are, and what they insist on inflicting on all the rest of us, our consent be damned.

The Enlightenment helped the world replace monarchy with republicanism, a world ruled by theology with a world of science, autocracy with the rule of law, aristocratic privilege with the equality of all men, and feudalism with capitalism. No matter how imperfectly it may have been realized, it was as noble a vision as human beings have ever devised. The two worlds are the difference between the "Dark Ages" that went before and the modern world. That is the Republicans' promise to America.

More regression. More destruction of beautiful ideals and noble institutions. More degradation of deserving people. More humiliation of undignified people, themselves being the examples. More carnage. More chaos. More slime spewed on everyone.

There's not a syllable of inspiring vision in anything they have to say, not a word of uplifting ideals in any of it. It is all pathetic self-victimization and a lust for vengeance against those who refuse to respect them. We must all be dragged into the sewer that spawned, that is, and that sustains Donald Trump. That is his and Republicans' retaliation against a people who once had the temerity to believe in majestic ideals, the audacity to strive for them, and who once imagined that they might even be worthy of them.

an ah 521

...:

"In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election," Steakin explains, "a sprawling collection of Trump loyalists, fueled by a host of baseless conspiracies involving disproven claims of widespread voter fraud, failed over and over again to overturn the election results in the courts. And while the effort resulted in dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits, many of the same Trump supporters — from a former Overstock.com CEO to longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon — have reemerged as key forces boosting the Republican-backed Arizona audit of the 2020 election results. The audit, which comes after two previous audits found no evidence of fraud sufficient to invalidate President Joe Biden's victory in Arizona and Maricopa County, has not only commandeered the attention of the MAGA movement, but also, of Trump himself, who has continued to push false claims that the 2020 election was stolen."

The former Overstock CEO that Steakin refers to is Patrick Byrne, who has been aggressively fundraising from the audit and claims to have raised $2.8 million. And Byrne, Steakin notes, "claims to have donated at least $500,000 of his own money to fund the audit."

Another far-right GOP conspiracy theorist who has been promoting the Maricopa County audit farce is attorney Lin Wood, who encouraged Trump to declare martial law following the 2020 election. Wood is an ally of Cyber Ninjas founder Doug Logan, another far-right Trumpista who pushed the Big Lie following the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, Bannon — former White House chief strategist in the Trump Administration and ex-chairman of Breitbart News — has been promoting the Maricopa County audit on his "War Room" podcast, where he has claimed that the audit "is going to lead to Georgia, and it's going to lead to Michigan."

Steven Slugocki, former chairman of the Maricopa County Democratic Party, has slammed the audit as a farce but stressed that it is a profitable farce. Slugocki told ABC News, "There are some people that are making a lot of money on this — and unfortunately, it's coming at the cost of our elections. They don't have Donald Trump anymore to lead them on social media; they're looking for content, they're looking for ways to engage the people who believe this election was stolen, and they're raising money off of it. It's turned into even more of a circus than anybody could have imagine."

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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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:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: 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 Thursday:{_{:{Daily Mail article:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: 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:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Boebert. "Why doesn't Joe stay out of my kitchen?"

"Not gonna happen in Texas!" Gov. Abbott :{_{:{tweeted:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, with a screenshot of Kudlow's broadcast. 

Greene, posting a picture of Biden eating a hamburger with others a table, :{_{:{echoed:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:: "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:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, 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:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, 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.

MORE FROM JON SKOLNIK 

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/violent-extremists-are-being-radicalized-by-fox-news-former-neo-nazi/

no lnx

On Saturday, March 6, CNN's Pamela Brown interviewedformer neo-Nazi Frank Meeink — who warned, during the interview, that Fox News is helping to radicalize far-right extremists by saying the types of things he used to say.

Meeink told Brown, "We have to know that a lot of our fellow Americans, fellow children of God, have been radicalized by a network of news that, as a former radical, I can tell you — from watching Fox News all day — I can show you where they're saying radical stuff that I used to say…. Where I would say 'Jews,' they say 'big media.' They swapped out a couple of words here and there, but it's still just radicalization. So, that's where we have to look. It's Fox News."

Meeink abandoned White supremacist ideology after going to prison and now lectures against it. In 2010, Meeink's book, "Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead: The Frank Meeink Story," was published — and he has testified before Congress about far-right extremism.

During the CNN interview, Brown showed a clip of FBI Director Christopher Wray warning, "January 6 was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and is not going away anytime soon. At the FBI, we've been sounding the alarm on it for a number of years now."

Reformed skinhead, Frank Meeink, said on CNN tonight that Fox "News" is radicalizing many white viewers, turning th… https://t.co/PEDDMlB5vt

— Joseph Barri (@Joseph Barri) On January 6 — two weeks before President Joe Biden's inauguration — a mob of violent far-right extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in the hope of preventing Congress from certifying his Electoral College victory. The extremists included QAnon supporters, members of the Proud Boys, White nationalists, and members of various militia groups. Some of the extremists who stormed the Capitol Building were calling for the murder of then-Vice President Mike Pence, who they believed had betrayed then-President Donald Trump by not being able to prevent Congress from ratifying the 2020 election results.

Meeink, who grew up in South Philadelphia, became active in White supremacist and neo-Nazi groups in the early 1990s. These days, however, Meeink lectures against racism and is an avowed supporter of Black Lives Matter.

During the CNN interview, Brown asked Meeink if he considered QAnon a "domestic terrorist threat" — and he responded, "Absolutely. The neo-Nazi stuff that I belonged to is manifested in the QAnon, in the Proud Boys…. When I see what I used to be, I see it in QAnon — I see it in the Proud Boys. Racism always just recycles itself. You know, we can't be the KKK anymore; so, they can't be neo-Nazi anymore. Now, they are Proud Boys. It's remarketing hate."

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Gang of young Marines and an ex-porn star moved to Idaho to ... ›

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CPAC veers into neo-Nazi fantasy — was it deliberate? - Alternet.org ›

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lots of analysis 321 an; meme remix? prphet/profit grift for non xian?  ghost dance?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/trump/

salon

Lorie Laddgazes into the camera with glossy eyes, a look that mimics the long stare one gets after meditating. She's about to give one of her sermons, one of the "most challenging" ones she's ever had to make, she explains. Ladd says she's received a message that needs to be shared from "higher dimensional consciousnesses," what she refers to as the "Galactic Federation of Light." But before revealing the message, Ladd, a self-described "ascension teacher," advises her viewers to shed the stereotypes that have been "programmed" into them — "polarities," she calls them, like "Democrat" and "Republican" — and listen to her message: Donald Trump is a "massive and powerful lightworker."

"To say that I was shocked was an understatement," Ladd tells her nearly 139,000 YouTube followers of her revelation. "I have been digesting information from my guides about what this lightworker in human form looking like Donald Trump has been doing for the human collective; this man has more charge around him than any other human on the planet right now."

Ladd goes on to explain that her video isn't a "political one," but a "consciousness one," and that she's not talking about "voting," but "ascension." Trump, as she explains in the next half hour, is here to help assist humans in what many in the New Age and spiritual communities refer to as a great "awakening" of consciousness. The idea behind the awakening is that human consciousness is approaching a "fifth dimension," which will eventually bring humans closer to the "Source."

A lightworker, as defined by well-being magazine Happiness, is someone who feels "an enormous pull towards helping others." The term, they say, can be interchangeable with "crystal babies," "indigos," "Earth angels" and "star seeds"; "these spiritual beings volunteer to act as a beacon for the Earth, and commit to serving humanity," the story continues. The magazine states that the term was first coined by the New Age author Michael Mirdad.

This rhetoric might sound cultish, but these phrases don't belong to any one specific religious sect. Indeed, such belief systems are part of a larger, more diffuse New Age culture embraced by the ever-increasing number of Americans leaving organized religion in droves — or who were never religious in the first place — and turning to conspirituality by way of many self-described spiritual and wellness influencers online.

Conspirituality, the term that defines this movement, was coined by researcher Charlotte Ward. She describes conspirituality as "a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews." There is no official indoctrination video, no book to read; the hundreds of thousands of people who embrace these New Age-like beliefs find them on YouTube vlogs like Ladd's, as well as Instagram and Facebook. Recently, conspiritualists have begun to overlap with the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon.

This notion that Trump is a lightworker shares obvious parallels with the belief, held by some evangelicals, that Trump is comparable to Jesus; similarly, some QAnon followers believe that Trump is the "world leader" whose mission is to "save the children."

Yet what makes the lightworker theory especially odd is that it has emerged from a demographic that would have previously been described as apolitical, or even far-left.

However, as the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol showed, QAnon and Trump adherents are no longer just middle-aged, conservative white men like the Republican Party of yore. Many of those who embrace right-wing fringe beliefs are yogis, and love-and-light types, too. Take Jake Angeli for example, the so-called "QAnon Shaman" who donned a horned hat and spear-tipped American flag as he stormed the Capitol building on January 6. The 33-year-old, who identifies as having "shamanistic" beliefs, was recently granted the right to be fed an all-organic diet in jail in line with his religious practice.

Ladd's declaration that Trump was a lightworker sent shockwaves through conspiritual and self-help communities. (Salon reached out to Ladd for comment, but did not receive a response.) Some spirituality and consciousness bloggers vehemently disagreed. But many influential figures in the community thought Ladd was onto something, including Christiane Northrup, a physician and best-selling author who has been spreading anti-vaccination rhetoric and has embraced QAnon.

Matthew Remski, a co-host of the Conspirituality podcast and a cult dynamics researcher, described Northrup as a "conspirituality aggregator" who feeds what she finds most interesting to her followers, of which she has many.

"What I think is really brilliant about this particular iteration of QAnon — or 'soft' or 'pastel Q,' you could call it — is that it's really effective at evading content moderation," Remski said. "To only really say something positive about the person who's at the head of QAnon mythology and sort of soft-pedal all of the aggression and triumph that is going to be involved in his mission is a really good way of brand-washing QAnon for the wellness set."

Indeed, while social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have suspended many accounts sharing QAnon-related disinformation, the wellness influencers remain. Dr. Ronald Purser, a professor of management at San Francisco State University and the author of "McMindfulness," said that in uncertain times, societies see a rise of "occultures," meaning "groups of people who are attracted to strange occult and esoteric ideas, mixing them in unforeseen ways with political movements."

"A common theme in such movements is the need for purification, purifying and purging unwanted elements – toxins, impurities, or anything foreign or other," Purser said. "This is why we see so many New Age yoga practitioners seduced by QAnon."

Purser said there are parallels between the rise of "occultures" now and the role spirituality and mysticism played in Nazi Germany. Notably, the Third Reich appropriated the swastika, a symbol used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains; the word means "well-being" in Sanskrit.

"Consider Hitler, who was obsessed with the occult, was a vegetarian, used astrologers [and] oracles," Purser said. "The Nazi Heinrich Himmler, head of SS, was enamored with Eastern mysticism, and he sent an expedition to Tibet in search of lost remnants of a secret and pure Aryan race; Hitler was seen as a 'light worker' [as in someone who's saving humanity] that would purge Germany of Jews."

Purser added that Trump and his enablers have "mastered the ability of weaponized mass delusion through social media."

"Many of the New Agers drawn to QAnon are probably suffering from unresolved trauma – like many in Trump's base as well," Purser said. "It's easier to look to a savior and to find scapegoats than to face one's own fears and pain."

When asked about the term lightworker, and where it derives from, Remski said he first heard it when he was in a "Course in Miracles cult" from 1999 to 2003. The name is a reference to a book, titled "A Course in Miracles," that was published by Helen Schucman in 1976; Schucman claimed the book had been spoken to her via "inner dictation" from Christ. Remski said the word "light" appears in the text frequently.

"Light is not only the sort of keynote of this Manichaean universe in which things are either light or shadow, they're either good or bad, it's also like schizotypal as a universe, it is given this materiality as well," Remski said of Schucman's book. "Light is said to be something that can fill a person up, it can blow a person apart, it can enter a person, and I think it probably overlaps with some pre-modern ideas like *prana* or ch'i —those kind of folk medicine ideas of vital force — but it's also associated with an absolute truth, an ontological transformation . . . like once once light enters into you, you are forever changed."

Remski believes the conspiritual rhetoric around "light" started after the book was published. While the book "A Course in Miracles" doesn't include the term "lightworker," the theme of light itself runs throughout. "The key is only the light that shines away the shapes and forms and fears of nothing," a typical passage reads.

One prominent figure who was deeply influenced by "A Course in Miracles" is former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. In 1996, Williamson wrote a book, "A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of 'A Course in Miracles,'" that was structured as a reflection on the original text. Williamson, too, has used the term "lightworker" before; in a 2013 Facebook post, Williamson wrote, "A light-worker is not someone who ignores the darkness; it's someone who transforms the darkness."

Obviously, Williamson and Trump are political opposites; Williamson, a Democrat, came down hard and repeatedly on Trump's policies during her 2020 campaign. Salon asked Williamson what she thought about the term "lightworker" being used to describe Trump. She replied via email: "I think it's insane. . . . Like many others, I don't understand it but I find it deeply disturbing."

When asked why he believes people have been so eager to embrace this belief that Trump is a "lightworker," Remski said that it is because it can "offer all of the benefits of the conspiratorial mindset, without a lot of the drawbacks."

"Because you're saying something kind about him," Remski said, "as the social psychologists basically repeat over and over again."

Remski believes conspiracy theories are attractive because they "satisfy epistemic needs." "Like, 'I'm now I'm going to know something that nobody else knows,' or 'I'm going to meet my survival needs, meaning this information is going to help me tolerate what's happening, but also maybe even preserve me from danger,'" he said.

But as the social media spread of the "lightworker" theory illustrates, conspiracy theories also open up their adherents to communities of people that they can hang out with, Remski mused.

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no lnx

New analysis turns up a surprising detail about Trump's Capitol insurrectionists

Supporters of President Donald Trump near the U.S. Capitol Building, Jan. 6, 2021, Tyler Merbler

Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams March 07, 2021

While the overwhelming majority of individuals charged so far in connection with the deadly January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol are unconnected to organized militias or other known extremist groups, a preliminary assessment conducted by researchers at George Washington University found they comprise a "hodgepodge" of individuals inspired by far-right ideologies.

Researchers at GWU's Program on Extremism analyzed the cases of 257 alleged participants the mob attack on the Capitol—inspired by former President Donald Trump and his lie that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen"—and found them to be a "heterogenous group."

The researchers divided the 257 individuals, who include 221 men and 36 women, into three groups: "militant networks," "organized clusters," and "inspired believers."

Militant networks, the report states, represent "the apex of organizational planning by domestic violent extremist groups for and on January 6th," and are "characterized by hierarchical organization and chains of command."

"Leaders of established domestic violent extremist groups issued orders or directives to members of their groups, encouraging them to travel to Washington in advance of the siege," the report states. "Unlike individuals in the other categories, not only did these militant networks plan to attend protests on the 6th, but they are also alleged to have planned in advance to breach the Capitol and, in many cases, conduct violence inside the walls of the building."

The second category, organized clusters, is "composed of small, close-knit groups of individuals who allegedly participated in the siege together, usually comprising family members, friends, and acquaintances."

"Finally, the remainder of the alleged siege participants can be categorized as inspired believers," the report says. "These individuals, according to available evidence, were neither participants in an established violent extremist group nor connected to any of the other individuals who are alleged to have stormed the Capitol."

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"Inspired by a range of extremist narratives, conspiracy theories, and personal motivations, individual believers made up a significant portion of the crowd at the Capitol," it says.

"Perhaps the most striking finding in this report is the range of far- and extreme-right actors who took part in the siege," the report states. "While such groups often splinter across various lines and form bitter rivalries with one another, it is clear that in some cases they have found enough common cause to mobilize together."

"The siege is not the first recent example of increased alliances among disparate right-wing groups in America," it continues. "The Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally in 2017, for example, while a different kind of event, also succeeded in bringing together a range of American groups over, among other things, their deeply-held conspiratorial anti-Semitism."

The report concludes:

The events of January 6th also allow us an opportunity to assess how the domestic violent extremist threat may take shape in the coming months and years, and if the siege may have some role in this. As law enforcement officials continue to identify and prosecute individuals involved in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, new cases of domestic violent extremists inspired by the siege to conduct their own violent attacks have already emerged.

Since the siege, federal law enforcement arrested at least four individuals with links to domestic violent extremist ideologies—one involving a militia affiliate from Northern California and another involving two associates of the Boogaloo Boys in Kentucky, all of whom reportedly believed that the siege would spark a new civil war in the United States.

"Moving forward, it is highly likely that violent extremists of multiple ideological persuasions, inspired by the events of January 6th, 2021, will add to the already bloated federal domestic extremism caseload for prosecutors throughout the country," it warns.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/capitol-riot-2650963652/

no lnx

German scholar explains how Trump and the Capitol riot leveraged an entire universe of conspiracy theory

The U.S. Capitol Building, Jan. 6, 2021, Tyler Merbler

Paul Rosenberg and Salon March 07, 2021

Conspiracy theories take can bewildering forms, as has become especially clear in the current era, when a recently deposed U.S. president became instrumental in spreading and popularizing an entire interlocking universe of demonstrably false conspiratorial narratives. But the historical development of conspiracy theories is becoming clearer, thanks to research across multiple disciplines, synthesized for a broad audience in German scholar Michael Butter's recent book, "The Nature of Conspiracy Theories."

None of that work in any of those disciplines — from psychology and sociology to philosophy, literature and cultural studies — gives us any reason to believe that conspiracy theories are going away anytime soon, simply because Donald Trump has left office. But they can help us make sense out of their persistence, which is why Salon reached out to Butter for an extended conversation.

In the first part of this interview, published two weeks ago, Butter — who teaches the history of American literature and culture at the University of Tübingen — discussed how conspiracy theories were long taken for granted. Winston Churchill, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln offer just a few entirely typical examples of major historical figures who believed in them. But conspiracy theories aren't universal throughout human history, Butter explained: They depend on the existence of a public sphere and the right sort of media environment.

Centuries before the internet, the printing press was responsible for the birth of conspiracy theories in their modern form. Butter also described the ways conspiracy theories can be categorized — they describe conspiracies from above or from below, from outside a society or from within — as well as the social and psychological needs they meet, and how they underwent a three-phase process of stigmatization that pushed them out of the mainstream after the 1950s.

In part two of the interview, Butter describes the three-phase process that brought conspiracy theories back into the public sphere as we know them today, their structural similarities with populism, the important case study of Donald Trump as a case study, what can be done to counter them and more. This transcript has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length.

00:01

01:44

In describing the comeback of conspiracy theory — which perhaps culminated with Donald Trump and QAnon — you outline what might be called a three-phase process of evangelism, in whose final stage we reach online conspiracy theories, which you characterize as "more rumors than fully fledged theories." How did this evangelical revival begin, and what defined it?

Conspiracy theories never really became unpopular. They were just flying under the radar for a while, in Europe far more so than in the United States. In the United States, conspiracy theories were always more part of popular discourse because of the [John F.] Kennedy assassination, because of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and also Watergate, than they were part of public discourse in Europe. Still, you could make the argument that full-blown conspiracy theories in the U.S. as well in Germany during the '70s and 80s and '90s were part of rather hermetic subcultures that are difficult to enter and whose members have problems articulating their ideas and finding a broader audience.

In the United States, of course, the emergence of talk radio and other venues, even before the internet, helps these people voice their ideas, but if you look at the Western world in general, I think it's really the emergence of the internet that turns these subcultures into what we could now call counter-publics, publics that are more easily found and whose members have far less trouble now finding a public for their ideas.

This again happens in different steps, in that during the late '90s we have these precursors of the internet like USENET, where people are writing in forums. Of course this is not yet happening in life on any large scale, because people are not online all the time. You need a modem, you need to connect through your landline telephone and you can't do that all the time. So you might download comments and then contribute to the discussion and people might look it up later. But on the other hand, it's very close to what's happening in social media these days — just a little slower.

Then, of course, a couple of years later we get platforms like YouTube where you can upload your own conspiracy film, something that before the advent of digital technology was really only possible for professional filmmakers and people who were very rich and who could afford all this equipment. Now you can just do these things on your laptop. The first version of the "Loose Change" films, which had tens of millions of viewers, was allegedly produced for just $1,200 on a laptop. Suddenly you can do that and put it online and you will find an increasingly big audience.

Then the third step would be what's happening to conspiracy theories because of social media — the echo chamber they increasingly generate and the specific conditions that they impose on how messages can be framed. If you have only 140 or 280 characters at your disposal, you can't really develop the conspiracy theory in the way a 90-minute YouTube video can do it. You have to restrict yourself to certain bold claims, and you don't provide any evidence.

I think in American culture the first case we can observe is what is called the "birther" conspiracy theory, which claims that Barack Obama was never eligible to become president because he allegedly was not born in the United States. I tried very very hard, with students of mine, to find anything on the internet where this conspiracy theory is developed in detail in the way older conspiracy theories were developed. But it's not really there. You only find the rumors, you find little bits and pieces of evidence. People taking apart the birth certificate and arguing that it's a forgery. You don't find a full-blown, completely developed conspiracy narrative about that.

At the same time, it's not the case that one of these online forums entirely replaces the others. Even now, in 2021, we still find fully fledged conspiracy theories. It's not all about conspiracy rumors these days, and it seems to me that these longer documentaries are even making a comeback. So there is this film "Plandemic" that you probably have heard about, which is really returning to a form that was popular 10 years ago with the "Loose Change" films, and there's a second part that's up now which is called "Indoctrination," which I think runs nearly two hours. So these older forms don't disappear and they're coexisting with the newer ones now.

You talk about how conspiracy theories today have a lot in common with populism, even though historically that's not usually the case. What do they have in common, and what distinguishes them?

There are a couple of structural analogies between populism and conspiracy. For example, both of them clearly divide the world into good and evil. For conspiracy theories, it's always the conspirators and the victims of the conspiracy and for populism is always the elite and the common people, and the elite is always acting against the interests of the common people.

This is coming back to what we talked about earlier, that contemporary conspiracy theories usually target an alleged conspiracy from above, and it's usually elites that are imagined as conspiring from above. So we could say that both populism and contemporary Western conspiracy theories have a common enemy and that is the elite.

Now, of course not all populist discourse accuses the elite of conspiring actively against the people. But usually accusations of conspiracy are one way of explaining why the elite is acting against the interests of the people that tends to coexist with other explanations within a populist movement.

For example, very often the elite is being accused of having lost touch with reality, of neglecting the common people — they're so caught up in other things, so detached from reality, that they no longer know what people need. Sometimes the elite is also accused of being corrupt, meaning that everybody that wants to just enrich themselves — which is why they act against the interests of the people — but they're not following one common systematic plan. And then there are those people who say, "Wait a minute, it's not that they are detached from reality. It's not that they're all corrupt. They are all part of a devious plot."

To a certain degree these explanations can overlap and the accusation of conspiracy grows naturally out of the other explanations. So we could say that accusations of conspiracy are one specific way in which members of the populist movement make sense of the fact that the elite is allegedly acting against the interests of the people.

Another analogy is that both populism and conspiracy theory are stigmatized in similar terms, aren't they?

Yes. Both populism and conspiracy theory are stigmatizing terms. If you call somebody a conspiracy theorist, you imply that you don't need to take them seriously, that this person is making baseless claims. If you call somebody a populist — I would suspect even more so in Europe than in the United States — you are also accusing them of being a fraud, of being somebody who is offering simplistic solutions to complex problems and is trying to rile up the masses.

Something we've observed again and again is that populists and members of populist movements accept people who believe in conspiracy theories, even though they themselves do not believe in these conspiracy theories. They say, "Well, you know, the elites are looking down on these people and think they are idiots because they believe in conspiracy theories. But they also think that we are idiots and should not be taken seriously, so there should be a space for these people within our movement." That's another parallel between populism and conspiracy theory.

You deal with Donald Trump as a case study, illustrating where conspiratorial thinking has most recently come to fruition. How did he rely on conspiracy rumors at first, rather than full-blown theories?

Trump is an interesting case, in that I think that he has been using conspiracy theories and conspiracy rumors very smartly from basically 2011 or 2012 onward, though most recent developments may have changed this. But initially he uses conspiracy rumors — those about Barack Obama's alleged birth outside of the country — to turn himself into a political figure. And this works — he's quite popular with Republican voters, suddenly, early in 2012 — and then he shuts up again, because he doesn't want to run against Obama just yet.

But he resuscitated these accusations against Obama and against conspiring elites in 2015, when he decided to run for the presidency. The interesting thing about Trump is that he usually does not articulate conspiracy theories. He doesn't really commit to anything; he restricts himself to conspiracy rumors. He just makes very short accusations, and usually leaves a safety net for himself. So he will always use phrases like "A lot of people are saying," or "I hear all the time," or "I've been told," or "Think about that." I would argue this is a strategy, because he does not want to alienate traditional Republican voters who have very little sympathy for conspiracy theories, and also people who might be receptive to his increasing populist stances, but who also favor other explanations of why elites are neglectful or corrupt over explanations of conspiracy.

But then, as you describe, that changed. When did that happen, and why?

It's only a couple of weeks before the 2016 election that he really makes this move from conspiracy rumors to conspiracy theories. In October 2016, the TV debates are over and he is behind in the polls to Hillary Clinton, and this tape has just been leaked to the press where he talks about sexually harassing women. I think this is the moment where Trump realizes that there is no chance that he's going to win over undecided voters or moderate voters. He knows that a lot of Republican voters will vote for him because they always vote for the Republican candidate and they really hate Hillary Clinton, but he now can reach out to people who are really receptive to his populist and conspiracist rhetoric.

So in his first public appearance after his tape goes public, he steps in front of his audience in Florida and talks for 45 minutes about a huge global conspiracy led by international banks and Hillary Clinton in order to destroy the American people. So here he really becomes a full-blown conspiracy theorist, because he knows he needs those people to vote for him now. This works and he wins the election, because, of course, of a couple of other factors interfere in his favor — James Comey's letter and also other things — and after the election he goes back to conspiracy rumors, at least usually.

This is the phase of the process I describe in the book. But since then things have developed further, and my impression is that what happened to Trump is something that has happened to other political leaders who initially use conspiracy theories strategically as well, for example, Viktor Orbán in Hungary. It seems to me that Trump at some point starts believing some of his own conspiracy theories that so far he has only spread strategically.

That seems to apply both to the accusations against Hunter Biden that are connected to Ukraine — because otherwise there would be no point in sending Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to investigate all of this, and to expose himself in a manner that led to the first impeachment — and secondly, Trump had been talking about election fraud for many years, even before the 2016 election. Then, after that election, he said there had been illegal votes cast, and this is how he explains that he lost the popular vote.

He systematically picks up on this again from June 2020 onward, in order to cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election. It seems to me that this is something that by now he genuinely believes in himself, because there is no longer any discernible strategy in maintaining these conspiracy theories. Even now, at the moment that we're speaking, with the second impeachment going on, he first ordered his lawyers to focus on the election fraud, not on arguing that impeaching him while he was no longer in office is unconstitutional. So he seems to have fallen victim to some of his own conspiracy theories.

You have some prescriptions for what to do about conspiracy theories. Regarding specific ones you recommend "pre-debunking." How does that work?

We know that debunking is very problematic. It's very difficult to convince people who already believe in conspiracy theories, or are drawn to conspiracy theories, that they are wrong. But we know from a couple of studies — and I know from conversations with teachers, for example — that something that what works much better is the so-called pre-debunking, which means you teach people about the arguments of specific conspiracy theories, but also about the way in which conspiracy theories generally work, before they are exposed to them. Of course schools would be the place to do that. If you equip people with the right education and the right knowledge, then the likelihood that they will come to believe in conspiracy theories significantly decreases.

This is something that we can explain historically, if we return to the stigmatization of conspiracy theories during the 1950s and 60s, which was also partly motivated by explaining to people why conspiracy theories are bad explanations, how they overemphasize intentions and why this is problematic. We know that educating people is a good means against belief in conspiracy theories, because education seems to be negatively linked to belief in conspiracy theories. While there are, of course, highly educated and intelligent people who believe in conspiracy theories, the likelihood that you will believe in them decreases with your level of education. So I think that education and pre-debunking really are key to fighting conspiracy theories.

You also speak more generally about social literacy, media literacy and historical literacy. Explain briefly why those are important in combatting conspiracy theories.

Media literacy is of course extremely important. People need to know which sources, especially on the internet, they can trust and which sources they cannot trust. Why does it make more sense to trust an article by the Washington Post or the New York Times than to trust something that somebody just writes in social media? People need to know about how the media work, how the internet works. They need to understand the search algorithms of something like the Google engine, that this is not an objective window on reality, but the results you get are predetermined by your earlier searches, for example, so that there is a certain subjectivity there right from the start. This is something people need to understand.

Right. Then explain what you mean by social literacy?

It's important to teach people about how politics works, how society works and why it is impossible to plan all of these things years or sometimes even decades in advance. These processes are extremely complex, which basically means that a large-scale conspiracies are virtually impossible. And this is basically what people realized in the '50s and '60s, when the stigmatization occurred.

Finally, historical literacy: What's most important here?

Historical literacy for me would mean that you study both historical conspiracies and historical conspiracy theories. Of course there have always been conspiracies, and there will always be conspiracies in the future. But if you look at historical conspiracies, you realize that in scope and reach they are much different from what conspiracy theories imagine. Far fewer people are involved than conspiracy theories claim. In the assassination of Julius Caesar it's just a couple of dozen people. Even in the toppling of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh, back in the 1950s, by MI6 and the CIA, it's just a couple of dozen people, as opposed to faking the moon landing or orchestrating the 9/11 attack as an inside job, which would have required tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people.

And then real conspiracies usually revolve around singular events like a coup-d'état or an assassination. Conspiracy theories might begin with a single event but then we move on very quickly to all of history being a plot and people being deceived for years and decades.

Finally, if you study historical conspiracies, you also realize that usually something happens that the conspirators have not foreseen. Karl Popper writes in 1949 in "The Open Society and Its Enemies," when he coined the term "conspiracy theory" in its modern meaning, that the conspirators rarely enjoy the fruits of their labor. What he means by that is that something usually goes wrong. Think again of Julius Caesar. Roman senators killed Caesar because they saw him as a danger to the republic. They succeed in killing Caesar, but of course what ensues is a civil war and at the end of the civil war the republic ends. The time of the empire and the emperors begins, and the republic is history forever.

Or think of the recent Russian efforts to assassinate the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, to poison him. This didn't work in the end. He was brought to Germany and he was cured and now he's back in Russia and he's just been sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but he remains a real danger to the regime there. This was a conspiracy, but it didn't succeed the way it was imagined, and this failure is something for which there is no place in conspiracy theories. So studying historical conspiracies, I think, can alert us to seeing where conspiracy theories go wrong.

What's the most important question I didn't ask, and what's the answer to that question?

Not all conspiracy theories are dangerous, and not all conspiracy theorists are dangerous. It is important to contextualize. But generally speaking, there are three ways in which conspiracy theories can be dangerous.

First, they can be a catalyst for radicalization and thus ultimately lead to violence. People who believe in conspiracy theories can feel justified or even obliged to take up arms to interfere in the struggle between good and evil that is allegedly going on in front of them.

Second, medical conspiracy theories can be dangerous because people who deny established medical knowledge and dismiss it as part of a devious plot can endanger themselves and others because they do not take the necessary precautions.

Third, conspiracy theories can be a danger to democracy if they undermine people's trust in democratic processes and institutions. This danger is particularly high if a lot of people believe in these conspiracy theories and if they are articulated by people in power who stir up the masses.

All three dimensions can be observed in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. People who do not wear masks or socially distance, because they think that the coronavirus is harmless, violently attack the heart of American democracy because they have been stirred up by a populist leader.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/qanon-march-4/

raw story

On CNN Wednesday, "QAnon Anonymous" podcast host Julian Feeld explained the strange new conspiracy theory that Trump will be re-inaugurated on March 4th as the "19th president" of the "restored" United States — and how it ties into long-standing "sovereign citizen" beliefs that the United States has been an illegitimate government for over a century.

"Can you explain the convoluted conspiracy theory that has begun to take hold that involved March 4th?" asked anchor Alisyn Camerota. "What are they expecting to happen on March 4th?"

"The March 4th theory actually comes from sovereign citizen beliefs," said Feeld. "Now in the past, we haven't seen such a huge overlap, but in this case, QAnon — certain QAnon followers have borrowed whole cloth from a belief that the last legitimate president was the 18th president, so this goes back to 1871, and this is the belief that Trump will be actually inaugurated as our 19th president."

"Now, of course, this is illogical since he was the 45th, but what they believe is that there is — there has been no country known as the United States ever since it was unstuck from the gold standard and they don't believe that any amendment past the 16th Amendment is valid," said Feeld. "They essentially believe that Ulysses S. Grant was the last American — valid American president. They believe — I mean, I think there's different beliefs, obviously, of what will happen on that day, but I think many are expecting a ceremony, and that ceremony may be accompanied in their mind by what QAnon believers called 'The Storm.' That would be, you know, as described a little earlier on the segment, the rounding up and often military tribunals, you know, for leading Democrats, but also some celebrities they believe falsely to be part of this pedophile cabal."

"So essentially people are still in this belief that Trump will come back and will become the president again. Obviously, falsely," he added.

Watch below:

an 221  he has back-pedaled w/ attn

watch: Michigan Senate majority leader caught on video calling deadly Capitol siege a 'hoax'

Meaghan Ellis

A top-ranking Michigan Republican lawmaker is facing intense criticism after footage captured him...

"pre-planned"

===

https://www.rawstory.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-2650170676/

qAnon-loving Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2018 posted a bizarre conspiracy theory on her Facebook page involving then-California Gov. Jerry Brown using a giant space laser to deliberately start wildfires.

Media Matters on Thursday revealed that Greene, in a since-deleted Facebook post from November 2018, speculated that Brown started the fires in order to clear out forests in areas where he wanted to build a high-speed rail line up the California coast.

At the center of Greene's theory was a partnership between utility company Pacific Gas and Electricity (PG&E) and renewable energy startup Solaren.

Greene argued that PG&E and Solaren sent solar power generators up into space that were then used to beam the sun's energy back down to Earth to start the California wildfires.

"If they are beaming the suns energy back to Earth, I'm sure they wouldn't ever miss a transmitter receiving station right??!!" she wrote. "What would that look like anyway? A laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth I guess. Could that cause a fire? Hmmm, I don't know. I hope not! That wouldn't look so good for PG&E, Rothschild Inc, Solaren or Jerry Brown who sure does seem fond of PG&E."

See Greene's full post at this link.

oregon GOP offers ridiculous excuse for US Capitol attack

Meaghan Ellis

 January 26, 2021

The Oregon Republican Party insists there is "growing evidence" to support their baseless opinion that the U.S. Capitol riot was a "false flag" operation.

According to The Guardian, the resolution, published

meme remix recycling?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/qanon-2650129695/

no travis view twt

Trump's QAnon fans are not giving up hope that he will be reinstalled in the White House this year, with a new theory that has them planning on celebrating his inauguration on March 4th.

According to a report from Vice, the latest theory being passed around by right-wing extremists is based upon writings from members of the fringe "sovereign citizen" movement and a unique interpretation of American history.

As the Vice report notes, "Sovereign citizens believe that a law enacted in1871 secretly turned the U.S. into a corporation and did away with the American government of the founding fathers. The group also believes that President Franklin D. Roosevelt sold U.S. citizens out in 1933 when he ended the gold standard and replaced it by offering citizens as collateral to a group of shadowy foreign investors."

With that in mind, QAnon supporters are making common cause with the sovereign citizens -- a new development -- and focusing on the 1871 conspiracy theory to reassert their claim that Donald Trump is still president.

"Over the weekend, QAnon groups on Gab and Telegram, where most QAnon supporters have found a home since they were kicked off Twitter and Parler was de-platformed, commenters have been sharing documents describing the 1871 act, claiming it proves that Trump will be sworn in on March 4," the report states. "The source for this date is the fact that 1933 was also the year when inaugurations were changed from March 4 to Jan. 20 — to shorten the lame-duck period of outgoing presidents. QAnon followers believe that Trump will become the president of the original republic, and not the corporation that they believe the 1871 act created."

The belief that Trump might bolster the hopes of the QAnon followers who have been despondent that President Joe Biden wasn't arrested on January 20th.

A deeper explanation of this latest theory -- and its genesis -- can be found below:...

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/false-flag-conspiracy-theory/rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-facebook-2018-parkland-school-shooting-was  false flag

==

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/capitol-riot-2649960031

ME

It's no secret that President Donald Trump's angry supporters were seen storming the U.S. Capitol but the president's Kremlin-controlled Russian state broadcasts are still circulating lies the series of events that erupted on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. According to Russian media, members of Antifa were seen storming the Capitol—not Trump supporters.

According to The Daily Beast, Russian media outletsclaimed "the pro-Trump insurrectionists were merely "peaceful demonstrators" and blamed "Antifa" for the violence that took place in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021."

Although the (FBI) has announced a series of developments regarding the Capitol riots, including the arrests of more than 100 Trump supporters, Russian media has focused on featuring clips from conservative news networks like Fox News in addition to remarks from widely known conservative public figures including Tucker Carlson, a number of Republican lawmakers, and other Trump allies and apologists.

But the truth never stopped the Kremlin's propaganda networks from continuing to disseminate a convenient fable. Russian-speaking eyewitnesses were shown intermittently—or some might argue interchangeably—with clips from Fox News, featuring Tucker Carlson, Marco Rubio, and other Trump apologists. Appearing on state TV channel Rossiya-24, two Russian-speakers living in the United States were identified as "those who participated in the events" on Capitol Hill and later took part in numerous shows on Russian state television.

Despite Russian-controlled media propagandists' attempts to control the narrative regarding what happened amid the Electoral College certification, the publication notes that even Republican lawmakers are now distancing from that false narrative.

In fact, Rep. Kevin McCarthy even addressed the rumors when he spoke on the House floor during the hearing for Trump's second impeachment. "Some say the riots were caused by Antifa," McCarthy said, adding, "There is absolutely no evidence of that."

More disturbing is that despite the Electoral College certification, and Trump finally admitting that a new administration will be taking the White House on Jan. 20, he has still convinced many of his supporters that the presidential election was stolen from them. Yet, he still has no proof to back his claims.

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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 trust the 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."

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aha omg: in post-truth, JOK video dr is SOP // Neg attack ad, strip of context, hype anger, pix bypass brain

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/gop-conspiracy-theories/

it's been happening for decades — but the transformation is now complete.

It started with the Whitewater investigation, went through all of the Benghazi investigations, and ramped up in recent years when Republicans turned around to falsely claim that the investigation into Donald Trump's ties with a Russian conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election was as a "hoax," ignoring the overwhelming evidence of rampant collusion. On Wednesday, the transformation of the GOP from a real political party to a conspiracy theory cult was finally fully completed.

Wednesday was the day Senate Republicans spent hours and a hefty chunk of taxpayer money to bolster the lie that Democrats "stole" the 2020 election, with their only evidence being the say-so of a narcissistic sociopath whose only spoken language is lying. No one, especially no Republican politician, sincerely believes that Trump was the "real" winner of the 2020 election, or that there's any evidence whatsoever of voter fraud or election irregularities of any real importance. As Sen. Gary Peters, D.-Mich., the ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee declared during his opening remarks, "this hearing gives a platform to conspiracy theories and lies" and " is a grave threat to the future of our democracy."

Of course, that is the point.

As the committee chair, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and his fellow Republicans understand, their party can no longer win fair elections or campaign on ideas, since the public rejects most policies the GOP stands for. So the party's only recourse is to dish out a steady stream of conspiracy theories meant to distract from the policy debate while leveraging their power to undermine democracy.

As the mainstream news coverage of the hearing dutifully noted, no evidence of voter fraud was presented during Wednesday's hearing and Democrats on the committee repeatedly emphasized that Trump's claims of "fraud" have been presented before the courts dozens of times and thrown out for lack of evidence. Indeed, anyone who actually watched the hearing or read responsible coverage of it would walk away with the impression that the Republicans were a bunch of raving madmen and the Democrats were the only people speaking any sense.

What the Republicans running the hearing understand, however, is that their audience, the Republican base, neither watched the hearing nor consumed the mainstream media coverage of it. Instead, the purpose of the hearing is to generate footage that can be edited, often misleadingly, into clips that are fed into right-wing media sources and circulated through social media.

Evidence is not needed, nor is proof, nor convincing arguments. All that's needed are clips of the Republican senators, looking officious in the trappings of a Senate hearing, railing about "stolen" elections and defending the honor of those who purport to believe that Joe Biden stole the election. And all those poignant and convincing rebuttals from Democrats? Those can be chopped and edited to make the Democrats look "crazy" and like they're unleashing "unhinged" attacks on the noble Republicans.

None of this is about keeping Trump in office.

Senate Republicans not only understand that he lost, but that his coup efforts are failing. Their crusade now is about exploiting his lies of a "rigged" election for their own political purposes. Feeding the GOP base's victim complex and riling them up with conspiracy theories keeps them too busy obsessively hating Democrats to notice that the Republicans have run the country into the ground. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri showcased the strategy perfectly, with a maudlin speech about how actual evidence of a rigged election wasn't the point, because "the constituents back at home" told him "theyfeltthey had been disenfranchised."

"These are normal, reasonable people. These are not crazy people," he said.

For someone actually watching the hearing, this is maddening. The folks Hawley is talking about are just rabid Republicans who back Trump's coup and are willing to stand by outrageous bad faith arguments to defend their belief that certain voters — namely Black voters in big cities — simply shouldn't have the same right vote.

But when Hawley's remarks about are inevitably cut into a video that removes all this context and fed into right-wing disinformation channels, all that audiences will see is Hawley defending his voters as "normal, reasonable people" who are "not crazy". It will read as him defending the honor of conservatives against those elitist, condescending liberals who are always calling them "crazy", instead of what actually happened, which was that Hawley said conservative "feelings" about the election matter more than the fact of who actually won.

Similarly, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky declared during the hearing that the election "in many ways, was stolen." He did not offer evidence, much less proof for this claim, which was a blatant lie. But it doesn't matter. He knows that his statement will be cut into a video and disseminated. He doesn't need evidence, so much as a quick clip with him looking authoritative as he offers this lie without rebuttal.

That's what GOP politics is all about these days. It's not about making a policy case to voters, since Republican politicians know that will never fly. Instead, it's about identity politics and stirring up hate, however ridiculous, against liberals. Hawley is hoping his constituents be so angry at the alleged liberals calling them "crazy" that they focus on getting their revenge by voting Republican, rather than asking hard questions about, say, why the Republican-run Senate has abandoned them to economic devastation during this pandemic.

This is all the Republican Party is these days: A propaganda engine churning out fake "scandals" meant to send their voters down conspiracy theory rabbit holes or stir irrational right-wing grievances. Anything, really, but ever talk about actual policy or governance, which Republican politicians know is territory they will always lose on.

That's why Republicans have fully committed to Trump's lies about the 2020 election. It's not that they care one whit about Trump — I suspect many of them are glad to see him go since he's a miserable person to be around — but because this conspiracy theory is so useful. Republicans can now focus their voters, ideally for four years, on nursing a grudge over losing an election they "should" have won, if only the votes of those meanie Democrats had been thrown in the trash.

After all, what's the alternative?

Republicans know they'd lose a reasonable debate about policy differences with Democrats. So this is what they've turned themselves into: A conspiracy theory cult that is always dashing from one mad lie to another, stirring up the base with nonsense and hoping the voters will never catch onto what a con the whole thing is.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-coup-2649538441

no lnx twt vid

Four chilling signs Trump's attempted coup is escalating

Bob Brigham December 18, 2020

President Donald Trump continues to refuse to concede that he lost the 2020 election to President-elect Joe Biden.

There were four major signs on Thursday evening that the Republican effort to overthrow the election is escalating.

The first sign was when former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn suggested on NewsMax Trump could use "military capabilities" to overturn the election in swing states hold do-over elections.[mart law used 64x]

The second sign occurred a short time later on Fox News when White House advisor Peter Navarro said President-elect Biden would be an "illegal and illegitimate president."

The third sign was when White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany argued on Fox News that Congress could use "alternate slates" of electors to steal the election.

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1339758838535180288

The fourth sign was Trump's Twitter account.

Trump complimented Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for saying he would back Trump's efforts to overturn the election in Congress.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1339758142381551629

Trump then falsely claimed he won Wisconsin and that the vote was rigged.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1339759289234317312

And then Trump complained about the United States Supreme Court refusing to go along with his efforts to overturn the election.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1339759289234317312

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Trump can't even keep his coup secret - Alternet.org ›

Fascism expert: Donald Trump's coup is not over — and his ... ›

Trump's purge at the Pentagon is increasing fears of a coup-in ... ›

Trump's coup attempt is very real — but there are several gaping ... ›

The Trump coup is a total failure — here's why it's still ongoing ... ›

reboot of agenda 21, plandemic, the memes are mating /remix smoothie

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/08/great-reset-conspiracy/

...

The Great Reset is an attempt to create a plausible impression that the huge winners in this system are on the verge of voluntarily setting greed aside to get serious about solving the raging crises that are radically destabilizing our world.

So no, the Great Reset is not just another name for the Green New Deal, as many a right-winger with a digital chalkboard and an unhealthy AOC obsession is absurdly claiming. It is, first and foremost, about blocking a real Green New Deal, which most assuredly would not have the support of BP, Mastercard, the Prince of Wales, and all of the other Great Reset partners.

And yet, in recent weeks, a slew of right-wing commentators on Fox News, as well as Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs and prominent opposition politicians in Australia and Canada, have claimed to be confused about this and are suddenly giving oxygen to what was, until recently, amarginal conspiracy. Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Ben Shapiro have all been terrifying their huge audiences with claims that green socialism is about to be forced down their throats via Schwab’s Great Reset, which, they explain, is the very same thing as President-elect Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan, which is itself a thin cover for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. (Like an early fan of an indie punk band, Glenn Beck has been using his perch at The Blaze to point out that he was ranting about the Great Reset when it was just a gleam in Schwab’s eye.)

Do these people honestly think that Schwab is in cahoots with AOC and using the pandemic to put BP out of business — with the full cooperation of BP? Of course not. But President Donald Trump is on his way out, and the Green New Deal is popular — precisely because it is as far away from Davos as it could be, grounded in a polluter-pays ethos and in programs like a jobs guarantee and universal health care that enjoy broad working-class support. For right-wing politicians and the oil companies that back them, the more climate action can be conflated with an organization known for its traffic jams of private jets and its Bond villain founder, the easier it will be to resist any climate plan at all. That’s why the earliest alarmism about the Great Reset came from the Heartland Institute, ground zero of the climate change denial machine.

[Jason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party,speaks during a news conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on Friday, April 5, 2019. Kenney said he would create a C$1 billion ($750 million) crown corporation to support Indigenous resource projects including pipelines if he's elected to lead Alberta's government this month, according to an emailed statement. Photographer: Todd Korol/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesJason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party, speaks during a news conference in Calgary, Canada, on April 5, 2019. Photo: Todd Korol/Bloomberg/Getty Images

This messaging is gaining traction not because people are suckers but because they are mad — and they have every right to be. Lockdown policies have demanded months of individual sacrifice for the collective good without providing the most basic collective protections to keep families from slipping into starvation and homelessness, or to keep small businesses afloat. Meanwhile, trillions have been spent to backstop markets and bail out multinationals, and pandemic profiteering is rampant. Is it any wonder that so many find it entirely plausible that the same elites who expect them to swallow all the coronavirus-related sacrifices while they party in the Hamptons and on private islands would also be willing to exaggerate the risks of the disease to get them to the accept more bitter “green” medicine, for the common good? As that first Davos theme made clear, trust between the people and the mountaintop has been broken — and it most certainly has not been rebuilt.

For a glimpse of how all of this fits together, take a look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada, under its truly reprehensible premier, one Jason Kenney. Kenney came to power pledging to serve as a shameless valet for the Alberta oil patch, specifically its extra-fast-planet-cooking tar sands. He promised to ram through all pipelines, no matter the opposition, and create a “war room” to surveil all opponents....

==

1220

flynn in dc stop steal jeircho maga attacks deep state

1220 an hunter

sow doubt disinfo

...

In this particular case, however, (most) House Republicans do not sincerely intend to win. But neither would they feel chagrined if their actions further provoked the sort of far-right violence seen in Washington, D.C., this weekend—the very public suggestion that non-Republican rule can simply no longer be tolerated by the unwashed masses, and that their non-Republican opponents should begin contemplating their own safety if they intend to continue thwarting Republican demands. That is the goal behind nearly all of this nonsense: to delegitimize; to put the stochastic notion in public heads that if The Base suffers a setback in its ambitions, it can only be because The Base was conspired against.It was conspired against by theurban, and the globalists, and the socialists.

1220

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/tucker-carlsons-history-pushing-vaccine-conspiracy-theories

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-supporters-2649431913/

Do Republican voters really believe that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump? Do they sincerely see Trump's efforts to overturn the election as the legitimate actions of a wronged man trying to defend democracy? When they declare "stop the steal," are they truly unaware that they are the ones trying to steal this election from the rightful winners?

Or are millions of Americans arguing in bad faith, merely claiming to believe Trump is the true winner? Is this all just a disingenuous song-and-dance, meant to put a morally justifiable gloss on what is actually widespread support among Trump voters for a coup? The answer to this question of "delusion or bad faith?" matters quite a bit, as Trump continues to prosecute his futile campaign to steal the 2020 election.

Polls show that a hefty majority of Republican voters — 68%, according to Reuters/Ipsos — say they believe the 2020 election was "rigged" in Biden's favor. Since the election, more than $200 million has flowed into Trump's coffers from Republican donors responding to emails promising to "stop the steal." Are these donors innocent lambs who sincerely believe that Trump is a good man done wrong? Or are they people who areactively seeking to finance a coup, employing the flimsiest of excuses?

Well, as the author of a book called "Troll Nation," it's clear where I stand: By and large, Republican voters who claim that Biden stole the election are arguing from bad faith, not delusion.

This distinction is important because it shows that the intentions of Republican voters (and too many of their elected leaders) are sinister, and need to be taken seriously as an overt assault on democracy. Understanding modern politics means understanding one crucial reality about the current landscape: Conservatives don't hold beliefs, they only have rationalizations.

Many of their long-standing beliefs don't hold up to modern moral standards or rational scrutiny. Rather than give up those beliefs, however, Republicans have developed a series of disingenuous gambits, conspiracy theories and trolling tactics to derail conversations, sow confusion and otherwise distract those who would challenge their indefensible ideology.

Of course, it's morally indefensible to come right out and say you care more about keeping your gas guzzler than protecting the planet. So, instead, conservatives claim to be "skeptical" of climate science, wasting their interlocutor's time by forcing them to prove, over and over and over and over again, that climate change is real. Similarly, open contempt for women's rights is hard to argue, so instead, conservatives will claim concern for "fetal life" to justify support for forced childbirth — even though none of their other policy preferences point to concern about the wellbeing of children, much less fetuses.

Poll numbers showing that Republican voters "believe" that Trump lost the election are more of the same.

Conservatives know better than to openly argue that Democratic votes shouldn't be counted. So instead they concoct this elaborate conspiracy theory, painting themselves as the victims of voter fraud in order to justify an illegal effort to steal the election. The current situation is similar to the last time there was a widespread conspiracy theory aimed at delegitimizing a duly elected Democratic president. During Barack Obama's presidency, polling showed that large numbers of Republicans, often a majority, expressed "skepticism" that Obama was a natural-born citizen and therefore legally eligible to be president. As is the case now, Trump was a ringleader in pushing this "birther" conspiracy theory, helping to mainstream claims that Obama's presidency was illegitimate.

But did Republican voters really believe that Obama was born in Kenya? Or was it just a cover story for their real but unspeakable racist opposition to a Black man being president?

A 2014 study by Stanford researchers suggests strongly that for most birthers the conspiracy theory was bad faith and not a sincere error. The researchers compared different polls and found that how the poll questions were worded made a huge difference in conservative adherence to birtherism. When pollsters reminded respondents that only "natural-born" citizens can become president, nearly 60% of Republican voters readily denied Obama's citizenship. But when polls framed it as a test of knowledge of facts, by asking respondents where Obama was born, only 31% of conservatives espoused birther beliefs. These findings suggest that most conservatives weren't confused about where Obama was born. The conspiracy theory was just a way to express racist beliefs about the inherent illegitimacy of Black leaders by asking "questions" about Obama's birth certificate.

Trump knows how to tickle this racist impulse in his followers and, unsurprisingly, his claims that Biden "stole" the election follow the same formula. Trump and his main henchman, Rudy Giuliani, have specifically accused Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta — all cities where Black Americans are either a majority or a plurality of residents — of having "dumps" of illegal ballots.

The appeal of this conspiracy theory to racists isn't subtle. It's a way to deny the legitimacy of Black voters without coming right out and saying it. This isn't just a conspiracy theory about Trump's fragile ego. It speaks directly to long-standing right-wing fury at minority voting rights. Historian Jeffrey Herf notes another historical precedent at play, comparing Trump's conspiracy theory to the ones that rose up in Germany between the first and second world wars in a recent Washington Post op-ed:

[Trump's] efforts to deny the reality of defeat and threaten democracy recall the most famous comparable episode in modern European history — the claims by the German military and diplomatic establishment that Germany had not been defeated militarily in World War I. Instead, they argued, Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by liberals, socialists, communists and Jews who somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

In reality, Herf points out, the war was "lost because of the superiority of the Allied military" and German hubris leading to bad battlefield decisions. But claiming to believe otherwise gave conservative Germans a chance to save face and, perhaps more important, an excuse to bash other Germans — mostly leftists and Jews — who they didn't want to acknowledge as equal citizens. Was it bad faith or misapprehension? As I note in a recent newsletter, Jean-Paul Sartre felt strongly it was the former at the time, and argued the "bad faith" case in his famous 1946 essay on anti-Semitism.

So why does it matter?

As Greg Sargent writes at the Washington Post, "What Republican voters think, or say they think, about who really won matters less than the fact that, as a consequence, they actively want their elected representatives to subvert our democracy and keep Trump in power illegitimately."

Unfortunately, the belief that these folks are sincere in their claims that the election was "stolen" puts a glow of innocence on their actions. This leads many observers underestimate the seriousness of a situation where a large percentage of Americans are actively supporting a coup. It also focuses attention away from what needs to be done to fight back. The "delusion" model of understanding Republican behavior suggests that education is the solution. That was thoroughly disproven in the Obama years, when even the release of his long-form birth certificate did little to discourage GOP voters from denying his legitimacy.

Instead, it's important to see those who support Trump's coup for who they are: People who have been radicalized, through racism hateful propaganda and a sense of perpetual grievance, against democracy. They aren't going to change their minds because of new facts, because the underlying belief — which is that they deserve to be in power, no matter what — is the problem here. It's a rising American authoritarianism, and we underestimate it at our peril.

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rudy's star witness tells SarahPalin.com: 'The Obamas funded that Wuhan lab to make COVID'

Aldous Pennyfarthing Daily Kos

December 10, 2020

So you probably heard that Benito Shit-giggles is trying to overturn our election, and he's sent Four Seasons Total Lawyering founder Rudy G

an 12/6/20

just 27 out of 249 congressional Republicans acknowledge that Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, according to a Washington Post survey, and Trump on Saturday demanded that they be identified.

More than a month after President-elect Biden claimed a decisive victory over the lame-duck president—winning the popular vote by more than 7 million and garnering 306 votes in the Electoral College—Reps. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) still insist Trump won the race, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Another 220 GOP members of the House and Senate—roughly 88 percent of congressional Republicans—refuse to say who won.

Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey conducted this week.

Beginning "the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of 'corrupt forces' who stole the outcome from the sitting president," a team of 25 reporters contacted aides for all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate by email and phone, thePost explained.

In addition to researching "public statements made by GOP lawmakers in recent weeks to determine their stance on Biden's win," the Post reporters asked three questions:

  1. Who won the presidential contest?
  2. Do you support or oppose Trump's continuing efforts to claim victory?
  3. If Biden wins a majority in the Electoral College, will you accept him as the legitimately elected president?

According to the Post,only nine congressional Republicans oppose Trump's ongoing efforts to claim victory, nine others—including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)—support his attempt to overturn the election results, and 231 declined to answer.

Brooks and Gosar said they will not accept Biden as the legitimately elected president of the U.S. regardless of what happens when electors meet on December 14.

"In my judgement, this is the worst election theft in the history of the United States," Brooks said, while Gosar claimed that there is "too much evidence of fraud."

The lawmakers' statements come just days after Attorney General William Barr, a key Trump ally, admitted that "we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have" affected the outcome of the election, as Common Dreamsreported.

Thirty-two congressional Republicans said they will accept Biden's victory if he wins a majority in the Electoral College, and 215 did not respond.

The Post distilled the survey results into the following chart:...

an 1220

lt Gen. Thomas McInerney, a retired U.S. Air Force veteran, has not been shy about pushing ridiculous conspiracy theories — whether he was promoting the racist "birther" theory that President Barack Obama wasn't really born in the U.S. or claiming that the late Sen. John McCain divulged information to the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.

Now, McInerney is doubling down on his recent claim that U.S. Special Forces died during a recent attack on a CIA computer facility in Germany — where, McInerney claimed, information was being kept on a plot to flip votes from President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. But as Military.com explained, the Army has debunked McInerney's claims as nonsense.

reporter Gina Harkins explains, "No special forces soldiers were killed while seizing computer servers in Germany as part of a CIA operation after the presidential election. There was, in fact, no mission of the sort. And members of the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion are not 'the kraken' that an attorney for President Donald Trump said, last month, she'd be unleashing. The unit is not involved in any post-election missions supporting the White House — a move that would be highly unlikely considering it's an entry-level training battalion where new soldiers who haven't yet picked up their military occupational specialty are assigned."

The Trump attorney that Harkins is referring to is Sidney Powell, who promised to "release the kraken" with her lawsuits challenging Biden's victory. A kraken, in Scandinavian folklore, is a giant sea monster—and the expression "release the kraken" was used in the 1981 fantasy film, "The Clash of the Titans."

A U.S. Army official, discussing McInerney's election claims, told Military.com, "The allegations are false." Harkins notes that the 83-year-old McInerney "made the claims last weekend on a show hosted by Brannon Howse on the far-right WVW Broadcast Network, which streamed the discussion on YouTube. The claims quickly spread on social media, with users tying the retired general's comments to unsubstantiated allegations of fraud during November's presidential election.

in 2018, McInerney was banned from Fox News and Fox Business after appearing on Charles Payne's show and defaming McCain as "Songbird John," which was his way of making the baseless claim that McCain gave information to the View Cong while he was a POW during the Vietnam War. Before that, McInerney promoted the racist "birther" conspiracy theory and claimed that Obama was "constitutionally ineligible to hold office" because he wasn't really a U.S. citizen.

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new newt futurist? // soc med bias?

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannons-deranged-election-conspiracy-theories-ranked

no lnx vid

Steve Bannon's deranged election conspiracy theories, ranked

Bannon is light on details, heavy on apocalyptic innuendo

WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ

PUBLISHED 11/25/20 12:07 PM EST

I listen to Steve Bannon’s podcast for four hours a day, every day. While it's purported focus is the pandemic, at this point the show has devolved into a pro-beheading cesspool of election related conspiracy theories.

On the show, Bannon frequently brags about the size and diversity of his audience (the show is at the time of publication ranked 55th in Apple Podcast’s rankings). But though he considers himself a leader and a patriot, Bannon has failed his audience by deliberately squandering the opportunity to tell them the truth about urgent matters related to the election and the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, he services them lies and conspiracy theories about voter fraud and other vague, random Breitbart-style brain worms. In these sputtering sunset hours of the Trump legal defense, he’s live on YouTube for four hours every day repeating some combination of the following rabbit holes and falsehoods.

As such, Media Matters has compiled a non-exhaustive list of his various deranged election conspiracy theories and has ranked them from “extraordinarily” to “completely.”

  1. “The Great Reset” conspiracy theory

Derangement rating: Extraordinarily

Bannon has embraced a conspiracy theory about The Great Reset initiative led by the World Economic Forum, the organization focusing on public-private partnership that hosts the world leaders, billionaires, and business leaders at an annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland. Of all his falsehoods, this one is perhaps the most vague and unhinged.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) describes the Great Reset initiative as a collaborative effort among the organization’s sponsors “to build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being” in rebuilding a post-COVID world. The language may be vague and slightly creepy, but the initiative has no governance or enforcement mechanism -- its scope doesn’t extend beyond discourse. The Great Reset is also the title of a book written by Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive director of the World Economic Forum.

In Bannon-land, the great reset is an opportunity for the elite cabal to “depopulate” the earth to 500 million, then genetically engineer humankind using “the convergence of artificial intelligence, advances in chip design and bioengineering.” He explains that the Democrats are attempting to “steal this election” because “if they can thwart the will of the people in this country,” they’ll be able to achieve the great reset by taking down populist movements in other countries as well.

Video file

Video Player

00:00

03:16

CitationFrom the November 16, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): You’ve got [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau up there talking about the great reset. This is what the whole deal is. This is what they’re going to try to do. this is globalization on steroids. A system -- I think it’s actually a combination of state capitalism and authoritarian rule that lets your [UNINTELLIGIBLE] betters -- as they depopulate.

…

:{

}:

These oligarchs, and I call them the AI aliens, right, because they’re all on the spectrum, right. They have no human compassion or empathy. They look at the deplorables as just cogs in the machine. They look at lao bai xing as units of production and consumption, and they would like the earth not to have 6 billion people or 7 billion people. They’d like the earth to have 500 million people, which would be all them. And -- I said one time in Italy that the purpose of populism is to make sure that the guys that make the decisions on the world economic system today were not the same people -- that’s why we had to confront it now -- were not the same people making the decisions on the singularity, that convergence -- and that’s what the fourth industrial revolution really is is the convergence of artificial intelligence, advances in chip design and bioengineering. They never want to talk about the bioengineering piece, right. The singularity is on one side homo sapiens, on the other side is something that’s post-homo sapien. 

…

That singularity is going to be within the lifetime of our children. Maybe in the next 20, 25, 30, years. They don’t want to talk about that. That’s not conspiracy theory. I don’t have my -- it’s just a Harvard Business School case, right, to be deconstructed. And it’s obvious the direction they’re taking this, the great reset. Listen, we’re winning. But victory begets victory so Jack, I love the speech but hey, if they steal this election, it’s not about Trump. It’s not about Donald Trump as a person. If they steal this election they have basically thwarted the will of the people in the greatest republic in mankind’s history. If they can thwart the will of the people in this country, that’s how they try to break Brazil. That’s how they try to break Italy. That’s how they try to break the lao bai xing, the diaspora of the Chinese.

On November 20, Bannon returned to the conspiracy theory, saying “the deplorables understand” that Democrats are “trying to steal” the election in order to implement the great reset, which will involve “the convergence of advanced chip design, robotics, artificial intelligence with biotechnology.”

Video file....[many more

// metaphor; immune sys digestive sys goes on overdrive?

aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now  self-ish vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum

long term means more entities,  more events thus more complexity (tho a story can simplify/screen/ change emphasis, make a pattern (even where none exists, eg qanon) thus meaning, which then acts as term screen filter to repell conflicting/anomalous/dissonance info ); but fills vacuum need, that previously would have been filled by experts/textbooks/teachers/leaders/pastors?

:{

}:

aha conspiracy theories just this stew of memes that get recycled and combined?  related to pseudo-populism? the system is rigged, just not in the way you think. triggered by klown kar coup rudy elite strike team and fluoride below

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-voters-2649007931/

roger s salon

Plaintiffs in a number of the Trump campaign's lawsuits challenging the president's electoral defeat have peddled conspiracy theories and made racist comments. One of them, a plaintiff represented by Rudy Giuliani in federal court this week, was even implicated in an election fraud scheme of his own.

The new revelations, first reported by Salon, add another dimension of doubt to President Donald Trump's widely discredited, last-ditch legal challenges to President-elect Joe Biden's electoral victory.

"We are through the looking glass when Rudy Giuliani is appearing in court to allege voter fraud in the presidential race on behalf of a plaintiff who has previously been implicated in election fraud schemes himself," Kyle Herrig, president of government watchdog Accountable.US, told Salon in a statement. "The plaintiffs in these cases have long histories peddling conspiracy theories online. It is time for this legal freak-show to exit the courtroom and go back to the chat room where it belongs."

Among the more recent of the campaign's lawsuits is a complaint filed in Pennsylvania, which seeks a court order to block the certification of votes in the state. Giuliani took over that case on Tuesday, when he made his first arguments before a federal bench since 1992.

The amended complaint to that case includes allegations from a Uniontown resident named Larry Roberts, who claims the state did not notify him after his ballot was canceled.

"We are through the looking glass when Rudy Giuliani is appearing in court to allege voter fraud in the presidential race on behalf of a plaintiff who has previously been implicated in election fraud schemes himself," Kyle Herrig, president of government watchdog Accountable.US, told Salon in a statement. "The plaintiffs in these cases have long histories peddling conspiracy theories online. It is time for this legal freak-show to exit the courtroom and go back to the chat room where it belongs."

Among the more recent of the campaign's lawsuits is a complaint filed in Pennsylvania, which seeks a court order to block the certification of votes in the state. Giuliani took over that case on Tuesday, when he made his first arguments before a federal bench since 1992.

The amended complaint to that case includes allegations from a Uniontown resident named Larry Roberts, who claims the state did not notify him after his ballot was canceled.

Roberts is a former Pennsylvania Democratic state representative, who served from 1993-2006. During that time, he was accused of violating campaign laws multiple times, including election fraud.

In 2004, Roberts was accused of bribing a stalking-horse candidate to siphon primary votes from a Democratic challenger. That spoiler candidate, Michael Ciampanelli, at the time 20 years old, told the local board of elections that Roberts had paid him $200 to put his name on the ballot. A state grand jury investigated the claims, as did the attorney general, but what became of the probe is unclear.

That same year, the rival also accused Roberts of forging 33 signatures on his own nominating petition. The allegation was backed up by a woman who worked in one of Roberts' offices. The woman said Roberts staff told her to lie about the matter, warning her she could face jail time "if the real story came out," according to the Associated Press.

In 2007, the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission slapped Roberts with a $600 fine for violations in 2001 and 2004, including unlawfully using legislative staff to organize campaign events and co-opting his legislative office as a drop-off point for campaign materials.

A separate Pennsylvania lawsuit dropped on Thursday by the campaign featured Ted Dannerth as a plaintiff, a man who has repeatedly spread conspiracy theories online.

For instance, Dannerth has tweeted multipletimes this year about "Project Blue Beam," an apparent reference to a fringe conspiracy theory falsely claiming that a NASA-Illuminati joint effort is engineering earthquakes in order to establish a new-age religion led by the antichrist. Dannerth has also called women a "weapon" against what he considers to be the "imminent threat" of sterility that would accompany a COVID-19 vaccine.

The Trump campaign plaintiff stitched a number of baseless fringe, QAnon-adjacent theories together in a lengthy Facebook post this April. Among other things, he claimed that Oprah Winfrey's house had been raided in a sex-trafficking sting and the media had brainwashed Americans against the president, who "is working from the bottom up, to remove the Democrat/Communist/Socialist Epstein/Deep State/CCP scourge from the planet."

Dannerth was also involved in a previous 2020 election lawsuit challenging public use of a private grant to fund election initiatives over his opposition to "the election of progressive candidates in local, state and federal elections." That suit was dismissed by District Judge Matthew Brann, who is presiding over the Trump campaign's current lawsuit.

Several plaintiffs in the campaign's challenge to block Michigan canvassers from certifying Detroit-area ballots present similar personal histories.

Eric Ostergen, a Republican poll challenger named in the suit, has repeatedly pushed misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. This April, he shared a Washington Times op-ed calling coronavirus "the biggest hoax in political history," on Facebook. In a separate post, he endorsed the since-discredited treatment hydroxychloroquine.

Ostergen posted two times on Facebook about lawsuits he filed against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., over coronavirus measures, saying that "the tyrants will now be reeled in." He has also denied climate change science on Facebook, a platform where he has also posted baseless claims about Hunter Biden's laptop and voter fraud in Detroit's 2016 election.

The Trump campaign's Michigan case also features another coronavirus truther, Marian Sheridan, head of the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC), who in October led a "guard the vote" project after Trump's calls to recruit an "army" of poll-watchers.

In April, Sheridan's group staged "Operation Gridlock," where thousands of protesters jammed the streets of Lansing with their vehicles to express displeasure with Whitmer's stay-home orders. MCC also launched "Operation Haircut" in defense of a barber who opened his shop for illegal haircuts amid the state's lockdowns. And Sheridan hosted a Tea Party event to educate the public about "the common roots of COVID-19 hysteria and climate change."

A third plaintiff in the Michigan lawsuit, Grosse Pointe City Councilman Matt Seely, has mocked allegations of sexual assault in social media posts, including against Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

"I'M SORRY THAT BAD MAN TOUCHED YOU INAPPROPRIATELY," read one meme, featuring a crying woman, which Seely shared during the Kavanaugh hearings. "LET'S WAIT 30 OR 40 YEARS … UNTIL HE RUNS FOR OFFICE … AGAINST A DEMOCRAT."

Seely also drew criticism for a social media post in which he connected four Democratic Congresswomen of color, known collectively as "the Squad," to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the post — which was published on the 2019 anniversary of the attacks — Seely said the elevation of those women to Congress was "proof we have forgotten" about 9/11. The words accompanied a picture of the Twin Towers on fire.

Seely pushed back against criticism over the post, saying he could express political views on his private Facebook page. In doing so, he was backed by the mayor of Grosse Pointe Shores and other city council members.

In Nevada, former Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle — who already had a mail-in ballot case tossed in October — filed a lawsuit parallel to other GOP election challenges in the state, asking the court to stop the state from certifying its votes.

Angle is known for repeatedly pushing right-wing conspiracy theories, such as warning that American towns would fall to Sharia law and claiming fluoride in drinking water is a "communist plot to undermine Western democracy."

In a radio interview ahead of the 2010 midterms, Angle, who at the time was running against Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, alluded to armed insurrection as a remedy for a liberal Congress, saying — citing Thomas Jefferson — that "it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years."

"I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, 'My goodness, what can we do to turn this country around?" Angle said. "I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/did-donald-trump-steal-the-election-2648992261/

digby

Back in September, Politico's Anita Kumar reportedthat for the previous year the Trump campaign had been assembling a team of election lawyers from all over the country to familiarize themselves in local election laws and prepare "prewritten legal pleadings that can be hurried to the courthouse the day after the election, as wrangling begins over close results and a crush of mail-in ballots." The effort was led by "a 20-person team of lawyers" from major law firms who were overseeing a strategy in "key states the Trump campaign is targeting, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan." It sounded like a very serious and professional operation, one which came as no surprise to me, since Republicans have specialized in disenfranchising Democratic voters for many decades.

Trump himself repeatedly made clear on the campaign trail what he planned to do, from contesting the validity of mail-in ballots to declaring himself the winner on election night regardless of whether the votes had been counted and filing a flurry of lawsuits contesting the election with an eye toward having "his" judges (including newly-minted Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett) deliver the election to him if necessary. I don't think anyone can possibly say they are surprised at how he has reacted to losing the election.

In the weeks before Nov. 3, Trump did have that team of high-powered legal talent arguing cases around mail-in ballots and shifting deadlines in various states, some of which did make it to the Supreme Court. But then the election actually happened and vote-counting began, and since then Trump's crack team has been been remarkably unsuccessful. The good lawyers have either been pressured to to quit orthrew in the towel themselves as it became patently obvious that they had no evidence of voter fraud.

That hasn't stopped Trump from plowing ahead anyway with the self-described "elite strike force" led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, last seen prior to the election with his hand down his pants in the latest Borat movie and famously presiding over a post-election press conference at a landscaping company next door to a sex shop and a crematorium. Trump was evidently impressed by Rudy's performance in both venues, because he gave the former LifeLock spokesman (hat tip to Salon's Roger Sollenberger) full authority to conduct the legal strategy to overturn the election results by any means necessary.

CNN reports that Giuliani has taken full control. For instance, upset by what he was hearing from three of the lawyers assigned to argue one of the Pennsylvania cases, the man once described as "America's mayor" fired them on the spot and took over the case — which was being argued the very next day — himself. He hadn't been inside a courtroom in more than 30 years, and it showed. He was very nearly laughed out of court.

Giuliani was undaunted. He immediately pulled together the other members of the "elite strike force": Sidney Powell, who is former national security adviser Michael Flynn's Fox News lawyer; veteran right-wing husband and wife team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, also Fox News lawyers; and over-the-top Trump defender and campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis. None of them have any expertise in election law, but then they don't have a legal strategy either.

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and "save democracy" from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

This idea has been pushed by conservative talk show host Mark Levin and picked up by the right wing as a way to keep their beloved president in office for at least four more years. It's a theory that is very unlikely to prevail, particularly since the Supreme Court just decided a case on "faithless electors" last July, in which the justices made it very clear that whatever the founders may have anticipated in the 18th century, our democracy today demands that electors express the will of the people. It will take some convoluted intellectual gyrations for them to conclude that state officials can simply change the results at their discretion.

In order to blow the smoke as thick as possible, Giuliani and the "strike force" held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday which was so surreal that it may have displaced the COVID task force briefing where Trump suggested that people might inject disinfectant as the all-time weirdest press conference of the Trump era.

Giuliani, Powell and Ellis held forth for 90 minutes, going full Infowars and throwing out one insane conspiracy theory after another. They said that Dominion voting machines had been created by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (who has been dead for seven years) and financed by George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and "communistic" countries China and Cuba. Just in case that didn't work, the corrupt Democrats had also rigged the vote with a sophisticated computer hack that was only foiled because Trump won so overwhelmingly that it tripped up the algorithm which allowed the "strike force" to catch them in the act. Also, the mail-in ballots were fraudulent because so many of them were filled out properly. (Yes! The fact that there were very few problems with mail-in votes was somehow evidence they were fake!)

Meanwhile, rivulets of black liquid were running down Giuliani's face as if he were an extra in an Alice Cooper video from the 1970s. The assumption is that it was some kind of temporary hair dye. But it could have been embalming fluid, for all we know.

Powell later made the rounds to expand on their theory and she made no bones about what they hope to do:

You'll notice that she just blithely uses the term "overturn," as if that were perfectly normal.

If that doesn't work, the "strike force" are also talking about a Plan C, which would be to delay the vote certification for so long that the states can't send Biden's required 270 electors to Congress by the deadline, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution would throw the election to the House, where every state's delegation gets one vote. As luck would have it Republicans hold 26 of the 50 delegations. Surprise!

Is any of this remotely possible? Sure. It's unlikely, but it's possible. It's tempting to think this is all so nuts that it could never possibly happen, but we thought everything Donald Trump has done over the past five years was nuts, and here we are. All our hand-wringing about this plot being un-American and destructive to our democracy is sadly irrelevant — not just to the preposterous Giuliani and the equally preposterous Trump but to the entire Republican Party. They have learned the power of total shamelessness, and it is profound. I would never count them out.

rww 1120

[pix: Right-wing activist Larry Klayman represents the source for a debunked claim about a supercomputer stealing the 2020 election from Trump.

As Right Wing Watch has been reporting, many of President Donald Trump’s religious-right backers are parroting and amplifying his unjustified clams that he won the presidential election and that Democrats are out to steal it from him. One of the most ardent pro-Trump media outlets, the Pentecostal-oriented Charisma, has now erased whatever blurry line might have existed between partisan propaganda, conspiracy theory, and outright misinformation.

In a Monday evening post, Charisma contributor Amir George quoted religious-right activist Franklin Graham saying the election isn’t over and calling on his followers not to give up or “stop asking for God’s help and mercy on this country.”

George’s post then went off the rails, talking about the “stunning news that a powerful supercomputer known as ‘The Hammer’ has been combined with a software system called ‘Scorecard’ to alter 3% of the votes when they are sent from local ballot offices to central counting systems.”

The Charisma post cites “government contractor Dennis Montgomery” as the sourcefor the claim, arguing that “it is imperative for citizens to stand up for the blatant attempt to overthrow an election dramatically won by President Trump.”

Reporter Will Sommer exposed the dubious source of the“Hammer” supercomputer hoaxat The Daily Beast. “The head of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has called the claim about supercomputer election fraud ‘nonsense,’ and urged Americans not to promote it,” Sommer reported.

Sommer noted that “Montgomery has a long history of making outlandish claims that fail to come true” and “was behind what’s been called ‘one of the most elaborate and dangerous hoaxes in American history,’ churning out allegedly fictitious data that one prompted the Bush administration to consider shooting down airplanes.”

The “Hammer” hoax has been debunked by Snopes and Lead Stories. It has been spread by former White House aide Steve Bannon, guests on Fox News, other right-wing media outlets—and now Charisma.

Montgomery’s credibility is not exactly enhanced by the fact thathis lawyer is right-wing crank and conspiracy theorist Larry Klayman, who once held a far-from-successful rally in Washington D.C. that he hoped would draw millions to “occupy” the nation’s capital and force then-President Barack Obama to leave office.

Tags: Amir George Donald Trump Franklin Graham conspiracy theories Election 2020 Stop the Steal Charisma

https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-can-only-explain-election-one-way-vast-conspiracy-theories

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/did-donald-trump-steal-the-election/

 (AFP) - All it took was a Facebook page and a hashtag: As election tallies trickled in Donald Trump supporters were busy going viral, accelerating the unsubstantiated claim that Democrats were "stealing" the election under the rallying cry #StopTheSteal.  It lived just 48 hours but the page quickly racked up 350,000 members, people subscribing to the conspiracy theory the Republican president too has been touting to his 88 million Twitter followers.  Trump's social media "influencers" -- his son Donald Trump Jr, or the spokesperson of the Republican party Elizabeth Harrington -- also play...

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

==

https://www.salon.com/2020/10/19/fox-news-rejected-hunter-biden-expos-new-york-post-writer-refused-to-put-his-name-on-it-reports/

oct 20?

when former LifeLock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani approached Fox News with the trove of emails he alleged had been retrieved from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the network declined to run the story over concerns about its credibility, according to a new report.

Sources told Mediaite that "the lack of authentication of Hunter Biden's alleged laptop, combined with established concerns about Giuliani as a reliable source and his desire for unvetted publication, led the network's news division to pass."

Giuliani previously told The New York Times that he had chosen to place the material with The New York Post because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out."

The Post, a sister company of Fox News, published the unverified emails in a Wednesday exposé, which drew widespread blowback for its dubious sourcing. The Times earlier reported that most of The Post article had been written by a staff reporter who refused to allow the tabloid to attach his name to the byline over doubts about the article's credibility.

The alleged emails informing the article were obtained in a circuitous route by two Trump allies: Giuliani and former White House strategist **Steve Bannon,** who currently faces wire fraud and money laundering charges in a federal court. The pair gave the outlet a copy of what they claimed was content copied from a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, the youngest son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, which they said had been obtained from a computer repairman who wished to remain anonymous.

The repairman told a group of reporters last week that a man named Hunter Biden had dropped the laptop off at his store, but medical issues with his vision prevented him from making an identification.

A number of Post staffers questioned the vetting process for the article and expressed concerns about the sources and the timing as the election nears, The Times reported. Upon publication, other journalists pointed out major errors and holes in article, and the FBI has since opened an investigation into the story as part of a possible Russian disinformation operation, according to multiple reports.

The Times also reported that one of the article's two bylined authors had first learned that her name was on the report after publication; the other writer never previously had a byline at the paper. Both writers formerly worked at Fox News.

The Trump-friendly cable network's so-called "Brain Room" had previously warned hosts about Giuliani's reputation for "amplifying disinformation,"according to The Daily Beast.

One day after The Post published its story, The Washington Post reported that U.S. officials had repeatedly warned the White House in 2019 that Giuliani was a target of Russian intelligence, and information he passed along might be tainted by his interactions with pro-Putin officials in Ukraine.

In the days leading up to publication, a team of The New York Post's top editors met to determine a course of action, including the editor-in-chief and the digital editor-in-chief, a person with knowledge of the meeting told The Times. At least two writers refused to put their names on the report, according to The Times.

The bylines eventually went to Emma-Jo Morris — a deputy politics editor who joined the Murdoch-owned tabloid this spring after four years at Fox News — and Gabrielle Fonrouge, a reporter at The Post since 2014.

At Fox, Morris worked as an associate producer for Trump "pillow-talk" confidante Sean Hannity,according to her LinkedIn profile.Morris' Instagram, which has sent been set to private, included photos of her posing with Bannon and Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally and Republican operative. In July, President Donald Trump commuted Stone's sentence on seven felony counts.

Fonrouge, the article's other acknowledged writer, "had little to do with the reporting or writing of the article," according to The Times.

"The senior editors at The Post made the decision to publish the Biden files after several days' hard work established its merit," a senior Post official told The Times in an email.

The Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have all reported that they were not able to independently verify The New York Post's reporting or the contents of the hard drive.

News outlets have repeatedly debunked allegations of corruption against the Bidens, and a roundly discredited investigation by Senate Republicans — predicated in part on information Giuliani acquired from a Russian agent sanctioned by the Trump administration — found no evidence that the former vice president had engaged in wrongdoing related to his son's business dealings.

Reports of the FBI investigation echoed headlines from the final weeks of the 2016 election cycle, when U.S. intelligence agencies began probing whether individuals connected to the Trump campaign were involved in Russian government efforts to harm Hillary Clinton via dumps of emails stolen from Democratic officials.

"At least in 2016, Trump's allies pushed powerful disinformation," national security attorney Bradley Moss told Salon last week. "These last-ditch efforts barely qualify as trying anymore."

"It's a garbage fire story with obscene numbers of legal holes and flaws," he added.

A Post spokeswoman told The Times in a statement that the story had been "vetted," and it "stands by its reporting."

Roger Sollenberger is a staff writer at Salon.

aha/doh:  --> echo bubble (and amp)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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....

~ putin bounty $?  plus bin laden win not real

https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/bizarre-benghazi-conspiracy-theory-traveled-through-right-wing-echo-chamber

Over the last several days, a fringe right-wing narrative has been circulating alleging a secret plot among Obama administration officials and the CIA to protect Osama bin Laden and assassinate members of SEAL Team 6. The claims appear to have originated at a conservative conference last weekend and quickly spread across the internet, reaching President Donald Trump by Tuesday evening when he retweeted an unverified account affiliated with QAnon. This conspiracy theory is not the first time that the president has amplified fringe, far-right accounts, but it shows the speed that such false and baseless claims can spread on social media through the web of far-right outlets and fringe conspiracy theorists.

A conservative conference legitimizes a wild, Benghazi-related conspiracy theory

The claim seems to have originated from AmpFest 2020, a conservative conference hosted by American Priorityand held in Miami during October 8-11. Charles Woods, the father of a victim of the 2014 Benghazi attacks, and Nick Noe, a conservative activist who has repeatedly pushedBenghazi conspiracy theories, gave a presentation featuring aninterview with “whistleblower” Alan Howell Parrot, who claims to have worked for U.S. intelligence. Parrot alleges that the Obama administration made a $152 billion payout to Iran to cover up the truth about hiding bin Laden and the killing of SEAL Team 6 members. Similar conspiracy theories have circulated regarding the attacks and the Iran nuclear deal, and Trump even referenced some during the 2016 campaign. But all have been debunked.

As The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer explained:

Parrot claims that Biden cut a deal with Iran to set up Bin Laden’s 2011 death in Pakistan. But when Iran double-crossed the United States and switched in a Bin Laden body double, in Parrot’s telling, Biden and Clinton arranged for a Navy SEAL helicopter to be shot down to keep the truth about the raid from getting out— a reference to a real-world helicopter attack in Afghanistan that killed 38 people, including 25 Navy SEALs.

“Vice President Biden paid with the blood of Seal Team 6,” Parrot said in the video. “He spent their blood like currency.”

Later in the video, Noe claims that the Benghazi compound was attacked to cover up the fact that, supposedly, the missile used in the helicopter attack came from the United States.[false flag?]

“It’s just so wicked,” Parrot said in the video, adding that he has “terabytes” of evidence to prove the conspiracy theory to Trump.

The video clip containing the conspiracy theory appeared online

On October 11, conservative personality Anna Khait tweeted about the presentation alongside a video clip of Parrot’s claims, which went viral and currently has 1.2 million views. The next day, Khait tweeted a YouTube interview with Noe, including the hashtags “#BenghaziAintGoingAway #BenghaziBombshell.” Khait also tweeted out a YouTube video of a panel interview with Woods and Noe at AmpFest. Both videos received hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.

On October 12, YouTube conspiracy theory channel The Next News Network also published an interview with Khait on the new findings, which currently has nearly 2.9 million YouTube views. The story was further pushed by right-wing blog DJHJ Media’s Kari Donovan, QAnon-adjacent YouTube channel RedPill789, and dubious Iranian blogger Heshmat Alavi, who was recently reported by The Intercept as being a seemingly fake persona created by an Iranian opposition group.

The story circulated on right-wing YouTube, Twitter, and fringe blogs until Trump shared the post 

On October 13, Donavan’s blog post was tweeted by user @The171111 alongside the claim that “Hiden Biden and Obama may have had Seal Team 6 killed,” which was then retweeted by Trump. The account, which also reportedly pushed QAnon content, has since been suspended by Twitter. Donovan and Khait both posted that Noe is releasing documents on Twitter that prove the conspiracy theory. Noe, on his part, sent out a series of disjointed tweets which supposedly contain audio transcripts from Parrot.

Message boards and QAnon supporters picked up on the wild claims

Throughout Tuesday, the story continued to spread in the fringe far-right ecosystem; it was pushed by QAnon influencer Praying Medicon Twitter, and multiple large 4chan threads on the far-right “politically incorrect” message board known as “/pol/.”

Former Navy SEAL Craig Sawyer and Project Veritas “whistleblower” Ryan Hartwig both tweeted about the story. Former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney tweeted a link to the Next News Network interview, and QAnon account “Greg Rubini” -- who is actually “Gregorio Palusa, a 61-year-old Italian sound engineer and marketer with no national security or intelligence credentials” -- tweeted that he can “now officially confirm that Trump KNOWS: he has been informed of the whole thing, and given documents & files”; Rubini’s tweet got over 12,000 retweets and 26,000 likes.

On October 14, Khait published two more YouTube videos claiming to have 2011 audio recordings from Parrot discussing the conspiracy with others. Far-right accounts and message boards continued to push the story on Wednesday along with Trump’s amplification, which some took as proof of the story.

Hashtags helped the conspiracy theory spread between platforms 

In addition to individual accounts pushing the story, the following hashtags flooded social media with claims about the conspiracy theory: #BenghaziAintGoingAway, #SEALTeam6, #OsamaBinLaden, #BenghaziBombshell, #Benghazi, #SealTeamSix.

This debacle is yet another example of the president of the United States promoting fringe conspiracy theories; Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan has found that Trump has promoted QAnon accounts on Twitter over 200 times throughout his presidency.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/americans-have-always-spun-tale-of-conpiracy-but-trump-takes-the-delusion-to-a-new-level/

1020

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/john-ratcliffe-back-his-bullshit-and-fox-news-loves-it

John Ratcliffe, President Donald Trump’s handpicked director of national intelligence, is selectively declassifying documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. His politically motivated disinformation campaign puts bolstering the president’s faltering reelection chances above U.S. national security. And he has found eager partners at Fox News. The network’s hosts are lapping up the story and baselessly claiming that it vindicates their conspiracy theories that the federal investigation into Russia’s actions was an anti-Trump witch hunt.

For years, Fox has been trying to delegitimize the voluminous evidence that Russia helped Trump win the 2016 election. Russian President Vladimir Putin personally “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed” at helping Trump defeat his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the U.S. intelligence community. That campaign included a Putin-directed effort to hack and release Democratic emails and an array of interactions between Trump associates and Russians with ties to the Kremlin. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian operation led to the successful prosecutions of various close supporters of the president. But for Fox’s propagandists, the real story has been “Obamagate,” the right’s spittle-flecked conspiracy theory postulating that “deep state” elements in the U.S. government dreamed up a Russia “hoax” in order to stop Trump.

Trump, a Fox obsessive, is an eager “Obamagate” proponent, and over the last few years, he has replaced key figures in his administration with partisan Fox favorites who are willing to use their positions to prop up the network’s unhinged conspiracy theory. He removed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself from the Mueller probe, in favor of William Barr, who has worked to stymie Mueller-related prosecutions while ordering and overseeing a federal criminal probe into the origins of the Russia investigation. He used the same playbook at the top of the intelligence community, ousting Joseph Maguire, whose office had warned of Russian interference in the 2020 election, and subbing in Richard Grenell, a former Fox contributor who used the office to create fodder for pro-Trump conspiracy theorists. 

And now Ratcliffe, who replaced Grenell in May after gaining Trump’s favor despite a lack of experience in intelligence because the president liked his anti-Mueller rants on Fox, has levied his own salvo. On Tuesday, he selectively declassified and released two heavily redacted documents: a set of handwritten notes former CIA Director John Brennan took after briefing President Barack Obama in July 2016 and a memo the CIA prepared for the FBI summarizing intelligence. Those documents undergird a Russian intelligence assessment Ratcliffe described in a letter he sent last month to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Fox, unsurprisingly, was given the exclusive on the documents, and it credulously reported that they reveal that Brennan briefed Obama on Clinton’s “purported ‘plan’ to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as ‘a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server’ ahead of the 2016 presidential election.”

If Ratcliffe’s aim was to create political ammunition for the president and his Fox propagandists, he succeeded. The story led the network’s website on Tuesday night and was treated as a “bombshell” by Fox’s pro-Trump prime-time and morning hosts, who alleged that it proved that Clinton had “invented the Russia hoax” to deflect attention from her email server. And Trump furiously tweeted about the story on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, demanding arrests for what he baselessly termed had been an attempted “COUP."

This is nonsense.

The Russia probe did not begin due to anything Clinton did in July 2016. It was initiated based on earlier intel that George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, had disclosed that Russia had political dirt on Clinton.Papadopoulos, a bipartisan Senate report later assessed, was a “potential vector for malign Russian influence” who learned about the Russian hacking campaign from an individual with Russian ties and almost certainly informed the Trump campaign.

The notion that Clinton was secretly scheming to link Trump to Russia to avoid talking about her email server doesn’t meet the laugh test. At the time Brennan was briefing Obama, that hacking campaign was ongoing. WikiLeaks had just released thousands of Democratic National Committee emails, it was widely believed that those emails had been stolen by Russian hackers, and Clinton’s campaign was publicly denouncing Trump for calling on the Russian government to produce her emails while also denying that government’s involvement.

Ratcliffe’s selective redactions were also deceptive.“Four people familiar with the matter said the Russians’ assessment of Clinton was only one part of a larger intelligence report that was billed as an initial examination of Russian cyberattacks targeting the 2016 election, and was not the reason that it was referred to the bureau,” Politico reported Tuesday. Likewise, Brennan explained to CNN that the notes Ratcliffe released showed him “giving examples of the type of access that the US intelligence community had to Russian information and what the Russians were talking about and alleging.”

Moreover, the Russian intelligence assessment Ratcliffe produced had previously been rejected on a bipartisan basis as likely Russian disinformation intended to distract from their hacking of the Democratic National Committee as those documents were released.

This pipeline from the DNI’s office to Fox will continue as long as Trump is president. Ratcliffe is doing exactly what Trump wants him to do, using the power of the director of national intelligence to boost his reelection. And Fox is doing what they always do, serving as a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Russian effort to help Trump win the 2020 election continues.

Rep. John Ratcliffe loves Fox's Russia probe conspiracy theories. He was just confirmed to oversee U.S. intelligence.

07/29/19 1:02 PM EDT

The Foxification of the intelligence community follows the DOJ script

02/21/20 2:04 PM EST

“Obamagate” is just a rebrand of the right’s bogus “deep state” conspiracy theory

05/18/20 10:24 AM EDT

 Trump administration and Fox News are trying to gin up a scandal that would do to the 2020 election what Hillary Clinton's emails did to the 2016 election. There's no reason that anyone has to play along with the deceit.

The short version:

Objectively speaking, there is no reason to be talking aboutClinton's emails in 2020. She's not on the ballot, and a multi-year investigation by the State Department concluded in 2019 that there had been no mishandling of classified information.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/inside-qanons-toxic-spread-among-police-officers/

The problem with police officers being white supremacists is an obvious one: The public cannot have confidence that laws will be enforced equitably when even one such officer employed is racially bigoted or generally unhinged. The problem is somewhat less obvious when cops succumb to conspiracy theories, especially considering their spread into the mainstream in recent years—but it can be every bit as big a problem, especially when it involves an authoritarian political cult like QAnon.

And QAnon is indeed spreading among the ranks of American police officers, as Ali Breland recently explored at Mother Jones.Breland explains that this spread is particularly worrisome because of the peculiar nature of the QAnon theories themselves. "The logic of the conspiracy theory almost requires its adherents to carry out acts of violence: If you actually believe that elites are harboring scores of children in underground tunnels to rape and steal blood from, taking action to liberate them would be a moral imperative," he writes.QAnon seems to have taken root withinNew York City's police department in particular: 

The head of the department's second-biggest union gave a televised interview with a QAnon coffee cup in full view on the shelf behind him, and offered no clarification or apology afterward. The Harlem NYPD precinct's social media account retweeted a number of QAnon-related posts (including one accusing the mail-order business Wayfair of "sex trafficking young girls"), along with a number of Donald Trump tweets that spread misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and mail-in voting.

However, the conspiracist cult has spread to police precincts all around the nation. By far the most public and prolific of the officers adopting the conspiracy theories is Jason Bandy, who was formerly employed by the New Haven, Connecticut, police department.

Bandy has produced nearly 30 episodes of a podcast devoted to QAnon conspiracy theories, where he holds forth at length about a variety of dubious claims, gullibly relaying them all to his audience.

"Theseelites are torturing these kids," Bandy said in a March 22 podcast. "Yes, there's sex involved. They're trafficking these children and all these other rituals that they do. They are Satanic worshipers. They are Illuminati. Deep state, all this."

Bandy believes the ultimate proof of QAnon's substance is the fact that Donald Trump—around whom the theories revolve as the chief heroic figure—has refused to disavow them:

But my thing is look, Donald Trump calls fake everything out. If this stuff is fake, he'd be the first one to say, "Hey, this is fake." That's not what he said. When they asked him, "Do you know what Q is?" he said, "I'm not gonna say, but I'm just gonna tell you I think you'd be really surprised."

Bandy retired from the New Haven department in September after Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said there would be an internal affairs investigation into his posts, which remains ongoing.

Police in Bellevue, Washington, also suspended an officer—Nico Roche, who only recently joined the city's police department—after his frequent QAnon-related social-media posts became known. (A spokesperson told Daily Kos that the internal investigation, announced in June, will be completed soon.) His chief, Steve Mylett, told KIRO-TV in Seattle that the investigation would try to balance the officer's rights with the public's.

"The employee has constitutional rights, as everybody else, officers do. He's got freedom of speech, freedom of expression. We carry a burden and our standard is very high because of the work that we do and what we represent," said Mylett.

Not all jurisdictions take it seriously. In Joliet, Illinois, two officers who wore "Q" vests while participating in an anti-COVID-19 rally in Springfield were defended by the city's mayor, Jeff Grove, who told the local newspaper that he intended to judge the officers solely on the basis of their daily work, adding that in his view, "what you do on your own time is your choice, and that's your right." If any issues arise, he said, "we'll definitely be addressing them."

The officers—Matthew Kunkel and Mark Manicki—were even more aggressive in defending their associations with the conspiracy cult. "I, like millions of other people on this planet, enjoy the challenge of attempting to decode the information contained within the Q drops. It's called 'Q Research' for a reason, it requires research to obtain the information encoded within the posts," Manicki explained to theTimes. "I'm merely someone who sits on my couch late at night with my dog on my lap, iPhone in hand, while seeking the truth. Last time I checked, there was nothing wrong with that!"

In reality, the FBI has previously identified the QAnon cult as one of the leading sectors for the kind of conspiracism that, as the agency put it in a bulletin that was issued to law enforcement officers, is "very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity. The FBI further assesses in some cases these conspiracy theories very likely encourage the targeting of specific people, places, and organizations, thereby increasing the likelihood of violence against these targets."

And it warned that this is indeed a threat to public safety: "Anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace over the near term, fostering anti-government sentiment, promoting racial and religious prejudice, increasing political tensions, and occasionally driving both groups and individuals to commit criminal or violent acts," the bulletin read.

It lists several domestic terrorism cases as examples of conspiracy-fueled crimes, including a widely reported incident in July 2018 when a fervent believer in the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theories blocked traffic across Hoover Dam in Nevada, as well as a 2013 attack on security officers at Los Angeles International Airport.

The bulletin also mentions two incidents that had not been previously reported in the media:

The memo is also remarkably astute in its assessment of the mechanics of conspiracist radicalization. Its definition of "conspiracy theory" may lack an esoteric component, but it is pragmatic and to the point: "an attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others." It explains how they "typically allege wrongdoing by powerful others (for example, public officials, business executives, scientists) or societally marginalized groups (for example, Muslims, Jews), and are most prevalent among individuals with extreme political views."

It points directly to the aspect of conspiracism that gives it an unusual power to unhinge its believers: namely, the estrangement from factual reality.

Conspiracy theories typically "ignore stronger evidence that would refute their claims. Consequently, they are usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events."

"Relying on the premises that nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected, conspiracy theorists tend to view every bad outcome as the result of an intentional decision by an evil actor, dismiss disconfirming evidence as 'fabricated' by the conspirators, and connect a wide range of seemingly unrelated occurrences to suggest a larger plot," the memo explains.

"The danger," QAnon Anonymous podcast host Jake Rockatansky told Mother Jones, "is that you've got law enforcement who have a tremendous amount of responsibility who are showing complete disconnect from reality. They carry weapons. What happens if a police officer thinks that they've uncovered a pedophile ring?

==

all news pipeline (broke jade helm)

Monday, September 21, 2020

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/red-pills-and-radicalization-heres-how-conspiracism-is-overwhelming-us/

america is drowning in conspiracy theories: QAnon cultists are taking over the Republican Party, the occupant of the Oval Office praises them in press conferences, rational COVID-19 pandemic measures are met with armed protests and raging open defiance, and Proud Boys and militiamen are bringing violence to liberal cities while armed vigilantes riled up about nonexistent “antifa arsonists” harass strangers and journalists in fire-stricken rural areas.

So I wrote a book about it. More importantly, it’s a book intended not just to document and explain the phenomenon, but to also be a guide for finding our way out of the morass. It’s titled Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us, out this week from Prometheus Books. Here’s an excerpt.

[The following excerpt is from Chapter Seven, “Chaos By Design,” which describes how and why people are effectively radicalized online by conspiracism and its attendant disinformation. It seemed especially appropriate for the current moment.]

It may be the most notorious Google search in history: “black on white crime.” That was the search that sent Dylann Roof down the path that led him to murder nine black parishioners inside a Charleston, South Carolina, church one evening in June 2015. he described this path in a post on the white supremacist website he had created.

The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?

From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there.From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.

Roof actually has provided a kind of map of radicalization online. As information scientist Michael Caulfield explains, this whole process is actually produced by a kind ofself-contained data spiral that’s based to a large extent on “curation”—that is, the way we collect web materials into our own spaces and annotate them.  That curation creates a data feedback for the algorithm that then directly affects what you see. Curations, he warns, can warp reality because of the resulting feedback loop: they “don’t protect us from opposing views, but often bring us to more radical views.”

Caulfield observes that “black on white crime” is a data void—that is, it’s not a term used by social scientists or reputable news organizations, “which is why the white nationalist site Council of Conservative Citizens came up in those results.That site has since gone away, but what it was was a running catalog of cases where black men had murdered (usually) white women. In other words, it’s yet another curation, even more radical and toxic than the one that got you there. And then the process begins again.”

Noble explains that the framing a person brings to his or her Internet experience shapes what kinds of results they see on a search engine, or a video recommendation, or a social media news feed. “In the case of Dylann Roof’s alleged Google searches,” she writes, “his very framing of the problems of race relations in the U.S. through an inquiry such as ‘black on white crime’ reveals how search results belie any ability to intercede in the framing of a question itself. In this case, answers from conservative organizations and cloaked websites that present news from a right-wing, anti-Black, and anti-Jewish perspective are nothing more than propaganda to foment racial hatred.”

The key to this process of radicalization is its incremental nature: people undergoing it don’t recognize what is happening to them, since each step feels normal initially. This is in fact precisely by design by the organizations and ideologues who are trying to recruit people into their conspiracy theories, which are ultimately about belief systems and political movements.

A onetime “red-pilled” conspiracy theorist named Matt described how he became trapped in a curated spiral like this for Kelly Weill ofThe Daily Beast. It began when he innocently watched a video of Bill Maher and Ben Affleck discussing Islam, and at its completion, thealgorithm recommended several much more extreme videosattacking Islam, including some produced by Infowars conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson. One video led to the next and the next.

“Delve into [Watson’s] channel and start finding his anti-immigration stuff which often in turn leads people to become more sympathetic to ethno-nationalist politics,” Matt said. “This sort of indirectly sent me down a path to moving way more to the right politically as it led me to discover other people with similar far-right views.”

Now twenty, Matt has since exited the ideology and built an anonymous Internet presence where he argues with his ex-brethren on the right.

“I think YouTube certainly played a role in my shift to the right because through the recommendations I got,” he said, “it led me to discover other content that was very much right of center, and this only got progressively worse over time, leading me to discover more sinister content.”

“The thing to remember about this algorithmic–human grooming hybrid is that the gradualness of it—the step-by-step nature of it—is a feature for the groomers, not a bug,” says Caulfield. “I imagine if the first page Roof had encountered on the CCC page had sported a Nazi flag and a big banner saying ‘Kill All Jews,’ he’d have hit the back button, and maybe the world might be different. (Maybe.) But the curation/search spiral brings you to that point step by step. In the center of the spiral you probably still have enough good sense to not read stuff by Nazis, at least knowingly. By the time you get to the edges, not so much.”

Peter Neumann, of the U.K.’s Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, identifies six steps on the ladder of extremist belief. “The first two of these processes deal with the consequences of being exposed to extremist content,” he writes. “No single item of extremist propaganda is guaranteed to transform people into terrorists. Rather, in most cases, online radicalization results from individuals being immersed in extremist content for extended periods of time, the amplified effects of graphic images and video, and the resulting emotional desensitization.”

Beheading videos, photos of corpses, suicides, and mass murders, all these things are part of these first two steps in the immersion process. Neumann calls this mortality salience—material intended to create an overpowering sense of one’s own vulnerability to death, as well as to heighten the viewer’s moral outrage.

The next two steps are also key to the process—namely, immersion in extremist forums, where deviant and extremist views are normalized, and online disinhibition, wherein people lose their normal inhibitions about violence because of their relative anonymity online. “Some of the participants get so worked up that they declare themselves ready to be terrorists,” notes psychologist Marc Sageman. “Since this process takes place at home, often in the parental home, it facilitates the emergence of homegrown radicalization, worldwide.”

The final stages occur when online role-playing occurs—the kind in which new recruits more or less practice their ideology in gaming situations, often in the context ofmodern video games. The participants project themselves into their gaming avatars, giving themselves traits that they usually do not possess in real life. After a while, this divide becomes noticeable and drives further radicalization: “[A]fter recognizing the gap between their avatar’s mobilization and their own physical mobilization, many online participants begin taking steps to reconcile the gap,” observe researchers Jaret Brachmann and Alex Levine.  This is when they take the last step: using the Internet to connect directly to terrorist infrastructures that then begin to mobilize them.

Caulfield believes one of the keys to preventing this kind of radicalization lies in establishing “digital literacy” programs wherein young people new to the Internet can learn how to confront, cope with, and overcome the challenges they will be forced to navigate there. And it all begins with the curation process, how we accumulate the materials for our personal spaces.

“So, the idea here is that you might start in a relatively benign space with some kind of ideological meaning, and then someone uses this term ‘black on white crime,’” Caulfield says. “It’s probably a stretch to call the Google search results a curation, but you can think of it along the same lines. You put in a term, and Google is going to show you the most relevant, not necessarily the best, but the most relevant results for that term.And now you have a set of things that are in front of you. Now, on each of those pages, because you picked ‘black on white crime,’ if you click into that page that has ‘black on white crime,’ there are going to be other phrases on there.”

Even people with normal levels of skepticism can find themselves drawn inside. “So you go, and you do the Google search, and you’re like, ‘You know what? I can’t trust this page. I’m going to be a good info-literacy person, and what I’m going to do is, I’m going to just check that these crimes really happened.’ OK, so what do you do? You pull these crimes and what you find is that these crimes did happen, and the pages they’re going to are more white supremacists talking about how these are actually black on white hate crimes. And now they’re mentioning more things, and they’re mentioning more terms, and they’re mentioning changes in law that now make it easier for black people to kill white people.

“So you’re like ‘Oh, well, I’ve got to Google this change in the law.’ But who’s talking about this thing that’s broadly made up, or it’s a heavy misinterpretation of something? Well, again it’s white … So you keep going deeper and deeper, and every time you’re pulling out something to investigate on that page, it’s pulling you into another site, and that other site of course is covering a bunch of other events and terms and so forth. And you end up going deeper and deeper into it.”

Caulfield argues that educators need to help their students develop better informational literacy, including learning how to recognize when they are being recruited into a radical belief system or cult or are being manipulated for either financial or political motivations.

“My contention is that the students are practicing info-literacy as they’ve learned it,” he says. “And as a matter of fact, this approach to researching online is what they have learned from a fairly early age in terms of how to approach sources and information on the web.

“I think a lot of academics and teachers would say, ‘but that’s not what we’re teaching,’” he adds. “Let’s just put that whole argument aside because it doesn’t matter. Whatever we’re teaching, these are the lessons they take away from it. So they are practicing info-literacy as learned, and through either chance or through engineering or through fate, whatever it is, these techniques plug really well into radicalization.”

*

Sometimes the people who fall down the rabbit holes and are recruited into communities organized around conspiracy theories would have ended up in a similar situation regardless. But people are also being actively recruited for a combination of political, ideological, and financial/economic motivations. And they are being actively deceived.

“We are all targets of disinformation, meant to erode our trust in democracy and divide us,” warns University of Washington information scientist Kate Starbird.

She came to this stark conclusion while conducting a study at the University of Washington involving the evolution of the discussion about the Black Lives Matter movement on social media—and found herself walking into the unexpected realization, supported both by data and a raft of real-world evidence, that the whole discussion was being manipulated, and not for the better. The more the team examined the evidence, the clearer it became that this manipulation was intended to fuel internal social strife among the American public.

The study quickly morphed into a scientific examination of disinformation—that is, information that’s intended to confuse and distort, whether accurate or not—which exists on all sides of the political spectrum.  One of their key studies focused on Twitter to see how bad information immediately follows major crisis-type events such as mass shootings and how those rumors “muddy the waters” around the event, even for people who were physically present, and in particular how such rumors can permanently alter the public’s perception of the event itself and its causes.

Consider exhibit A: the nearly instantaneous claims by Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists that the Las Vegas mass shooting of October 1, 2017, was a false flag event and the ensuing swirl of confusion around it, which eventually permanently obscured the public’s understanding that the man who perpetrated it was unhinged and at least partially motivated by far-right conspiracy theories about guns. Police investigators avoided the evidence that this had been the case as well.

The chief reason we perceive stories, whether real or not, as “true” depends in large part on our unconscious cognitive biases, Starbird says—that is, when our preexisting beliefs are confirmed along the way. We’ve seen how these biases can be targeted by technology companies. Well-equipped political organizations can manipulate disinformation in much the same way.

“If it makes you feel outraged against the other side, probably someone is manipulating you,” she warns.

The main wellspring of the disinformation Starbird dealt with in her study was Russia and its “troll farms” that introduced industrial-strength data pollution into the American discourse via social media during the 2016 election campaign and afterward. However, she says that the disinformation can be, and often is, run by anyone sophisticated enough to understand its essential principles. These include white nationalists, a number of conspiracy-oriented campaigns involving vaccines and other health-related conspiracies, and in recent years, QAnon.

The strategy, she says, is not just consistent, but frighteningly sophisticated and nuanced. “One of these goals is to ‘sow division,’ to put pressure on the fault lines in our society,” she explained in her findings. “A divided society that turns against itself, that cannot come together and find common ground, is one that is easily manipulated. . . . Russian agents did not create political division in the United States, but they were working to encourage it.”

These outside organizational entities make full use of a preexisting media ecosystem featuring “news” outlets that claim to be “fair” and “independent,” but which are in fact only propaganda organizations, nearly all of them right-wing. As Starbird explained in one of her studies:

This alternative media ecosystem has challenged the traditional authority of journalists, both directly and indirectly. . . . Its development has been accompanied by a decreased reliance on and an increased distrust of mainstream media, with the latter partially motivated by a perception of widespread ethical violations and corruption [METOO?] within mainstream media. . . . Indeed, many view these alternative news sites as more authentic and truthful than mainstream media, and these effects are compounding—as research has found that exposure to online media correlates with distrust of mainstream media.

False information renders democratic discourse, which relies on factual accuracy, impossible, and as Starbird notes, “with the loss of commonly-held standards regarding information mediation and theabsence of easily decipherable credibility cues, this ecosystem has become vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and propaganda.”

Because it’s actually a fairly closed, self-contained, and narrow ecosystem, it becomes a real echo chamber, with stories being repeated among the various “independent” news sites, even if they seem not to show up on the major networks (Fox being the most common exception). After a while, the repetition acts as a kind of confirmation for the stories—if people keep seeing different versions of the same headlines, they’ll start thinking the information has been confirmed by a “variety” of sources.

“The tactics of disinformation can be used by anyone,” Starbird says. “The Internet seems to facilitate access towards targets of different kinds, and we are definitely seeing disinformation from multiple sets of actors, including from the U.S., including foreign actors and domestic actors as well. There’s a certain flavor of Russian disinformation that is perhaps different from some others, but the tactics are known and they are easily learned and portable.”

Unwinding the relationship between authoritarian governments like Russia—which has been promoting far-right political movements around the world, particularly in Europe—and white nationalists trying to “red-pill” vulnerable young people is complicated. “There are some movements, particularly these far-right movements, whose disinformation aligns neatly with Russian disinformation as well,” Starbird observes.

“It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The current manifestation of the far right or alt-right or whatever we want to call it, the information systems and some of the mechanisms for information flow all seem to have Russian disinformation integrated into them. It’s hard to know what’s cause and what’s effect, but they seem to be intertwined. In a similar way, we can see far left ecosystems around things like Syria and Venezuela are integrated with Russian disinformation as well… . We don’t know how causal that is versus opportunistic.”

==

trump’s latest conspiracy theory seems to echo Facebook ‘antifa panic’ — and Rudy Giuliani’s BLM paranoia

Roger Sollenberger / SalonSeptember 2, 2020

President Trump pushed a baseless and bizarre conspiracy theory on Monday that a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs” was sent to disrupt the Republican National Convention, a claim that appears almost identical to a rumor…

==

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex-jones-and-deanna-lorraine-say-michelle-obama-is-a-man-and-bill-gates-is-an-alien/

trump cultist, QAnon conspiracy theorist, and failed congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine served as an in-studio guest host on Infowars last night, where she and extremist right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones alleged that former First Lady Michelle Obama is a man and that Bill Gates is an alien.

Lorraine and Jones repeatedly referred to Michelle Obama as “Big Mike” as they suggested that she is really a man or possibly pretending to be a man as part of a “psy op.”

“Do I think she has a swinging you know what?” Lorrainesaid. “Maybe. I think she might. I think she might, but it does look suspicious.”

“There’s videos of her where she looks like she’s got a flaccid eight-inch rubber snake in her pants,” Jones replied. “We’re talking like a foot-and-a-half long thing. She’s adjusting it. It’s flopping around. It’s halfway to the knee. And the word is, you know, she’s pitching, he’s catching.”

“She might have put a rubber snake on her pants and all these things to mess with us because they run psy ops,” Jones declared, and Lorraine agreed.

“Wouldn’t that be the biggest psy op ever perpetuated to have a woman as the first lady but who is actually a man who is a transgender?” she said. “Wouldn’t that be the biggest psy op and everyone just believes it? Because they do stuff like that all the time, so I wouldn’t put it past them.”

Later in the program, Lorraine insisted that “elites” like Bill Gates “seem like they have very manly looking wives,” which prompted Jones to asset that Gates may be a woman, or possibly an alien.

“These aliens, and I think that’s what they are—I don’t get into like flying saucers. As a human, my first thing is that’s not a human,” Jones said. “There’s something wrong with these people.”

“There’s something very, very wrong with these people,” Lorraine responded. “It’s from the inside out. I think when they trade, they make a deal with Satan that we’re going to do some satanic work here on Earth—they’re exchanging their soul for it.”

==

==

BS conspir disinfo out of Ron J committee? WH press conf?!:

ders dis prep

Annual meetings

In August 2015 the group held its 33rd annual meeting. While attacks on mainstream climate science are "a staple", the meeting provides a forum to a "broad" range of material. Presentations at the 2015 meeting included a theory about links between John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the deaths of his brother and son; a prediction that the aim of Obamacare was to cause the collapse the U.S. health-care system and a recommendation "that the audience start stockpiling medications and finding doctors who would work for cash"; a sympathetic discussion of the theory that low doses of radiation are "beneficial to human health"; and an argument that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS, but instead was invented by government scientists who wanted to cover up other health risks of “the lifestyle of homosexual men.”[3] The meeting was covered by conservative website Breitbart, attended by George Gilder, and the conservative Heartland Institute sent its science director to present his plan to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.[3]

==

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/15/white-house-plants-pro-trump-conspiracy-theorists-among-reporters-briefing-room/

IN  AN APPARENT effort to make his daily news conferences even more like campaign events than they already are, the White House press office has been packing the briefing room with supporters of President Donald Trump from far-right media outlets who can be relied on to toss him softball questions and initiate attacks on his political rivals.

Clearly in on the plot, Trump solicited a question each day this week from one of the guests invited by his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to stand at the back of the room — where representatives of One America News, The Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit compromised the health of reporters by violating social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.

On Monday, Trump called on Chanel Rion, a far-right Republican operative and conspiracy theorist now working as a correspondent for One America News,a San Diego cable channel dedicated to spreading lies about Joe Biden and elderly protesters battered by the police.

Rion gave Trump the opportunity to unleash a familiar riff from his pre-pandemic rallies by suggesting to him that Biden might have been considering President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, as his running mate because, “she can best cover up a lot of the Obamagate surveillance crimes that have taken place during your campaign.” Trump responded by accusing Obama and Biden of “probably treason.”

The next day, Rion triggered another familiar Trump diatribe by asking for his take on the resignation of Carmen Best, the first Black woman to lead Seattle’s police force, after the city council voted to cut her department’s budget. “What does this say about our country?” Rion asked Trump. “And what does this say about the Defund Police movement?” The president replied by repeating the lie that Seattle’s Democratic mayor had let “a radical left group, Antifa and others, take over a big portion of the city.”

On Wednesday, Rion drew Trump’s attention to what looked like a fairly lame conservative prank — the fact that the obscure website antifa.com was suddenly redirecting traffic to Biden’s campaign site. Suggesting that this stunt might somehow indicate support for Biden from the loose network of antifascist groups Trump has falsely portrayed as a shadow army, Rion asked if the president thought Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, should “publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?”

[twt]

They should,” Trump replied. “I think they’re afraid to. In my book, it’s virtually a part of their campaign: Antifa.” There was nothing remotely surprising in Trump making the absurd argument that Biden, a centrist Democrat, is secretly part of an antifascist subculture, but Rion’s play-acting as a White House correspondent is not intended to elicit any new information from the president. The point of these exchanges is to shield Trump from what tough questions about his failure to lead a coordinated federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic and to give him an opportunity to repeat lines he has already rehearsed, delivered as if they were answers to questions of vital importance.

Rion, who has been attending briefings as a guest of the White House press secretary since April, previously traveled to Ukraine with the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to promote false accusations about Biden spread by the pro-Russian lawmaker Andriy Derkach. An American intelligence assessment released last week concluded that Derkach was involved in a Russian plot to undermine Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party by “spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls” from 2016 between the former vice president and Ukraine’s president.

On Thursday, shortly after Trump praised the crackpot legal scholar who invented a racist conspiracy theory that Harris was not eligible to be vice president, even though she was born to immigrant parents in Oakland, he turned again to Rion. This time, however, she asked if he would, instead, take a question from Emel Akan of The Epoch Times, another of his press secretary’s guests from an equally rabid pro-Trump media outlet.

When Trump agreed, Akan asked him how the U.S. would respond to “the recent attack on press freedom in Hong Kong,” specifically the arrest of the publisher of the popular Apple Daily tabloid news site, Jimmy Lai, who has been an outspoken critic of the pro-Beijing leadership in the semiautonomous Chinese city. Lai could be charged with “collusion” with the United States for meeting Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington last summer to discuss Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest movement.

Although Trump began by saying, “Well, I think it’s a terrible thing,” he appeared to have little familiarity or interest in the subject of press freedom, or democracy in Hong Kong, pivoting quickly into his stock complaints about China’s trade policies. He even seemed to gloat a bit when he said that, as a result of the U.S. withdrawing the “tremendous financial incentives” for businesses based in Hong Kong, American companies might profit from the crackdown on the territory.

“We’ve now withdrawn all of those incentives. It’s going to be very hard for Hong Kong to compete,” Trump said. “And I will tell you that the United States… will end up making a lot more money because of it, because we lost a lot of business to Hong Kong,” he added. “We made it very convenient for people to go there, for companies to go there. We’ve withdrawn all of that and the United States will be a big beneficiary from an economic standpoint.”

While Trump’s answer was not the kind of stirring endorsement of press freedom Akan might have expected from an American president, inciting an attack on China’s government was probably gratifying to the owners of The Epoch Times. The paper is owned by members of the dissident Chinese Falun Gong spiritual movement who have spent heavily to promote Trump as a useful battering ram against their ultimate enemy: the Chinese Communist Party that considers the banned sect a cult. An Epoch Timescoronavirus explainer video echoes Trump’s rhetoric that China is to blame for the global pandemic, but urges people to call it not “the China Virus,” as Trump does, but the “CCP Virus.”

The White House press secretary’s invitation to the Epoch Times writer to participate in the briefing alongside reporters and photographers from some of America’s leading news organizations is remarkably brazen given that last year, when The Epoch Times wasthe largest buyer of pro-Trump ads on Facebook outside of the president’s own campaign, the site spent heavily to promote the baseless conspiracy theory that Biden had abused his power as vice president in 2016 to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine.

Since then, the site has been banned from advertising on Facebook, after NBC reported that the newspaper had secretly placed Facebook ads promoting President Trump.Last week, Facebook also removed 303 fake accounts linked to The Epoch Times for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and pro-Trump conspiracy theories about supposedly shadowy figures behind the ongoing racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

On Friday, after Trump twice refused to answer a question from The Associated Press about whether he believes the QAnon conspiracy theory in which he is a central figure,hesolicited one from Alicia Powe,a proponent of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory who writes for the far-right Gateway Pundit blog.

Powe, who has claimed that the Clinton Foundation controls the FBI and is stifling investigations of child sex-trafficking rings and the murder of Seth Rich, asked Trump to comment on the accusation that Biden had claimed credit for the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

[vid]

powe’s question was based on a blog post by the founder of Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, which amplified an attack on Biden from the Kremlin-owned site Russia Today. Hoft’s post also quotes the analysis of Heshmat Alavi, a supporter of a militant Iranian cult called the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who, as my colleague Murtaza Hussain revealed last year, is a fictional character.

McEnany did not respond to a question about whether she or someone else in her office invited Powe to the briefing on Friday, but Powe is a former blogger for WorldNetDaily, the far-right website that helped create the racist “birther” conspiracy theory to undermine President Barack Obama. Alyssa Farah, the White House director of strategic communications, is the daughter of Joseph Farah, who founded WorldNetDaily. In the 1990s, Joseph Farah was a leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that deputy White House counsel Vince Foster might have been murdered.

The presence of Rion, Akan and Powe also infuriated the White House Correspondents Association, whose members have agreed to send only 14 reporters a day during the pandemic, to maintain safe social distance.

The WHCA, which normally decides which accredited journalists are allowed in to the briefing room on a given day, also wants the aisles at the sides and the back of the room to be open for photographers and video crews to operate safely. “It is outrageous that the White House continues to invite ‘guests’ to press briefings, putting the health and safety of everyone in that workspace at greater risk,” the WHCA president, Zeke Miller, said in an email. “The WHCA’s social distancing guidelines were crafted in consultation with the White House based on the recommendations of the CDC and the nation’s leading public health professionals. Trampling on those guidelines endangers the critical work of reporters who have maintained independent press coverage of the presidency throughout the pandemic.”

Until April, OAN was a member of the correspondents’ association but the cable channel was expelled after Rion kept showing up at briefings when it was not her turn. Since then, she has attended press events as a guest of the White House press secretary.

Unlike the original, freewheeling coronavirus task force briefings — which came to a sudden halt in April when Trump mused that doctors should “check” to see if injecting patients suffering from Covid-19 with bleach or isopropyl alcohol, or exposing them to ultraviolet light, might cure them — the president’s current news conferences are much shorter and seem designed mainly to get his lengthy, written opening statements on the air and get him out of the briefing room after taking just a handful of questions.

Trump’s opening statements at the latest briefings are often nakedly political in nature, featuring crude, jarring attacks on Biden and other Democrats. “Today, we saw Joe Biden continue to politicize a pandemic and to show his appalling lack of respect for the American people. That’s what it is,” Trump said at the start of Thursday’s briefing. “At every turn, Biden has been wrong about the virus, ignoring the scientific evidence and putting left-wing politics before facts and evidence.”

After then blatantly lying about Biden’s suggested response to the pandemic in the most idiotic terms — “Sleepy Joe rejects the scientific approach in favor of locking all Americans in their basements for months on end” — Trump concluded, with a stunning lack of self-awareness: “To Joe, I would say: Stop playing politics with a virus. Too serious. Partisan politics has no place here. It’s a shameful situation for anybody to try and score political points while we’re working to save lives and defeat the pandemic.”

Trump’s prepared remarks at these briefings almost always feature highly misleading health and economic statistics intended to convey the false impression that the federal government’s pandemic response is the envy of the world.

At Tuesday’s briefing, for example, Trump said in his opening statement: “Since the end of July, the seven-day average for cases in the United States has fallen by nearly 20 percent, but the virus continues to increase in nations across the globe. Last week, France and Germany both recorded their highest daily number of new cases in three months — not that I want to bring that up, but might as well explain it to the media.” While those statistical measures of the increase by percentage of new cases in Europe and decrease by percentage in the U.S. were accurate, what they hid was the fact that, in raw numbers, the pandemic is obviously far less under control here than there.[shillenberger pat m cherrypick]

The day Trump made those remarks, 53,315 new Covid-19 infections were confirmed by testing in the U.S. Germany’s highest number of daily infections in three months, recorded this week, was 1,445. Cases are down more in the U.S. but from a very high level to a slightly less high level. In much of Europe, cases are rising but from very low baseline. Adjusted for population, the U.S. recorded 154 new cases per million on Friday, while France had 41 and Germany 17.[graf]

While the pandemic is resurgent in many parts of the world, Trump has been unable so far to brow-beat the public into accepting his obviously false claims that things are better in the United States than in Europe or Asia. A new poll released by Monmouth University on Thursday showed that 52 percent of Americans “think the United States’ handling of the pandemic is worse than other countries,” while just 15 percent feel the U.S. is doing a better job than others and 29 percent say it is doing about the same.

Having complained on Wednesday about what he called “a wiseguy question” from a reporter who noted that two top Federal Reserve officials “said that the economy hasn’t recovered strong enough because the country hasn’t contained the virus,” Trump devoted part of his opening remarks at Thursday’s briefing to falsely complaining that Biden, whoheld a news conference two weeks ago, “never takes questions.”

“I take questions; he never takes questions,” Trump continued. “And you sort of wonder what’s going on, because they’re not that difficult. Some can be nasty, but they’re not that difficult.”

Social media platforms elevated a video featuring disinformation about COVID-19. Right-wing media figures embraced it.

On July 27, a video making false claims about COVID-19 began circulating on Facebook, and soon other social media platforms. Within a day, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter committed to taking it down, but copies are still spreading -- and even worse, mainstream right-wing media figures are embracing the video, even as we learn about the deranged figures behind it.

First promoted by the Tea Party Patriots and Breitbart, the video featured members of a group called “America’s Frontline Doctors” holding a press conference in front of the Supreme Court. One of the speakers, Dr. Stella Immanuel, falsely claimed that “you don't need masks” to prevent the spread of COVID-19; she also falsely claimed hydroxychloroquine was a cure for the disease. It's not, and the fact is that trusted studies have repeatedly shown no effect.

Within hours, Donald Trump had retweeted claims from the video.

The Daily Beast found that Immanuel has made some truly bizarre claims, including that alien DNA can be used in medical treatments, and that some medical problems are caused by sex with demons. Eric Hananoki found that Immanuel had a long track record of anti-LGBTQ remarks, including calling homosexuality "the agenda of the Devil." The rest of the "Frontline Doctors" are hardly any better.

Facebook and Twitter removed the original video, with a Facebook spokesperson saying the reason was it shared “false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19,” and a Twitter spokesperson saying, “We're taking action in line with our Covid misinfo policy.” However, Media Matters found multiple instances of the video being re-uploaded on Facebook and Twitter following the platform’s statements.

Fox News and right-wing media did a full-throated defense of the video and the doctors, despite the lies and the extremist personalities. Rush Limbaugh extensively defended Immanuel, claiming the Daily Beast ran a "hit piece" on her. Tucker Carlson complained about the video being removed while also attacked the Daily Beast's reporting. Immanuel herself said that the Daily Beast's reporting did "a great job summarizing our deliverance ministry and exposing incubus and succubus.”

Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham also complained about the video being removed. Ingraham hosted one of the "Frontline Doctors," who repeated the false claim that hydroxychloroquine was a "cure."

Theentire right-wing ecosystem is built upon and thrives upon conspiracy theories. While conspiracy theories once took weeks or months to reach millions (for example, conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birth certificate), the process now happens in a matter of minutes -- and this time, the misinformation puts public health on the line. Even worse, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are either unwilling or unable to stop it.

russians wd be stupid not to use Qanon?

720 srch: russia putin GRU qanon disinformation active measures

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Putin's Goal Is to Bring Down American Democracy - The ...www.theatlantic.com › magazine › archive › 2020/06

The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to ...

Missing: qanon ?| Must include: qanon

PROPAGANDA BACKFIRE: The Kremlin's Conspiracy ...bylinetimes.com › 2020/06/02 › propaganda-backfire-t...

Jun 2, 2020 - By supporting theories aimed at destabilising the US during the Coronavirus pandemic, Kseniya Kirillova reports on how Putin has opened up ...

Russian troll accounts purged by Twitter pushed Qanon and ...www.nbcnews.com › tech › social-media › russian-troll...

Feb 2, 2019 - The accounts' tweets featured the hashtag #MAGA, usually in support of President Trump, almost 38000 times — the most of any hashtag.

Missing: GRU ?active ?measures

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/russian-troll-accounts-purged-twitter-pushed-qanon-other-conspiracy-theories-n966091

no lnx pix

new batch of troll accounts identified by Twitter as having ties to Russia’s propaganda operation revealed an emphasis on promoting far-right conspiracy theories such as Qanon to Americans.

Twitter announced Thursday the removal of 418 accounts tied to the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, the disinformation group whose employees were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller last February for attempted election interference.

The accounts’ tweets featured the hashtag #MAGA, usually in support of President Donald Trump, almost 38,000 times — the most of any hashtag. #ReleaseTheMemo, a social media campaign pushed by allies of the president last year that aimed to discredit some members of the FBI, was tweeted 37,583 times.

In all, the 400-some accounts tweeted more than 900,000 tweets.

At the time, close allies of Trump brushed off suggestions that #ReleaseTheMemo, which trended on Twitter, was boosted by Russian influence. "Russian trolls have nothing to do with releasing the memo. That was a vote of the intelligence committee,” counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said last February.

[Related

BUSINESS

Like the fringe conspiracy theory Qanon? There's plenty of merch for sale on Amazon]

Some now-purged users spammed Twitter with tweets repeating the hashtag “#ReleaseTheMemo.”

When removing the spam-style messages that included multiple hashtags, the second-most tweeted topic for the Russian troll accounts was #Qanon, a baseless conspiracy theory that claims Mueller and Trump are secretly working together to take down a global pedophile ring run by celebrities and Democratic politicians.

#GreatAwakening and #FollowTheWhiteRabbit, which are catchphrases for #Qanon followers, also featured prominently in the Russian trolls’ tweets.

Nina Jankowicz, a global fellow at the Kennan Institute focusing on Russia and technology, told NBC News that Qanon’s often outlandish narratives about a secret global cabal fueled by the United States fits well with Russian propaganda’s larger narrative.

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“One of the Kremlin’s favorite tactics is to inspire confusion and doubt to sow distrust in government. Qanon certainly does that,” Jankowicz said.

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“Amplifying the conspiracy theory also makes it look like it has more supporters, distracting from more substantive issues in the online discourse.”

[Related

TECH

What is Qanon? A guide to the conspiracy theory taking hold among Trump supporters]

Qanon, a more elaborate offshoot of the "pizzagate" conspiracy theory, came to prominence when several Trump supporters showed up at the president’s rally in Tampa, Florida, this past August carrying “Q” signs and wearing T-shirts supporting the conspiracy.

In the last year, believers in the conspiracy have also been in armed standoffs with the police in Arizona, and one blocked the Hoover Dam demanding the “Release of the OIG Report,” a Qanon-based conspiracy theory loosely derived from the success of #ReleaseTheMemo.

All of the 30 most-used hashtags pushed by the suspected Russian troll accounts focused on either support for Trump, conspiracy theories that targeted his political opponents or a separate — but sometimes overlapping — trolling campaign that meant to demean Muslims.

The hashtags #IslamIsTheProblem, #StopImportingIslam and #BanShariaLaw were each tweeted more than 15,000 times by the 481 Russian troll accounts.

The accounts attempted to emulate Americans on both sides of the political aisle.

One account identified by Twitter as a Russian troll account, @QuartneyChante, posed as an African-American woman. One of her tweets received more than 66,000 retweets.

“Dear White People. It’s a privilege to learn about racism instead of experiencing it your whole life,” the tweet read.

The account was even featured in several news articles, including a Mashable story dubbed "Dear white women: Here's how to step up for women of color.”

Jankowicz said the widespread dissemination of the tweets is a good reminder not to trust everything you read on social media.

“That account was created fairly recently and gained a lot of traction quickly, it seems,” Jankowicz said. “It’s pretty sad, but unless accounts use a plausible name and personal photo on Twitter, I’d advise users against interacting with them.”

Ben Collins

Ben Collins covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News.

Image: Joe Murphy

Joe Murphy

Joe Murphy is a data editor at NBC News Digital.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/how-donald-trump-will-try-to-scapegoat-george-soros-to-win-re-election/

no lnx twt

How Donald Trump will try to scapegoat George Soros to win re-election

Written by The Conversation July 16, 2020

by Neil McLaughlin, McMaster University and Iga Mergler, McMaster University

When future scholars write the history of the administration of Donald Trump, he may end up being called — among many other things — the conspiracy theorist president. Trump famously began his ascent to power with the false and racist “birther” claim that Barack Obama was not really an American.

Trump and his followers have also legitimized bizarre conspiracy theories against Hungarian American financier and philanthropist George Soros. It now appears continued attacks toward Soros will be a part of the president’s re-election campaign.

Soros has been a punching bag for authoritarians, anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists around the world since 1992, when he became famous as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” by making more than US$1 billion by “shorting” the British pound.

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Born in Budapest in 1930, Soros barely survived the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. Living in New York City since 1956, he has combined a long career as a successful capitalist while doing philanthropy under the banner of his Open Society Foundations.

Anti-Semitic attacks

Attacks on Soros have circulated on the margins of mainstream politics for years, tinged with anti-Semitism and fuelled by half-truths and outright lies. Russia has always been at the heart of anti-Soros propaganda, and it’s now joined by China in promoting attacks, distortions and lies. Over the last few years, these conspiracies have entered mainstream debate in Hungary, Poland, Brazil and the United States.

The Trump movement attempted to scapegoat Soros as part of its Make America Great Again rhetoric. Trump supporters accused Soros, among other things, of supporting the caravan of migrants attempting to enter the United States from Central America, being behind the attacks on Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination (a falsehood Trump himself tweeted about) and promoting an elitist globalist agenda that undermined American jobs and culture.

Most incredibly, in recent weeks Soros has been accused of paying Black Lives Matter protesters who demonstrated across the United States after the police killing of George Floyd.

Trump has major liabilities in his quest for re-election: his incompetent handling of the coronavirus pandemic, his polarizing opposition to protesters after the Floyd killing and the decline of the U.S. economy since the outbreak of COVID-19. Loss of support among suburban white women, members of the military elite and moderate Republicans are now a threat to his electoral prospects.

Attacking Soros part of the plan

Attacking China, stoking nationalist resentments, uncritically defending the police, claiming economic competence and bashing Joe Biden will be Trump’s major electoral strategy. But Republican attacks on Soros are also likely to circulate widely until the election.

Soros is a perfect foil to try to convince people that Trump stands for the average American. What better scapegoat than a wealthy, uber-liberal currency speculator who helped fund Obama and Hillary Clinton, supports abortion, gay and trans rights and gives generously to the electoral campaigns of liberal public defenders and prosecutors? In Trumpist rhetoric, Soros is soft on crime and promotes the values of cultural liberalism and global elites over the average American. [HE'S ALSO THE WHATABOUTISM CORP OLIGARCH FOR KOCH BOROS; I'M NOT CORRUPT YOU'RE CORRUPT KNEE-JERK REFLEXIVE ST'D MOVE

Soros’s history of supporting Palestinian rights and calling for a negotiated peace settlement created an opportunity for the White House to exploit. Rhetoric about big finance linked to a “globalist” Jewish philanthropist understandably concerns Jewish voters and others opposed to anti-Semitism, but anti-Soros rhetoric can unify evangelical Christian Zionists, pro-Israel Republicans, interventionist neo-conservatives and far-right extremists.

Attacking Soros is also part of a Trumpist appeal to conservative Black voters, now being led Candace Owens, a young media figure and Republican activist.

Owens spreads paranoia

Prone to gaffes that expose her ignorance about history and politics, Owens has gained a massive online presence among far right-wing Trump supporters by directly challenging the mainstream Democratic Party narrative on racism, police violence and poverty in America. She’s also attacked George Floyd’s character. What’s more, Owens has spread anti-Soros paranoia online, giving it a cooler, hipper and younger flavour.

The core of the Trumpist scapegoating of Soros is an attempt to blame Soros for the Black Lives Matter protests and calls for defunding the police. The lie that Soros is paying for the protests that have swept through the United States and is promoting riots is deeply corrosive to American democracy.

Conspiracy theories work best when lies, exaggerations and paranoia are linked to real things in the world that can be distorted by spin. Soros’s recent pledge of US$220 million to support civil rights and racial equality groups like Black Voters Matter will add fuel to extremist fire.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson will play a major role in all this. During a recent segment on his show, former Missouri governor Eric Greitens attempted to link Soros to anti-police violence and made reference to a “George Soros-funded prosecutor” involved in the case of the couple in St. Louis who stood in front of their house with guns while anti-racism protesters marched on their street.

None of this is likely to save Trump from going down to an electoral defeat in November. While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the role of billionaires like Soros in politics and economic life, the divisiveness of anti-Soros paranoia will take years to repair.

The Conversation

Neil McLaughlin, Professor of Sociology, McMaster University and Iga Mergler, PhD Candidate in Sociology,, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/theres-a-simple-reason-why-america-was-so-vulnerable-to-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/

The worldwide conspiracy is vast — so vast that most of the world’s scientists, journalists and political leaders are in on it. Somehow, in all this time, not a single one of the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of conspirators has grown a conscience and decided to blow the whistle on the conspiracy. Their goal? To ruin everything that right-wing America holds dear: the nuclear family, NFL football, needlessly enormous vehicles, the specials menu at Hooters.

To accomplish this dastardly goal, the conspiracy will fabricate a worldwide threat. They will falsify the data and use the power of institutions like governments and universities and scientific journals to perpetuate this hoax, tricking billions of people into believing this threat is real and needs a drastic response. The only people in the world who see through the hoax are right-wing Americans, of course, who know what lengths the “socialist left” will go to in order to destroy Mom and apple pie.

Coronavirus denialism has, in the period of a few short months, become one of the most serious political problems in our nation. It’s a major obstacle to both containing the virus and reviving the economy, which can’t happen until the virus is contained.

Coronavirus denialism isn’t just flourishing on social media, but emanating from both right-wing media and from Republican leaders, most notably Donald Trump. Over the weekend, the president declared that “99 percent” of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless,” a claim that isn’t just false but part of a larger pattern of Trump’s statements suggesting that the threat of the virus is being faked in order to harm him politically.

in other words, it’s a conspiracy theory, one that dates at least back to February, when Trump claimed that fears of the coronavirus were a “new hoax” designed by Democrats to ruin him.

The rapid spread of this conspiracy theory is puzzling, especially as it requires many leaps of faith, including the belief that literally millions of professionals who don’t know each other — scientists, journalists, government employees, health care providers and so on — are working to perpetuate this hoax.

There’s a simple reason why right-wing America was so quick to rally around a conspiracy theory that’s so utterly preposterous. They spent years training themselves by indulging in climate-change denialism.

It’s not a stretch to say that climate-change denialism and coronavirus denialism are basically the same conspiracy theory. In fact, it often seems like coronavirus denialists have simply copied and pasted their talking points about climate change and adjusted the wording a bit to be about virus spread instead of carbon emissions.

But the basic parameters are the same: a worldwide conspiracy, threats that are invented or exaggerated for supposed political gain, a sinister hidden agenda — whether that’s bringing down capitalism or ending Trump’s presidency.

The content of coronavirus denialism can be somewhat diverse. This article from the New York Times chronicling the struggles of nurses to convince family and friends that the coronavirus is a real threat gives a good overview of the range of different flavors. Some folks insist the virus isn’t real at all. Some accept that it’s real but believe the danger of death or serious injury is being wildly exaggerated. Some deny that it’s as communicable as public health officials believe. Some claim that deaths from other causes are being falsely attributed to the virus.

We see the same kind of diversity in the world of climate-change denialism. At first, conservatives flat-out denied that climate change or “global warming” was even happening. But as evidence for changing temperatures grew, the flavors of denialism did too, with some denialists claiming it was just a natural fluctuation not attributable to humans, others saying that the effects wouldn’t be so bad, and still others saying it was too late to do anything about it so we should just give up.

What holds all these flavors of denialism together is the conspiracy theory undergirding them: The people raising the alarm about this problem are in cahoots with each other, and have ulterior motives.

Climate-change denialists have long held that progressives, and the scientists and world leaders who supposedly share their radical agenda, aren’t really concerned about species loss or rising sea levels or the devastating effects on poor people or any of that. Instead, they argue, these concerns are being faked to create a justification for an all-out assault on capitalism and “freedom.”

Similarly, coronavirus denialists argue that health care workers and scientists warning about the coronavirus are insincere, but instead are part of a larger — again, worldwide! — movement to take down Trump by making him look bad.

The rhetoric between the two forms of denialism is almost comically similar.

In September, Fox News host Laura Ingraham declaredthat teenage climate-change activists were part of a sinister plot to seize control of “our economy, our way of life, our way of transport, how many children you want to have.”

In May, she made the same arguments about recommendations to wear face masks to slow the coronavirus spread, claiming it was about “control over large populations” that is “achieved through fear and intimidation and suppression of free thought.”

In case the link wasn’t obvious, Ingraham made it herself, saying, “They’ll say this whole mask thing is settled science, just like they do with climate change.”

It’s not possible that both things are just settled science, of course. It’s all just a massive conspiracy!

It’s the same story with Fox News superstar **Tucker Carlson, who argued**last September that climate strikes are “not about the environment” but are a left-wing scam meant to create “an emergency big enough to justify grabbing more power.”

Carlson copy-pasted those same arguments to deny the dangers of the coronavirus months later, claiming that the scientific evidence that it’s dangerous and communicable is overblown, and being exaggerated by people who are hungry for “power” and want to see Americans following “orders.”

Both climate change and coronavirus denialism are given a boost by the tribalist politics of right-wing America. For decades now, one of the ways for conservatives to indicate their skepticism of climate change and fealty to the right was to buy giant, gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks, making quite clear to anyone looking that they don’t care one fig about your fears of carbon emission.

The same logic is driving the anti-mask phenomenon, where some of the most fiercely loyal Trump supporters make a big show out of refusing wear a mask, because they don’t care one fig about your fear of catching a potentially deadly virus.

It was clever of Trump and his media followers to encourage his supporters not to wear masks. That kind of showy public defiance has helped normalize coronavirus denialism, and exerted pressure on other conservatives to follow suit to show their tribal loyalties.It serves the same function as mocking people for driving fuel-efficient vehicles did, using peer pressure to get people on board with a right-wing conspiracy theory.

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with climate-change conspiracy theories, once they take hold, it’s very hard to pry people free from their delusional beliefs. If you confront them with the evidence that the threat is real, they simply move to claiming it’s overblown. George Soros will probably be blamed. Or they’ll come up with excuses for why they personally won’t be affected and so shouldn’t care. Or they’ll just shift to casting aspersions on the motives of people who do care, whether that’s Greta Thunberg or Dr. Anthony Fauci, accusing them of being tools or power-hungry schemers. They’ll embrace any view, really, except admitting that the problem we’re all facing is real and that yes, we have to do something about it.

==

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/how-trump-and-the-right-wing-weaponize-the-propaganda-power-of-conspiracy-theories/

while  some horrible tweets from Donald Trump are surely the result of impulsive decisions made during the president’s extensive “executive time” (read: sitting on the toilet, watching Fox News), there’s sadly good reason to believe that actual deliberation went into Tuesday’s tweet in which Trump smeared Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old peace activist who received a horrible head injury as a result of being pushed by police during a protest in Buffalo, New York.

The tweet, which accuses Gugino of being “an ANTIFA provocateur” trying to “black out” police equipment and who “fell harder than was pushed,” has one of the main hallmarks of being written by someone other than Trump, such as a White House staffer: It uses, and even correctly spells, a $5 word — “provocateur” — that is outside of Trump’s extremely limited vocabulary. So while the tweet masquerades as a Trumpian outburst, allowing Republican politicians and some media figures to pretend it’s not important, odds are this was not impulsive at all, but a calculated effort to float a conspiracy theory meant to discredit not just Gugino, but the larger protest movement against police brutality and racism that’s sweeping the nation.

Trump and his advisors might not be the brightest bunch ever assembled in the White House — in fact, they’re probably the dimmest in history — but even they understand the propaganda power of conspiracy theories. When the facts are against someone’s viewpoint, conspiracy theories give them a set of “alternative facts” they can use to stick by a grotesque ideology....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/we-need-to-speak-honestly-about-the-gops-evolution-into-a-conspiracy-cult

wa mon

One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.

Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all.

But there comes a tipping point at which it becomes too dangerous to keep up the pretense. Most people left of center would argue (rightly, I believe) that we hit that point long, long ago and the time to re-evaluate journalistic norms and practices should have been decades earlier when the GOP was busy covering up the Iran Contra scandal and promoting the Laffer Curve as serious public policy. Or that any number of catastrophes of conservative public policy and norm erosion since should have sounded the alarms along the way, from the Bush v Gore decision and the Brooks Brothers Riots to the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq, to the deregulation-fueled Wall Street crash, birtherism, the Benghazi obsession and the nomination of Donald Trump. Many would point with legitimate outrage to the abdication of responsibility in the face of climate change, yawning inequality,forced family separation policy, children in cages and so much else.

But even faced with awful consequences of all these horrors, a defender of traditional journalism might simply chalk them up to policy differences in a democratic society. They would be wrong to do so, but the position would be intellectually defensible in principle.

But recently there has been a shift among GOP voters that is different not just in degree of virulence, but also in kind. For a host of different reasons, core Republican voters have begun to reconstitute themselves as a conspiracy theory cult devoted to beliefs that were once relegated to the farthest fringe–fictions that cannot help but end in civil conflict and violence if they fully become canon among conservative voters nationwide. This process arguably began as far back as Glenn Beck’s prominence on Fox News, but it has now blossomed into a grandiose collective paranoid fantasy.

Being a Republican now requires believing in a jaw-dropping series of claims that, if true, would almost necessitate anti-democratic revanchism. One has to believe that a cabal of evil scientists is making up climate science in exchange for grant money; that there is rampant, widescale voter impersonation fraud carried out by thousands of elections officials nationwide; that the “Deep State” concocted a scheme to frame Trump for Russian collusion but chose not to use it before the 2016 election; that shadowy forces are driving migrant caravans and diseases across American borders in the service of destroying white Republican America; that the entire news media is engaged in a conspiracy against the Republican Party; that grieving victims of gun violence and their families all across America want to take away guns as a pretext for stomping the boot of “liberal fascism” on conservative faces; and so on. That and much more is just the vanilla Republican belief system at this point (not even touching less explosive academic fictions like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “the poor will work harder to better themselves if you cut the safety net.”)

But things have gotten even worse in the few years short years since the Trump era began. Once a far-fringe conspiracy theory relegated to 8chan and neo-nazi filled knockoffs of Reddit, the QAnon conspiracy theory (which, among other things, posits that a wide swath of prominent Democrats, celebrities and assorted rich people are engaged in pedophilia and adrenochrome harvesting of children, and that the Trump Administration is always just a few weeks away from conducting mass arrests and summary executions–but only once QANON followers have awakened enough of the “normie” public) has become so pervasive that not only do “Q” signs pop up at almost every major conservative rally or protest, but a true believer is now the GOP nominee for Senate in Oregon.  When her campaign attempted to backtrack, she doubled down, saying “”My campaign is gonna kill me…How do I say this? Some people think that I follow Q like I follow Jesus. Q is the information and I stand with the information resource.” This conspiracy theory is destroying families, relationships, and the mental health of its adherents.A healthy and normal political party would inoculate itself from it and debunk it quickly. But the GOP is not a healthy or normal political party.

It doesn’t stop there. Almost half of Fox News viewers—the core of the GOP—believe that Bill Gates is using the COVID-19 pandemic to microchip them.  And Donald Trump has been promoting a series of conspiracy theories on twitter each more outlandish than the last, from old debunked accusations against cable news hosts he dislikes to concocted accusations against former president Barack Obama.

Go to any conservative event and you’ll notice a shift from even the raucous detached weirdness of Tea Party rallies. They feel less like political events than cult rallies.Cult experts like Steven Hassan have taken note of this, calling it exactly what it is: a cult built around manufactured realities, shared grievances and us-against-them insular extremism. The increasing dependence of Republican politicians on a shrinking, embattled white evangelical base already given over to faith-based belief systems and racism-tinged “city on a hill” ideology has only exacerbated the phenomenon.

It’s long past time for even the venerable pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to start calling this what it is, and stop normalizing it as standard partisanship. It is deeply dangerous in a democracy whose constitution functionally guarantees a two-party system, for one of those two parties to become a conspiracy cult.

But that is exactly what has happened. And the first step to fixing it is to call it what it is, no matter how uncomfortable that might be for institutions and journalism professionals who find that sort of language loaded with unprofessional bias. The truth is what it is, even if it requires rethinking therole of a responsible press in an era of white anxiety and mass social-media-fueled disinformation.

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5/20 covid

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/podcast/dispatch/united-states-of-conspiracy/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=coveringcoronavirus_episode10_main

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an 520

This is pretty nuts’: Kayleigh McEnany struggles to defend Trump’s vicious murder conspiracy theory

Cody Fenwick

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany was forced to defend President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Tuesday.

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// death cult? ghost dance?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/a-grandiose-collective-paranoid-fantasy-its-time-to-speak-honestly-about-the-gops-evolution-into-a-conspiracy-cult/

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/

trump trains?!

why are i/we not using alt rt tag anymore?

maga hatters?

==

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/

trump trains?!

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/

no lnx pix twet

The term disinformation tends to conjure up images of Twitter bot armies with thick Russian accents, but the disinformation landscape in 2020 is a lot more complex. While Russia has great expertise in roiling U.S. political waters, it isn’t the only foreign actor in the disinformation and trolling games. The Oxford Internet Institute issued a report finding “evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns which have taken place in 70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28 countries in 2017.”Social media companies have removed content with disinformation campaigns originating in Saudi Arabia, China, and Iran.

Iranian Facebook post targeting Americans. (Source: Facebook)

But homegrown disinformation is a much bigger problem, starting with President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and extending into a vast network of pro-Trump super PACs, right-wing media outlets, and an organized army of MAGA warriors happy to amplify every lie, false conspiracy, and misdirection online. Domestic disinformers have adopted tactics deployed by Russia and other hostile actors in 2016, optimizing them for 2020.

The lessons of 2016 haven’t been lost on the legions of far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theorists who have their own web-based video and audio shows. With the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout posing threats to Trump’s reelection, the president’s online far-right boosters have taken up disinformation messaging designed to discredit the judgment of public health officials and scientists on the severity of the pandemic and the resulting COVID-19 disease. For instance, Rodney Howard-Browne, a Florida megachurch pastor who convened large church services in defiance of social distancing orders, claimed that the pandemic was “planned” at a 2019 New York event hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And Rick Wiles, a religious-right broadcaster and font of anti-Semitic lies, suggested that the coronavirus emergency may have been “staged” to shut down the U.S. (Despite ample documentation of Wiles’ conspiracy-mongering and anti-Semitism, he is regularly granted press credentials by both the White House and the Trump campaign.)

In fact, MAGA-world influencer Brenden Dilley, whose YouTube channel has more than 12,000 subscribers, laid bare the MAGA disinformation playbook last year when he baldly asserted, “It doesn’t have to be true; it just has to go viral.” In that episode of his show, he used the example of the false claim that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was then running for the Democratic presidential nomination, had a racist knick-knack on display in her kitchen. On a more recent edition of his YouTube show, he reiterated that reasoning when explaining why he was advancing a false story about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.

Right Wing Watch

@RightWingWatch

MAGA life coach Brenden Dilleypraises Trump for baselessly suggesting that Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of an intern: "It doesn't matter if it's true. This is how you fight back against people who are trying to destroy you."

Embedded video

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11:14 AM - May 4, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

180 people are talking about this

The Trump campaign and pro-MAGA super PACs have made it clear that the old rules of politics no longer apply, and their base now largely believes in an alternative reality. The president spreads and amplifies so much disinformation on his Twitter feed that it’s nearly impossible to keep up, and GOP elected officials for the most part now follow suit. Republican operatives have built disinformation tactics into their strategies.

Trump Campaign Facebook ad with misinformation.Facebook refused to take this ad down per their policy not to fact check political ads on their platform. (Source: Twitter, Judd Legum)

Trump’s online supporters can’t merely be dismissed as bots. His online fanbase is overamplified but made up of actual individuals happy to spend considerable time and resources getting pro-MAGA messages out into the ether. Social media researcher Erin Gallagher has a fascinating piece on #TrumpTrains, self-organized cells of Trump fans working in Twitter direct messaging groups to spread Trump’s rhetoric and recruit new supporters to the cause.Gallagher was able to get a #TrumpTrain “conductor” to go on the record about how the #TrumpTrains are organized, recruiting volunteers or “riders” to tweet pro-Trump content in large volume at the direction of “conductors.”

Facebook groups and pages are another hub for pro-Trump disinformation. Writing for Media Matters, social media researcher Natalie Martinez details how the far-right propaganda machine operates on Facebook, “On Facebook, right-wing meme pages play a vital role in condensing and recycling far-right talking points and keeping the MAGA base engaged online. These pages regularly post extremist content, arguably violating Facebook’s hate speech content policy, and often exploit tragic events in the news cycle, images of veterans, and violent anti-immigrant rhetoric for likes and shares.” Multiple candidates running for office as Republicans have been caught participating—some as page administrators—in right-wing Facebook groups.

https://www.theatlantic.com/shadowland/

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new 520

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/a-completely-absurd-conspiracy-theory-about-bill-gates-is-shockingly-popular-on-the-right-wing/

new 520

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/a-completely-absurd-conspiracy-theory-about-bill-gates-is-shockingly-popular-on-the-right-wing/

Along with Dr. Anthony Fauci and prominent Democrats such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been a frequent target at far-right anti-shutdown protests. Extremists have accused him not only of using the coronavirus pandemic to hurt President Donald Trump but of designing somevast plot aimed at societal control.

And according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted on May 20 and 21, these preposterous beliefs are surprisingly popular on the right wing.

Yahoo News’ Andrew Romano reports that 44% of Republicans “believe that Bill Gates is plotting to use a mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign as a pretext to implant microchips in billions of people and monitor their movements— a widely debunked conspiracy theory with no basis in fact….In contrast, just 19% of Democrats believe the same spurious narrative about the Microsoft founder and public health philanthropist.”

The poll also found a connection between the media outlets that respondents were consuming and whether or not they believed that anti-Gates conspiracy theory. Naturally, whether one voted for Trump or Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 was a factor as well.

"Take the Gates example,” Romano explains. “Half of all Americans, 50%, who name Fox News as their primary television news source believe the disproven conspiracy theory, and 44% of voters who cast ballots for Trump in 2016 do as well — even though neither Fox nor Trump has promoted it. At the same time, just 15% of MSNBC viewers and 12% of Clinton voters say the story is true.”

The fact that 2016 Trump voters, Republicans and Fox News viewers were more likely to believe an outrageous conspiracy theory involving Gates, according to Romano, reflects “a growing problem: the dangerous, destabilizing tendency to ignore fundamental facts about the deadly pathogen in favor of misinformation peddled by partisans, including President Trump, and spread on social media.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/here-are-the-7-distinctive-traits-of-conspiratorial-thinking/

John Cook, George Mason University; Sander van der Linden, University of Cambridge; Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol, and Ullrich Ecker, University of Western Australia]

The conspiracy theory video “Plandemic” recently went viral. Despite being taken down by YouTube and Facebook, it continues to get uploaded and viewed millions of times. The video is an interview with conspiracy theorist Judy Mikovits, a disgraced former virology researcher who believes the COVID-19 pandemic is based on vast deception, with the purpose of profiting from selling vaccinations.

The video is rife with misinformation and conspiracy theories. Many high-quality fact-checks and debunkings have been published by reputable outlets such as Science, Politifact and FactCheck.

As scholars who research how to counter science misinformation and conspiracy theories, we believe there is also value in exposing the rhetorical techniques used in “Plandemic.” As we outline in our Conspiracy Theory Handbook and How to Spot COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories, there are seven distinctive traits of conspiratorial thinking. “Plandemic” offers textbook examples of them all.

Learning these traits can help you spot the red flags of a baseless conspiracy theory and hopefully build up some resistance to being taken in by this kind of thinking. This is an important skill given the current surge of pandemic-fueled conspiracy theories.

1. Contradictory beliefs

Conspiracy theorists are so committed to disbelieving an official account, it doesn’t matter if their belief system is internally contradictory. The “Plandemic” video advances two false origin stories for the coronavirus. It argues that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab in Wuhan – but also argues that everybody already has the coronavirus from previous vaccinations, and wearing masks activates it. Believing both causes is mutually inconsistent.

2. Overriding suspicion

Conspiracy theorists are overwhelmingly suspicious toward the official account. That means any scientific evidence that doesn’t fit into the conspiracy theory must be faked.

But if you think the scientific data is faked, that leads down the rabbit hole of believing that any scientific organization publishing or endorsing research consistent with the “official account” must be in on the conspiracy. For COVID-19, this includes the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, Anthony Fauci… basically, any group or person who actually knows anything about science must be part of the conspiracy.

3. Nefarious intent

In a conspiracy theory, the conspirators are assumed to have evil motives. In the case of “Plandemic,” there’s no limit to the nefarious intent. The video suggests scientists including Anthony Fauci engineered the COVID-19 pandemic, a plot which involves killing hundreds of thousands of people so far for potentially billions of dollars of profit.

4. Conviction something’s wrong

Conspiracy theorists may occasionally abandon specific ideas when they become untenable. But those revisions tend not to change their overall conclusion that “something must be wrong” and that the official account is based on deception.

When “Plandemic” filmmaker Mikki Willis was asked if he really believed COVID-19 was intentionally started for profit, his response was “I don’t know, to be clear, if it’s an intentional or naturally occurring situation. I have no idea.”

He has no idea. All he knows for sure is something must be wrong: “It’s too fishy.”

5. Persecuted victim

Conspiracy theorists think of themselves as the victims of organized persecution. “Plandemic” further ratchets up the persecuted victimhood by characterizing the entire world population as victims of a vast deception, which is disseminated by the media and even ourselves as unwitting accomplices.

At the same time, conspiracy theorists see themselves as brave heroes taking on the villainous conspirators.

6. Immunity to evidence

It’s so hard to change a conspiracy theorist’s mind because their theories are self-sealing. Even absence of evidence for a theory becomes evidence for the theory: The reason there’s no proof of the conspiracy is because the conspirators did such a good job covering it up.

7. Reinterpreting randomness

Conspiracy theorists see patterns everywhere – they’re all about connecting the dots. Random events are reinterpreted as being caused by the conspiracy and woven into a broader, interconnected pattern. Any connections are imbued with sinister meaning.

For example, the “Plandemic” video suggestively points to the U.S. National Institutes of Health funding that has gone to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. This is despite the fact that the lab is just one of many international collaborators on a project that sought to examine the risk of future viruses emerging from wildlife.

..vid [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rban0JGEimE&feature=emb_logo]...

earning about common traits of conspiratorial thinking can help you recognize and resist conspiracy theories.

Critical thinking is the antidote

As we explore in our Conspiracy Theory Handbook, there are a variety of strategies you can use in response to conspiracy theories.

One approach is to inoculate yourself and your social networks by identifying and calling out the traits of conspiratorial thinking. Another approach is to “cognitively empower” people, by encouraging them to think analytically. The antidote to conspiratorial thinking is critical thinking, which involves healthy skepticism of official accounts while carefully considering available evidence.

Understanding and revealing the techniques of conspiracy theorists is key to inoculating yourself and others from being misled, especially when we are most vulnerable: in times of crises and uncertainty.

:{Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:*.* [Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

John Cook, Research Assistant Professor, Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University; Sander van der Linden, Director, Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, University of Cambridge; Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol, and Ullrich Ecker, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Western Australia

https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/conspiracy-theory-handbook/

This article is republished from The Conversation

==

https://www.theatlantic.com/shadowland

includes qanon

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/

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plandemic:

The patent was not for Covid-19; it was connected to a potential vaccine for a different coronavirus that affects poultry. But two days later, the conspiracy website Infowars inaccurately said the patent was for “the deadly virus.”

The idea spread. From February to April, conspiracy theories involving Mr. Gates and the virus were mentioned 1.2 million times on social media and television broadcasts, according to Zignal Labs. That was 33 percent more often, it said, than the next-largest conspiracy theory: that 5G radio waves cause people to succumb to Covid-19.

AHA RARE CASE OF DOWNSIDE TO BS GRIFT?

Diamond and Silk take the fall for Fox’s irresponsible coronavirus coverage

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}_

week, Fox parted ways Diamond and Silk (stage names of Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson) over their promotion of dangerous conspiracy theories related to the spread of the coronavirus. The Trump supporters and Fox commentators have promoted a variety of conspiracy theories, including claims that people are increasing the number of coronavirus deaths to make Trump look bad, as well as speculating that virus is being spread deliberately. Twitter even deleted their tweet opposing quarantines and calling for people to expose themselves to the virus.

Fox’s actions removing low-level commentators are simply a public relations strategy. The network lets their big stars to amplify the same messages to larger audiences, while punishing low-level people who get too much bad press.

For example, Fox host Tucker Carlson and Brit Hume, Fox’s senior political analyst, argued earlier this month that the COVID-19 death toll had been inflated due to what Carlson termed journalists’ “agenda.” Further, just hours after news broke that Diamond and Silk were shown the door, Carlson argued on his show that there is no scientific justification for quarantines and baselessly claimed that the spread of the virus has been slowed not by social distancing measures.

The language and content of these conspiracy theories are nearly identical, though Fox’s most notable figures are rarely held accountable. As Media Matters' Matt Gertz explained, “Fox’s executives have made the calculation that its big stars are too big to fail. Unless further pressure from advertisers and cable providers changes the financial equation, they will have no reason to hold them accountable.”

==

no lnx

ref

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/04/17/hate-groups-and-racist-pundits-spew-covid-19-misinformation-social-media-despite-companies

Hate groups and racist pundits have pushed misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic on mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube throughout the crisis, despite companies pledging to fight fake news about the virus.

Among some of the false claims propagated on social media include the notion – based on unproven race science – that persons of East Asian descent were predisposed to suffer from COVID-19, erroneous assertions that the virus was originally designed to be a bioweapon and arguments supporting the idea that racism can protect against global pandemics.

Hatewatch has chosen to repeat some of these posts in full to demonstrate the nature of the problem.

This deluge of COVID-19-related misinformation cuts against a pledge made by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in February 2020, when representatives from some of the world’s largest tech companies convened with members of the World Health Organization (WHO) to discuss tampering the spread of false information related to the virus. The group was gathered, in part, in response to what a representative from the WHO dubbed an “infodemic” in an interview with CNBC – the new wave of false information on major social media platforms.

Groups such as Change the Terms, a coalition of civil rights organizations including the Southern Poverty Law Center, have pushed to bridge this gap. Change the Terms advocates for social media companies to adopt a reasonable standard of care regarding regulation, which aims to constrain hate activity without stifling communities arbitrarily. But there is work yet to be done. Companies, as the 2019 “Year in Hate” report found, still struggle “to prioritize public safety over the freedom of their users to post extremist content.” The moderation of hate groups across all platforms is often inconsistent as well. Some groups, such as white nationalist publication American Renaissance, have been banned from Twitter and Facebook for hate speech for years, but have nevertheless continued to operate on YouTube.

As Hatewatch found in a survey of numerous hate groups tracked by the SPLC’s Intelligence Project across three major social media platforms – YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – racism and disinformation has continued to fester. In addition to spreading racist memes and fake news about Asian Americans and other minority groups, hate groups have used all three platforms to boost a slew of conspiracy theories, fake cures (including one that has resulted in a death in Arizona) and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

When considering the real-world threat posed by social media companies’ inability to enforce their own guidelines on misinformation and fake news, Chloe Colliver, the head of digital policy and strategy at ISD, told Hatewatch that “three main risks came to mind.” These included the risks posed not only to public health by the proliferation of fake cures, but also to institutions as a result of a preponderance of conspiracy theories. She also cited the danger of “target attacks” against minority groups and others.

“None of which are new,” she added. “They fit the patterns of platforms’ inability to deal with [these] specific kinds of attack and disinformation content.”

Most, if not all, of the groups spreading this content have been given a pass to do so under existing social media policies.

“Obviously, the historical reticence of these companies to promote evidence-based or expert information above other kinds of information has come back to bite [them] now, as we’ve seen,” Colliver continued. “The platforms themselves acknowledged that their policies aren’t up to scratch in a crisis like this.”

Facebook

VDARE, a white nationalist site that has had a promotional page on Facebook since 2012, has seized upon this climate of instability to push its racist agenda. More than 50 posts on its promotional page referred to the epidemic in some capacity.

“There is now scientific evidence that Africans (and Whites) are more resistant to [COVID-19] than Asians and that this is for genetic reasons,” one post from March 5 said. It included a link to an article from pseudonymous New York-based contributor “Lance Welton,” titled “Chinese Scientists Find MORE Evidence That Coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19) Discriminates By Race.”

“I’m sure the health authorities do have this information,” VDARE editor Peter Brimelow contended in an article posted to the site on March 12 as a follow up to “Welton’s” piece. Using debunked race science, Brimelow posited that COVID-19, as well as its predecessor, SARS, were “Oriental-specific.”

“Are some racial groups more prone to catching the Chinese pathogen – and are some races more severely affected when they do?” asked another Facebook post from March 31 – the same day officials announced that deaths in the United States had officially surpassed those of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The same post included a link to an article featuring a section titled “Coronovirus [sic] and the Mexican Race.”

VDARE, which has often referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan flu” (or “Wuflu”), defended Trump’s own use of the term on March 17 as well, arguing in a March 17 post that any opposition to such nomenclature was born out of a world where “white people are blamed for all . . . problems.”

Fake cures, not to mention misinformation regarding the source of the virus and government efforts to contain it, have been featured on a number of pages belonging to hate groups and extremist groups monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

WorldNetDaily (WND), a conspiracy-minded outlet and active antigovernment extremist group with over 840,000 likes on Facebook, has boosted a number of articles featuring antisemitic dog whistles, fake cures and other disinformation. Recent WND headlines include: “Coronavirus is being weaponized by Soros, others behind anti-Trump ads”; “Clyburn: Democrats must use Chinese virus to restructure America ‘to fit our vision’”; and “Newt Gingrich’s question for Biden exposes Obama’s undeniable role in N95 mask shortage.” Another proclaimed that a three-drug cocktail promoted by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko had a “100% success” rate in treating 350 patients with COVID-19. The article, which was shared to WND’s Facebook on March 24, includes an embedded video from Dr. Zelenko himself, which has since been removed by YouTube for violating community guidelines.

Though the particular combination of drugs – which includes hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial treatment – has been used by some doctors, the rapid spread of misinformation regarding the drugs’ use has raised some concern, especially for patients who may attempt to administer them themselves.

On March 31, WND published an article titled “‘Cover-up’: Chinese researched bat virus near Wuhan market,” which posited that the virus may have originated in a research lab near Wuhan.

Several antigovernment groups, including militias, peppered their pages with misinformation implying that the virus would result in a communist takeover of essential industries and/or attacks on the Second Amendment. These fears are central to the antigovernment movement’s opposition to the “New World Order.” This far-reaching conspiracy theory, which features prominently in antigovernment and other far-right circles, posits that a small, secretive cadre of elites are behind a rising totalitarian, one-world government.

“We’re not going down the road that leads to tyranny, and that’s what this whole crisis is about,” James Stachowiak, otherwise known as “Johnny Infidel,” said on a video on Facebook that sought to inspire “lone wolves” to take action.

“KLAYMAN: LEFT USING COVID-19 TO INSTALL GOV’T DICTATORSHIP!,” screamed a post on Freedom Watch’s page – a group run by far-right extremist Larry Klayman – in a post from March 25.

Still others encouraged users to view the virus as a vast “globalist” conspiracy. This antisemitic euphemism is frequently used by groups such as WND and Infowars, and has its roots in the centuries-old antisemitic image of Jews as “puppeteers” in complete control of society. One post from anti-LGBTQ extremist Scott Lively, published on March 22, claimed that the coronavirus outbreak had been “orchestrated” by the elites. Their goal, he contended, was to target “small business because it is a cornerstone of American self-sufficiency and serves as a barrier to the complete Marxist takeover of our society.”

Twitter

“Now think of a country the size of China . . . and think of its multi-thousand-year habit of eating some very strange creatures – basically a zoo is a menu in China, it seems. What are the odds that coronavirus just happened to emerge within a stone’s throw – in a giant country – of its only level four bioweapons lab?” asked white nationalist YouTuber and self-proclaimed philosopher Stefan Molyneux in a video clip posted to his Twitter on March 30.

“The odds, of course, are virtually zero,” he said. He claimed the virus appeared to be “engineered,” possibly for “transmission and lethality.”

Molyneux – who runs a verified account on Twitter with over 450,000 followers – has spread racist or pseudoscientific disinformation about COVID-19 for weeks.

“Open borders guy reaps fruit of open borders,” he tweeted on March 7, after the head of Italy’s Democratic Party tested positive for the virus.

Then, on March 25, Molyneux released a video accusing the media of turning “attention away from the mass infiltration of academia, of media, of Hollywood, [and] of real estate [by] Chinese citizens, often with illicit money from the criminal actions of the Chinese government.”

Finally, when asked by a follower why German hospitals weren’t “overwhelmed,” Molyneux encouraged followers on March 26 to “go look up average IQ by country.”

Molyneux, a well-known proponent of scientific racism, has as recently as Oct. 7, 2019, stated that the “average IQ in Syria is 83. Turkey is 90. They will never ever be like the West.” In 2018, he also cited “racial IQ differences” as a method to “push back against Third World immigration without succumbing to racism.”

Molyneux has made his affinity for a white “monoculture,” to borrow his term, widely known. In late 2018, Molyneux said he had endeared himself to white nationalist beliefs after visiting Poland, which he referred to as “an all-white country,” according to a Right Wing Watch report from Dec. 21, 2018.

Other prominent far-right accounts have sought to downplay the threat posed to Americans by the virus in various ways.

Far-right social media personality and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe produced a series of videos featuring him driving to different COVID-19 testing sites and hospitals in the New York City metro area on March 27. The videos, which were published on both O’Keefe’s personal Twitter with over 710,000 followers, as well as Project Veritas’s verified account with some 460,000 followers, include O’Keefe pressing a national guardsman to call the media coverage of the crisis “overblown.”

Though one of the videos was removed from O’Keefe’s Facebook on April 1, they remain on Twitter.

VDARE, which has evaded waves of Twitter bans targeting white nationalists, advertised on April 3 that they had created a “special archive” for posts related to COVID-19 and race. According to the white nationalist site, the “race-denying ruling class” – as one author called them in a March 28 article quoted on Twitter on April 1 – has supposedly denied the role of pseudoscientific racial differences in the spread of the disease.

“Ruling Class concedes it’s ok to Notice that Coronavirus discriminates by gender, but NOT that it discriminates by race. Why?” the account tweeted on Feb. 21.

VDARE also pushed the same anti-Asian rhetoric that has led to a wave of hate crimes across the country. “575,000+ Chinese call NYC home,” it posted on March 22, along with a link to an article titled “Is NYC Coronavirus Ground Zero Because Massive ‘Be Strong Wuhan’ Feb 9th Chinese New Year’s Parade Helped Spread the Chinese Virus?”

Twitter has, at times, cracked down on disinformation on the platform. On March 25, Twitter removed a post from the far-right site the Federalist, which advocated for spreading the virus through “chickenpox parties.” A March 27 tweet from Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk, which echoed the president’s endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, has since been removed from the platform for a terms of service violation. Two tweets from the far-right populist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, were removed on March 30 for spreading misinformation.

YouTube

“We actually have sound, instinctive reasons to be xenophobes,” American Renaissance head Jared Taylor told viewers in a YouTube video posted on March 12. He continued:

Everyone knows about the body’s immune system, which fights disease. We also have a behavioral immune system. All people everywhere instinctively avoid certain things that could make us sick. Piles of feces. Rotting flesh. People with running sores. Part of this behavioral immune system is an instinctive fear that people who act or look strange could be carrying disease.

“Xenophobia,” Taylor concluded, “can save your life.”

Taylor followed up on March 27, noting in a video titled “What the Virus Means for Us” that “everything teaches ‘identitarian’ lessons, including the coronavirus.”

“Professor Giorgio Palu, former president of the European Society of Virology, says that early on there was a proposal to isolate people coming from China, but they didn’t do that because people would’ve said that was ‘racist.’ Professor Polu believes that a large level of the devastation [in Italy] was caused by that: fear of being called racist,” Taylor said later in the same video.

Though Palu did acknowledge that a proposal to “isolate people coming from China” was shot down in a statement to CNN on March 18, he also explained that the breadth of Italy’s outbreak arose from the government lagging on both testing and enforcing lockdowns.

Despite being banned from Twitter since 2018, American Renaissance’s YouTube channel and its 126,000 subscribers have remained.

Jason Köhne, a white nationalist podcaster and vlogger known online as “No White Guilt,” blamed “anti-whiteism” not only for coronavirus spreading throughout the United States, but also for ensuring that many medicines and medical products were produced abroad.

“This is an anti-white issue,” he said in a video posted on March 24. “You can say there’s an economic component to it, but the bottom line is that the . . . incentivization structures have been put in place to capitalize on the harm inflicted on Western kind.”

Molyneux, meanwhile, used his channel to flesh out the idea, also propagated on his Twitter, that the virus was a “bioweapon.”

“[COVID-19] is kind of like the perfect virus from a weaponization standpoint, and if it was related to eating bats, it’s not like people in China started eating bats last October,” he said in a podcast from Jan. 25.

In a live stream aired March 27, Molyneux, along with his guest, Dr. Paul Cottrell, who received his Ph.D. in finance from the online, for-profit school, Walden University, discussed whether “the Wuhan virus is the bioweapon” that Cottrell contended had leaked out of a lab near Wuhan in 2015. Molyneux later pondered whether the virus’s spread throughout the world ought to be considered an act of “manslaughter” or even “homicide,” presumably on China’s part.

A day later, in a now-unlisted YouTube video linked to on Molyneux’s Twitter he declared a sort of victory for the racist, anti-immigrant right.

“All the people who were called ‘xenophobic’ and ‘racist’ for wanting to talk about immigration – who said that it was possible to stop it relatively easily – they’ve all been proven right,” he said in the March 28 video.

“Now the walls go up because it affects those in power,” he said

==

520 desmog on covid vlomate denial

Martin Armstrong

“:{World Health Organization Demanded Sweden Lock Down To Cover Its Own Fraud:(style="font-weight:700"):}:,” Armstrong Economics, April 17 (bold emphasis in original, highlights added)

The New York Times and others are out in full force to defend Bill Gates, their savior of the world. They distort everything and try to pretend he is this wonderful man who only has our best interests at heart. They also refuse to address how the World Health Organization has carried out the greatest fraud perhaps in modern history and the links of the United Nations to the drive for Climate Change also go back to Bill Gates.

“:{What is the Agenda?:(style="font-weight:700"):}:” Armstrong Economics, April 17

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the more socialistic the country, the greater the demand for us to be tracked. Australia is telling its people if you want to end the lockdown, then you must be tracked. This virus is by no means so dangerous to warrant such a complete breakdown of all our liberty. What seems to be emerging is that they know the monetary system is collapsing. A number of people have written in and said they have been following our models warning that 2021-2022 was going to be the breakdown of the monetary system. Perhaps, the actions of these socialists are clearly strategic and highly anti-democratic.

What comes next? Suspension of elections so we transform into totalitarian states? I would not expect that in the USA until they get rid of Trump. I would strongly advise he does not take any vaccine on the recommendation of Fauci.

“:{Is Bill Gates the Dark Lord?:(style="font-weight:700"):}:” Armstrong Economics, April 15

My trouble with Bill Gates is his alleged reputation for being ruthless and devious in light of his positions which are inconsistent. He is fearful of overpopulation, wants CO2 to be zero, funding vegetarian enterprises, wants to chip everyone, and then is a climate change supporter. This makes no sense. Why would you want to vaccinate everyone in the world to live longer if you are afraid of overpopulation and climate change? This is like being long and short at the same time in the same market with the same size positions on both sides. This makes no sense! What is his true end game?

COVID-19 will now be part of the annual flu season. By keeping everyone locked down, this means if they are not exposed, this virus will be prolonged. About 50% of those in Germany have already been exposed and have proven to be naturally immune.  Is this a virus they have intended to reduce the elderly to eliminate the pension and social liabilities for the baby-boomers? Some see this as the goal to save socialism. Reduce the population of the elderly and start over subjugating the youth. Interesting theory.

We already have Microsoft calls home like ET (phone home) every time you open any program in Office. Its antivirus software was taking your programs and checking them on their servers. That is obviously a threat to proprietary software to send a copy up to their servers.

Why do we all have to be chipped? Microsoft is tacking everything we do already. They sell that information to target advertisements. Now we have numerous countries demanding full-time tracking of people because of this coronavirus which is no more lethal than the flu. There are proposals for Britain and Europe lurking in the background where everyone must be tracked. How does this impact tourism? How will an American go to Greece or Italy if they are not part of this tracking system? Is this were Gates’ chips come in? Are we looking at losing our freedom to travel, assemble, and to speak freely? Is this what so many people died for defending our freedom in all these wars since the American Revolution?

[great pix bill as star wars dark lord]

“:{Trump Opening America Again,” Armstrong Economics:(style="font-weight:700"):}:, April 16 (bold emphasis in original, highlights added)

I had to laugh when Trump used the very reports claiming 2 million Americans would die which was put out by Neil Ferguson from Imperial College which received donations from Bill Gates to flip their negativity back on the press. We did a great job, Trump said, and we are coming in with well under 100,000 deaths because he closed the borders. It was sort of a mental martial arts contest using the force of your opponent against them.

Shifting the burden back to the governors was a brilliant move. New York City, which under governor Andrew Cuomo just weeks ago was blaming Trump and pleading that it would need 40,000 ventilators to handle a projected flood of critically ill COVID-19 patients that never appeared, now says things are going so well New York is shipping hundreds of ventilators to other states. It’s always a question of who gets the blame.

Socrates was right. COVID-19 would peak the week of April 6th. Even back on March 11th, our cyclical models showed the peak would be April/May. This was not some personal opinion or guess. This was simply modeling the life-cycle of all viruses. People who were saying this could last for 18 months were doing so to support Bill Gates saying it would take 18 months for a vaccine that would be conveniently after the 2020 elections.

I find it personally offensive for these journalists to harp on this nonsense that Trump was wrong when it is plainly the FAKE NEWS. What Trump has done was political. The draconian measures being carried out by each state will be attributable to the governor for the 2020 election – not Trump. Then we will probably see these horrible corrupt journalists flip it around and blame the lockdowns and loss of local jobs like in New York on Trump in time for the 2020 elections. Personally, I believe they are carrying out Sedition against the United States.

Trump has absolute authority to reopen the country because there is NO Constitutional Authority to have ordered a lockdown, to begin with. This idea of flattening the curve is only a THEORY and there is no evidence that this would even work. It is no different than Keynesian Economics with Quantitative Easing which has failed. The attempt to flatten the curve CANNOT defeat the energy of any cycle. All you will do is prolong it. The likelihood of this returning in the fall is probably better than 90%. The real threat is once this power has been seized by governments and it remains unchallenged, it will be used again and again in the future.

Trump made it very clear, there was NEVER a bed capacity problem. He sent hospital ships to New York, but they were not used. He had the Army Core of Engineers build beds in stadiums – they were never filled. The entire theory we needed to be locked down because there were not enough beds was totally BOGUS!!!!! When is the press going to point this out? We have been lied to and why? Where is the journalist willing to tell the truth just once! This is the CDC’s own graph showed bed capacity was the justification for the lockdown. The press bash Trump claiming he was wrong, but not a single word about this chart to justify the lockdown, to begin with, will ever appear in main-stream media.

“:{China v Gates – Spinning the Conspiracies:(style="font-weight:700"):}:,” Armstrong Economics, April 12

There may have been a leak from China which was a mistake, but it has been a deliberate seizure of this virus to further agendas by both the Gates Foundation and left-wing politicians. When Hydroxychloroquine has been used with 100% success in France, we had Gates and Fauci saying no – we need a vaccine. That was clearly the Gates agenda so were people supposed to die because Fauci claimed he wanted a long-term study?

[…]

The question will come down to historians was this a deliberate attack, or was it a leak which was exacerbated by the corruption behind the curtain of the Gates Foundation controlling every aspect of world health and politicians eager to use it because socialism was collapsing? This certainly seems to be very convenient for many people, not just China.

“:{Bill Gates Has Been Controlling WHO:(style="font-weight:700"):}:,” Armstrong Economics, April 12

We have a major crisis on our hands. Bill Gates is a VERY SERIOUS threat to not just the world economy, but to world peace. He has been using a loophole that allows health organizations to appear to be government agencies but are not independent and have been actually controlled by Gates. You will see that 80% of the funding of WHO is not from governments, but from donations. Then you see that Gates is the largest donor after countries listed on their website. Behind the curtain, the WHO has been bullied and pushed around by Bill Gates according to various sources one who is even writing a book on the domination of the WHO by Gates.

[…]

Bill Gates has taken over the world health issue as he allegedly ruthlessly he ran Microsoft. This man, I believe, has threatened civilization itself. We should be yelling to every politician in every country to (1) abolish any governmental agency from accepting any private donation AT ONCE! and (2) to launch an investigation into the connections with Gates that span the entire world. I may be risking my life even saying this – but we have a right to be free, not tagged and herded like cattle.

“:{The COVID-19 Fraud – It’s Massive:(style="font-weight:700"):}:,” Armstrong Economics, April 10

Senator Dr. Scott Jensen of Minnesota came out to expose how the AMA is encouraging American doctors to overcount coronavirus deaths across the US. He showed a 7-page document coaching him, as a doctor, to fill out death certificates with a COVID-19 diagnosis without a lab test to confirm the patient actually had the virus. Why? Because of the package for this relief, hospitals are paid more to attend this virus. NOBODY is dying of the flu any more – only COVID-19

The numbers will then be used to justify keeping the money flowing to misrepresent this as an epidemic. This fraud will then come back to justify keeping the economy locked down longer and the AMA is now contributing to the destruction of everyone’s livelihood, pension, and this exposes the corruption that always emerges with government programs.

“:{Influence v a Cabal:(style="font-weight:700"):}:,” Armstrong Economics, April 9

This is a cabal, a coordinated attack using so many fronts it is just beyond contemplation. It has been well organized. The WHO, which is part of this conspiracy, is now stating the world must remain locked down. This is not the bankers, it is the socialists who have used climate change which was not moving the people to action. They switched the dogma to immediate death if you dare to walk outside.

“:{Did Bill Gates Buy the CDC?:(style="font-weight:700"):}:” Armstrong Economics, April 6

Trump should fire Fauci first and secondly shut down all private donations from anyone, especially Bill Gates. This is a matter of NATIONAL SECURITY. Gates should be investigated and all his connections. Anyone who sold all their stocks and bonds just in advance should be hauled out for Insider Trading. But these people typically also OWN the SEC. Trump needs to appoint a Special Prosecutor and never someone from New York City.

“:{UN Wants Global Power to Tax 10% for the Coronavirus:(style="font-weight:700"):}:,” Armstrong Economics, April 2

Anyone who thinks for one second that I am exaggerating by calling this a global coup does not know me very well. I do not buy into conspiracy theories. I rely upon qualified sources – not rumor or conjecture. I have WARNED that we are facing a leftist coup of major proportions. I have warned that this virus was not a real threat from the beginning. It was not a biological weapon spliced with aids or a leak. This has been an intentional misrepresentation. My sources suggest it existed in the previous flu season in China.

The United Nations, and their World Health Organization, is behind this coup as well. The death toll is far less than the annual flu (about 10%) but the press is so happy to support this Marxist agenda. The journalists who are following orders from their managing editors are sealing their own future and that of their families and children. They used this virus for there is no vaccine but there are plenty of independent sources saying the medicine to treat malaria have been working with no deaths in France and elsewhere.

“:{Is the Virus Being Used to Usher-In a Police State in Different Parts of the World?:(style="font-weight:700"):}:” – March 21

There is something wrong here. You do not destroy the world economy on this magnitude to even save 25,000 lives. Even if 40% of the population got this, with a death rate which is less than 3% (8% among the elderly), it does not warrant this economic destruction. They are wiping out small businesses, countless people have lost their jobs, others their entire pension fund, and there is no putting this back together again as nothing happened. This is an intentional economic destruction that is being carried out for an undisclosed purpose.

:{The Wrong Conspiracy – Is the Virus the Bait? – March 19:(style="font-weight:700"):}:

In France, journalists are no longer allowed to go out and cover stories. They need permission from the government and must explain what the story is about. Then their editors must also approve before they even seek permission from the government. There are reliable leads that this is a manufactured crisis coming from people seeking to further the global socialist agenda out of the United Nations. I have confirmation that the central banks have NOT been apart of this and they are being pushed into the corner. Hedge funds are being wiped out and the losses are staggering. The main reason seems to be that the bulk of the industry relies on fundamental analysis. This has proven that they were caught completely off guard because this virus does not warrant shutting down the entire world economy. Now, journalists who are skeptical are being sequestered to prevent exposing what is going on.

Those touting the virus is being understated may love their own conspiracy world, but they are being used for a much more serious agenda.

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vp-mike-pence-rewards-rush-limbaugh-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories-another

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/trump-surrogates-and-fox-hosts-diamond-and-silk-pushed-unhinged-5g-coronavirus

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/trump-surrogates-and-fox-hosts-diamond-and-silk-are-pushing-dangerous-coronavirus

==

==

https://www.pbs.org/video/big-tech-dystopia-incorporated-2pe3lu/

THE OPEN MIND

Big Tech = Dystopia Incorporated

04/13/2020 | 26m 52s |Video has closed captioning.

not vetted

NBC News dystopia beat reporter Ben Collins discusses exposing viral deception and the companies that enable it.

==

wagle

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/kansas-republican-state-senator-goes-full-on-conspiracy-theorist-as-she-fights-for-us-senate-seat

==

aha note escalator, and rexycling mutation/hybridization of older conspir BS

he's the next soros re covid?

Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy theory spread on social media and then to a Fox News host.

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-gates-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-spread-social-media-and-then-fox-news

mma many link, pix, graf/ twt

Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy theory spread on social media and then to a Fox News host

Conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and QAnon supporters spread the false claim online

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 04/08/20 12:13 PM EDT

A conspiracy theory about Microsoft founder Bill Gates and a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been circulating for weeks on social media platforms, getting high engagement numbers, and has since been pushed by both Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a Newsmax correspondent.

As the coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the United States, Gates, who runs an organization that focuses on public health worldwide and has warned of the threat of epidemics for years, has been leading efforts to and spoken out about finding a vaccine. That has included spending billions of dollars to find a cure via his foundation and doing interviews on shows including Fox News Sunday and The Daily Show about the need for a vaccine.

Gates on March 18 also participated in a Reddit “AMA” (“Ask me anything”) Q&A, where he encouraged a “national tracking system” for the coronavirus and “some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”Scientific American reported in December that Gates had been funding efforts to create an invisible ink that could go into people’s skin to see who has been vaccinated. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology bioengineer said the ink could provide data that is useful in fighting disease around the world, noting, “If we don’t have good data, it’s really difficult to eradicate disease” (though the outlet also quoted a bioengineering professor admitting it could raise privacy concerns).

During this time, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have spread a baseless conspiracy theory on multiple social media platforms, far-right sites, and message boards claiming that Gates’ effort to help develop a vaccine is some kind of nefarious attempt to control, follow, or even depopulate the world’s population via a “microchip” of some sort (the “depopulation” claim is based on a major misreading of Gates’ past remarks).

A review by Media Matters found that the conspiracy theory first seemed to gain traction around March 17, when a YouTube video about the virus mischaracterized Gates’ work to develop trackable vaccine data as “implanting everybody with a global ID” and compared it to tattoos on Holocaust victims. The video received more than 120,000 views. On that same day, conspiracy theory outlet Infowars published a piece and video of an Infowars host suggesting Gates was using the situation to “reduce the world’s population,” citing the invisible ink, and tied it to claiming the government would give out a “color-coded wristband that will be used for traveling Americans during an impending COVID-19 lockdown.” The Infowars article subsequently spread in Facebook groups and showed up as a meme on Instagram.

Infowars Bill Gates

Following Gates’ AMA and his “digital certificates” comment, the conspiracy theory spread on March 18, moving to message boards including 4chan’s “/pol/” and the conspiracy subreddit on Reddit, where a user called Gates’ Reddit posts “pretext for introduction of certificate of movement” and a plan to be “fully enslaved by the Deep State.” On Telegram that evening, white nationalist Faith Goldy wrote that Gates’ posts were “underreported” and that a “microchip implant ID” would be harmful to “nationalists.”

Faith Goldy Bill Gates

The following day, as the conspiracy theory continued to circulate on 4chan, it was picked up by NewsPunch, a disinformation site formerly known as YourNewsWire, which accused Gates of pushing for technology that will be “adopted for its ‘convenience and safety’ and then overnight will become mandatory for you and your family – or else.” That piece, too, circulated on social media and as a meme, along with other memes accusing Gates of using a vaccine to work with “globalists” for a “new world order.”

Bill Gates Instagram3

On March 21, another YouTube video was uploaded saying Gates wants to implant microchips in people and calling them a “mark of Satan” that could be used for “identifying us to the United Nations.” The video has received nearly 1.8 million views and at least 1.2 million Facebook engagements, according to the tracking tool BuzzSumo. That includes shares in QAnon Facebook groups and on a major anti-vaxx Facebook page.

Bill Gates Facebook1

Throughout the rest of March, more videos popped up on YouTube (despite the platform’s pledge to crack down on coronavirus misinformation) accusing Gates of wanting “eugenics” and “population control” and claiming he is the antichrist and that he essentially supports genocide; they racked up another 1.6 million views combined. The videos included a clip from anti-Semitic conspiracy theory outlet TruNews and a video whose title called the virus a “hoax” (those videos received hundreds of thousands of Facebook engagements combined).

Bill Gates YouTube5

Videos on social media platform TikTok pushing the conspiracy theory in late March and early April also racked up many views(despite the platform’s anti-misinformation policy). One video that received more than 230,000 views included in the caption “#fvaccines” and accused Gates of pushing for everyone on the planet to have a “digital ID … by combining mandatory vaccines with implantable microchips.” (Media Matters removes identifying information from videos created by or featuring minors to protect their identity.) Another video that received tens of thousands of views claimed Gates was “evil” and connected him to a plan to “get everybody microchipped” via vaccines.

Video file

CitationFrom a video uploaded to TikTok on April 1, 2020

The conspiracy theory continued to spread following news in early April of Gates’ spending for a coronavirus cure. Another major white nationalist Telegram account shared a post saying Gates wants the population “extinguished,” and multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including QAnon and anti-vaxx accounts, shared a meme urging people to take “no vaccine from some shady ass nerd that wants to depopulate the planet.” Ben Garrison, a far-right and pro-Trump cartoonist, drew a cartoon pushing the conspiracy theory that portrays Gates as a Nazi, which was also posted on the backup site of the pro-Trump subreddit “r/The_Donald.”

Bill Gates Facebook Instagram meme

By April 6, bigger QAnon accounts on social media had spread the conspiracy theory, such as Dylan Wheeler, who accused Gates of using “microchip[s]” in order to be “the face of the New World Order.”

That afternoon, Emerald Robinson, Newsmax’s White House correspondent, tweeted a thread accusing Gates of “control[ling] global health policy” and saying that his “plan” was to use “vaccines to track people.”

On the morning of April 7, Fox host Laura Ingraham, while quote-tweeting an anti-vaxx musician's post about Gates’ AMA, said “globalists” see the pandemic as a “perfect vehicle” for their “dream” of “digitally tracking Americans’ every move.”

The spread of the conspiracy theory comes as multiple other conspiracy theories about the coronavirus have circulated on social media, including others about Gates and the virus.

==

an 420 kinda random

no lnx

Limbaugh baselessly claims Fauci is a ‘Clinton sympathizer’ who wants to ‘get rid’ of Trump

Written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon April 9, 2020

Right wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh baselessly accused Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of being a “Hillary Clinton sympathizer” who wants “to get rid of Donald Trump” during a Tuesday broadcast.

After claiming that the media tries to use its press briefings to undermine President Donald Trump, Limbaugh accused ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl of bringing in a reporter from Phoenix TV, a privately owned company stationed in Hong Kong with connections to the Chinese government. Limbaugh claimed that Fauci “gave Karl a-thumbs up, like a ‘job well done’ kind of thing” after the press briefing.

“We’ve got all of these Hillary Clinton sympathizers still in the medical expert team here, and we know that one thing has not changed,” Limbaugh added. “And that is these people’s desire — above everything else — to get rid of Donald Trump.”

“Can you believe these people don’t care about the economy being shut down? It is stunning to me. People are being ruined,” he continued. “I talked to a number of friends of mine. These are people that own their own business. A guy — a good friend of mine in South Carolina — told me he’s losing a million dollars a day. Another friend’s business is totally shut down — he’s ruined. And there’s no end in sight to this.”

Trump and Fauci reportedly have a strained relationship. The president blocked Fauci from answering a question about hydroxychloroquine during a Sunday press briefing. Hydroxychloroquine is an unproven drug treatment for the novel coronavirus, which the president has hyped in previous statements even as he reportedly failed to disclose that he holds a financial interest in a French pharmaceutical company that manufactures it. Fauci has expressed frustration at the way Trump behaves during press conferences, telling Science magazine that he feels “exhausted” but “can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down.”

Limbaugh concluded his monologue by falsely claiming that “there is an all-out subtle effort for the status quo because it’s going to hurt Donald Trump. That is the objective. That is the only thing at the forefront of some of these people’s minds while they portray themselves as being primarily concerned with public health.”

Trump lashed out at Karl during the Tuesday press briefing after the ABC News reporter asked about an inspector general report which found that the federal government had failed hospitals in a number of ways, including not providing them with sufficient medical supplies from the Strategic National Stockpile and offering them inconsistent guidance (which the report also blamed on state and local authorities).

Trump berated Karl for not mentioning in his question that the official who issued the report, Christi Grimm, had been appointed principal deputy inspector general by former President Barack Obama. However, Trump never appointed a replacement inspector general when Grimm’s predecessor resigned in June 2019.

“Whenever he sees the words or hears the words ‘inspector general,’ he thinks these are the people who forced me to go through impeachment,” Karl told Mediaite’s Dan Abrams on Tuesday.

He also questioned the sincerity of Trump’s attacks on the press, observing that “he praises me to his friends, and then he’ll come out right after and blast me in front of the cameras. I know for a fact he does this with Maggie Haberman.”

You can watch the full video below via Media Matters for America:=

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/zero-credibility-legal-experts-blast-bill-barr-for-espousing-political-conspiracy-theories-in-the-midst-of-global-pandemic/

===

an 420

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/new-study-finds-trumps-tweets-intensify-anti-vaccine-attitudes-among-his-supporters/

New study finds Trump’s tweets intensify anti-vaccine attitudes among his supporters

Written by April 3, 2020

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New research has found that Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 are particularly prone to anti-vaccination attitudes and that these attitudes can be exacerbated by the president’s tweets. The findings have been published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.“I’m generally interested in anti-vaccination beliefs because they have the potential to do so much damage. When Trump was elected it also struck me as a curious moment in history, because he was the first U.S. president in modern history to be on the record with anti-vaxx views,” explained study author Matthew J. Horns…

Read More

New research has found that Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 are particularly prone to anti-vaccination attitudes and that these attitudes can be exacerbated by the president’s tweets. The findings have been published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

“I’m generally interested in anti-vaccination beliefs because they have the potential to do so much damage. When Trump was elected it also struck me as a curious moment in history, because he was the first U.S. president in modern history to be on the record with anti-vaxx views,” explained study author Matthew J. Hornsey, a professor at the University of Queensland Business School.

Trump had sent dozens of tweets linking vaccinations with autism, such as one in 2014 that read: “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – AUTISM. Many such cases!”[see CPP?!]

Hornsey remarked that Trump is “the most conspiracy-minded president in modern history. It was natural to wonder, then, whether Trump supporters were more anti-vaxx than other Americans, and whether Trump’s tweets had the potential to still do damage.”

The researchers first conducted a scientific survey of 518 Americans who voted in the 2016 presidential election. They found that participants who voted for Trump tended to be more conservative and more conspiracy-minded, which in turn made them more likely to express concerns about vaccines and agree with statements such as “Children get more vaccinations than are good for them.”

“There’s a conspiratorial worldview that Trump voters hold more than other people; that it’s commonplace for groups of elites with hidden agendas to band together and conduct elaborate hoaxes on the public in near-perfect secrecy. And the data show that having that worldview makes you much more likely to be anti-vaxx,” Hornsey told PsyPost.

“We then did a study to test whether reading Trump’s anti-vaxx tweets still have an impact on the public.”

In the second study, another 316 Americans who voted in 2016 completed the same scientific survey. About a week later, the participants were randomly assigned to either view Trump’s tweets about vaccines or a view Trump’s tweets about golf. They then reported their levels of concern about vaccination for a second time.

“Trump voters became more anti-vaxx after reading his tweets. So Trump doesn’t just reflectthe views of his supporters, he still has the power to shapehis supporters’ views,” Hornsey explained.

“We thought that reading Trump’s tweets might shock liberal voters into being lessanti-vaxx. But it didn’t. Trump’s tweets made his own supporters more anti-vaxx but had no effect on anyone else. So it was all downside; there was no upside to the tweets, sadly.”

Trump appears to have reversed course on this issue, however.

“Trump has stopped making anti-vaxx statements since he became president. Last year, he even encouraged parents to vaccinate their children in the face of a measles outbreak. We’re hoping this is a permanent change of heart, especially in the wake of COVID-19. Every president since Roosevelt has swung behind the science on vaccination. It’s promising that Trump has stopped backing himself into a corner on this, because his words can save lives,” Hornsey said.

The study, “Donald Trump and vaccination: The effect of political identity, conspiracist ideation and presidential tweets on vaccine hesitancy“, was authored by Matthew J. Hornsey, Matthew Finlayson, Gabrielle Chatwood, and Christopher T. Begeny.Trend MD v2.4.7

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covid is (elite) power grab

Here are just some of the most notable examples of conservative media pushing this negligent narrative:

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-figures-are-making-unhinged-connections-between-coronavirus-and

Some of right-wing media’s most prolific climate deniers are using the disastrous effects of the coronavirus to promote their anti-climate agenda across multiple platforms.

These figures have reframed their usual climate attacks around the pandemic. Some have compared the (alleged) outcomes of the Green New Deal to the (real) impacts of the coronavirus, while others have claimed that both the coronavirus and climate change are being used by leftists to push a radical agenda.

Green New Deal

Perhaps the most shameful connection made between coronavirus and the Green New Deal came from Daniel Turner, a fossil fuel industry shill whose recent career has been bankrolled by Koch Industries. Making his debut in **The Federalist**on March 13, with an article titled “How The Wuhan Virus Is Accomplishing The Green New Deal’s Goals,” Turner concluded that “coronavirus is a glimpse of the long-term pain a Green New Deal and environmental radicalism would inflict on America.”

Turner attempted to support this conclusion with false claims about the Green New Deal, claiming that, like the coronavirus, it would crush capitalism, put the “oil and gas industry into panic,” end travel, and control the population.

To add insult to blatant misinformation, he also stated that supporters of the Green New Deal should be “pleased” at what the coronavirus is accomplishing because “green activists don’t fret these casualties” and that “greens will rejoice” over the coronavirus’s disastrous effects.

Turner had previously pushed this narrative on March 11, again connecting the coronavirus and the Green New Deal to “more government control.”

Over the past year, Turner has made a habit of appearing in right-wing outlets to lie and fearmonger about the Green New Deal, and to promote climate denial in general. This is also not the first time he’s claimed that the Green New Deal is just a front for socialism. Since January 2019, he’s appeared on Fox News at least 12 times and on Fox Business at least 21 times, and written at least 40 op-eds for Fox News’ website.

The same day that Turner published his abhorrent piece in The Federalist, well-known climate denier Rush Limbaugh made a similar connection between the climate resolution and coronavirus on his radio show, stating that “If you want to know what the Green New Deal would look like, you're starting to see it”:

[vid? aud?]

rush is no stranger to lying about the Green New Deal; in August, he said that “the premise behind it is bogus,” and also said that “there is no man-made climate change.” He’s been echoing the same sort of misinformation during the coronavirus outbreak, even claiming that it’s been “exaggerated and ... lied about.”

Alex Epstein, author of the book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which argues that the “overall impact of using fossil fuels is to make the world a far better place,” picked up on the egregious connection between the Green New Deal and coronavirus in a March 16 tweet. He told his followers:

Epstein has produced five videos featuring climate denial with Prager U--a right-wing, propagandist online video resource -- including one in which he lies about the Green New Deal. Perhaps more dangerously, his controversial (and flat out wrong) ideas are being promoted by Chevron to push back on climate activism against the oil industry. In the past, he’s appeared onFox News, Fox Business,BlazeTV, and theRubin Report.

These climate deniers love to fantasize about the supposed bad outcomes of the Green New Deal, despite the fact that it will have positive climate impacts -- it will help fight climate change and inequality, while reducing the reliance of harmful fossil fuels that are contributing to these very issues in the U.S.

Leftist policies and government control

Claims that climate action, especially as embodied by the Green New Deal, is just a front for more government control over our lives are popular among right-wing media figures, and they’ve also been invoked when talking about the coronavirus.

On March 16, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowlesdid just this, calling the responses to both climate change and coronavirus a “panic” and arguing that these issues are “simply being used to push through all the leftist policies that the left really, really wants.” He specifically referred to efforts “to pump up the Wuhan virus panic,” and he misrepresented climate science multiple times.

[vid]

Knowles is perhaps best known for being too unhinged even for Fox News; after he shamefully called Greta Thunberg a “mentally ill” child on a September appearance on The Story with Martha MacCallum, the network apologized for his “disgraceful” comment and stated that it had no further plans to book him. But he apparently still fits in perfectly at the cesspool of hatred and bigotry that is The Daily Wire.

Not to be outdone by Knowles, National Review’s Kevin Williamson invoked fascism when discussing climate change.Although he didn’t claim that the coronavirus is a false crisis, like some of his other right-wing colleagues, Williamson insinuated that both the left and the right are using the pandemic to push their respective “agendas.”

The great American longing for a generation-defining crisis — Pearl Harbor envy — is strange and enduring, and it shapes thinking on both sides of the great sociopolitical divide: On the left, global warming is the Third Reich, the so-called Green New Deal is the moonshot, and whatever unnecessary immiseration and chaos is unleashed by the fantasies of progressives are only sadly inevitable casualties on the beaches of this new Normandy. On the right, it’s an Islamic caliphate, the coming civil war (there’s always one), the nation’s being overrun by hordes of Spanish-speaking people, or — it is almost a relief to consider it — Armageddon itself. With everything from right-wing survivalist novels to ironic hipster zombie shows, we have been preparing ourselves, in our low-impact way, for just such an eventuality.

And in the plague, we see whatever we want to see: the need for a universal health-care system and paid leave, the need for a wall and for severing our relations with the Chinese.

An op-ed in RT (the state-run outlet formerly known as Russia Today) also made the government control point-- and also included a reprehensible attack on children concerned about climate change. Titled “What do the coronavirus & Greta Thunberg have in common? They’re both great for the planet,” the author writes:

Airplanes are grounded. Roads, deserted. The skies are clear and fish swim once again in Venice’s canals. Covid-19 has achieved in three short months what Greta Thunberg and her ilk could only dream of.

…

But climate hysteria has been relegated to the back pages by coverage of Covid-19. Thunberg and her devotees can find some silver linings though: not only does she not have to return to school (nice timing, G), but the virus has helped Mother Earth recover in ways that screaming, crying, and gluing themselves to trains never could.

…

But once things are back to normal, the environmental debate will likely start anew. This time, the Greta Thunbergs of the world can point to the current, virus-induced environmental uptick as proof that we can – when push comes to shove – give up our carbon addiction. However, remember that if your leaders are serious about meeting the climate goals they promise to, the lifestyle changes they ask of you will need to be enforced with the machinery of the state.

The author insinuates that “extreme measures” being taken to stop the spread of coronavirus are what “environmental crusaders” really want in pursuing their climate change goals.

The Russian government-backed RT has posted misleading climate videos on YouTube and has generally sown misinformation through its platform.

The government control idea has also been espoused by fringe, far-right YouTubers. One YouTuber, who has over 360,000 subscribers, produced anearly 18-minute video saying that coronavirus and climate change are both propaganda and that both of these “scaremonger” stories are being pushed by “globalist-backed” agendas that allow “governments to crack down on the public in various ways.” YouTube, which has a huge problem with climate change misinformation on its platform, has not tagged the video as pushing a climate falsehood.

Right wing-outlets, especially Fox News, have used a lot of misinformation when talking about the coronavirus. It’s no surprise that they’re also using favorite climate denier arguments within the discussions.

==

mma 3/22/20

Fox News’ dismissive coverage of novel coronavirus and COVID-19, which minimized the risk the disease posed in order to provide political cover to President Donald Trump, should be a stain on the network and its propagandists that never washes out.

Fox had a responsibility to provide its viewers with clear, accurate information about the ongoing public health crisis. Instead, for crucial weeks, as COVID-19 spread to become a global pandemic, the network’s propagandists downplayed the danger posed by the virus and portrayed it as a politicized hoax engineered by Democrats and the media in order to damage their beloved president. That initial coverage doubtlessly fed Trump’s own lack of concern over the threat, hampering public efforts to curtail the coronavirus. Only after Trump himself showed signs of taking the virus more seriously did many of the network’s hosts pivot and begin informing their viewers they were facing a “crisis.”

At a time of maximum peril, Fox put the president’s political standing over the health and well-being of its viewers and the country as a whole. This should follow each and every person who participated in the despicable effort for the rest of their days.

Fox viewers in denial: Fox News’ early coverage of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 appears to have successfully convinced its viewers not to take seriously the risk posed to the public, according to two polls released this week.

People who pay the most attention to Fox News are much less likely than others to say they are worried about coronavirus, according to a YouGov/The Economist poll. People who say Fox is their main source of election news are also much more likely to believe the news media has exaggerated the risks posed by coronavirus, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted March 10-16.

Pew similarly finds that 66% of Fox viewers say they are “very confident” in Trump’s handling of the outbreak, compared to 24% of all U.S. adults. Only 27% of Fox viewers call coronavirus “a major threat” to the health of the U.S. population as a whole, compared to 47% among all U.S. adults.

The cost of decades of anti-intellectualism: How did we get to a point where scores of people are downplaying the risk of a pandemic for political reasons? It's a story that played out over decades. Conservative leaders spent decades denouncing the press as perniciously liberal and standing up their own news outlets for their supporters to consume instead. The strategy worked: Rank-and-file Republicans came to deeply distrust mainstream news sources; right-wing talk radio, Fox, and a variety of other outlets became profitable and influential businesses; and the right gained immense political power.

In doing so, conservatives had also created a news bubble that became increasingly difficult to penetrate. In the Trump era, the people in charge of letting information through that bubble are political hacks, trained to downplay threats except for those that can be taken advantage of by nativist and revanchist forces.

As this email has documented, leading right-wing voices like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the Fox & Friends crew all downplayed coronavirus until it was too late. Now, the virus is still spreading and we still don't know exactly how bad it will get -- but we do know that four people at Fox have tested positive.
The pivot: Fox News stops calling coronavirus a hoax -- and instead features way more bigotry and nativism

After weeks of downplaying COVID-19, Fox News coverage is shifting to racist fearmongering and perverse victory-lapping about strict immigration enforcement.For Fox and other right-wing media, this is now settling into familiar territory: racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. We can expect more of it all as the pandemic worsens.

First, conservative media outlets anti-Asian bigotry simply referred to the outbreak as the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus." Health professionals have explained time and again the dangers these racist characterizations pose. The World Health Organization choseCOVID-19 as a “clinical and nondescript” name in order to avoid “stigmatization of the place from which it originated.”

Soon, it wasn’t enough to just call it the “Chinese virus.” The second strategy, just a step removed from conspiracy theories about a supposed bioweapons lab, promoted the idea that China “unleashed” it upon the world. We've seen this from the likes of Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity.

The third tactic was to accuse anyone of questioning Donald Trump or right-wing media of doing the bidding for the Chinese government.

Anti-Asian violence is on the rise. CNN's senior national correspondent Kyung Lah described how she personally experienced anti-Asian racism this week while reporting on COVID-19.

What Fox News and right-wing media want most of all is to distract from the colossal failings of the Trump administration and to make the national conversation about accusations of racism and a supposed backlash to political correctness. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer explained: “They’re far more concerned about riling up the base by drawing accusations of racism than they are dealing with the pandemic. It’s absolutely urgent to them that they be able to get into this argument to distract from Trump’s incompetence.”

There is plenty of reporting on how Trump long denied that the novel coronavirus was a problem, or how he ignored intelligence warnings of a pandemic, or how he forgotto make long-term plans, or how he and the White House have neglected to give basic instructions to those they ask for help, or how he's failed to take actions that would alleviate the imminent medical crisis that the country is facingand will continue to face.
Lou Dobbs' coronavirus poll
[grf]
Folks, this is a real poll that Lou Dobbs ran, asking if Trump's response to coronavirus has been "superb," "great," or "very good."
How Fox's medical commentators spread misinformation during the outbreak

Instead of giving sound medical advice, Fox News’ medical commentators for weeks pushed misinformation that directly echoed the talking points of both the **Trump** administration and Fox News opinion commentators.

Most notably was Fox’s chief medical contributor Dr. **Marc Siegel**. Before March 13, Siegel made 47 weekday appearances to discuss the outbreak. Here are just a few examples:

  • Siegel excused Trump from responsibility over the administration’s failure to widely test Americans.
  • Siegel said the “worst case scenario” for coronavirus is “it could be the flu.” In later appearances, he would contradict what he said here.
  • Siegel attacked the World Health Organization as “a bunch of alarmists, they are saber rattlers.”
  • Siegel claimed coronavirus concerns are being intentionally overblown to hurt Trump politically.

Several other medical commentators misled Fox’s audience as the outbreak worsened, including **Nicole Saphier**, **Manny Alvarez**, **Mehmet Oz**, and **Janette Nesheiwat**.

**Fox hosts quack doctor:** Fox News aired dangerous misinformation from **Steven Hotze**, a disreputable doctor who has a history of pushing “methods [that] are not supported by science and are potentially harmful” and sells bogus colloidal silver. Hotze used his Fox News platform to dismiss concerns about the coronavirus as people going “totally crazy” and told viewers to “conduct your life normally.” He is a bigot who has claimed that “‘Satanic cults’ were driving the ‘homosexual movement,’” compared LGBTQ people to “Nazis,” and said that Houston residents should “drive” LGBTQ people "out of our city.” More recently, Hotze has been a major backer of **Roy Moore** in Alabama.

3/20 three text capt

conspir320

7/17 prev capt?

THREE

519 SEE fake news, post truth, alternative facts

see ukraine 2 BLT

much invisible here 3/22/20 3 gray box, fixed end"Trump-favorite" ref

capt 3/20

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uber1 https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-4086

==

mma 3/22/20

Fox News’ dismissive coverage of novel coronavirus and COVID-19, which minimized the risk the disease posed in order to provide political cover to President Donald Trump, should be a stain on the network and its propagandists that never washes out.

Fox had a responsibility to provide its viewers with clear, accurate information about the ongoing public health crisis. Instead, for crucial weeks, as COVID-19 spread to become a global pandemic, the network’s propagandists downplayed the danger posed by the virus and portrayed it as a politicized hoax engineered by Democrats and the media in order to damage their beloved president. That initial coverage doubtlessly fed Trump’s own lack of concern over the threat, hampering public efforts to curtail the coronavirus. Only after Trump himself showed signs of taking the virus more seriously did many of the network’s hosts pivot and begin informing their viewers they were facing a “crisis.”

At a time of maximum peril, Fox put the president’s political standing over the health and well-being of its viewers and the country as a whole. This should follow each and every person who participated in the despicable effort for the rest of their days.

Fox viewers in denial: Fox News’ early coverage of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 appears to have successfully convinced its viewers not to take seriously the risk posed to the public, according to two polls released this week.

People who pay the most attention to Fox News are much less likely than others to say they are worried about coronavirus, according to a YouGov/The Economist poll. People who say Fox is their main source of election news are also much more likely to believe the news media has exaggerated the risks posed by coronavirus, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted March 10-16.

Pew similarly finds that 66% of Fox viewers say they are “very confident” in Trump’s handling of the outbreak, compared to 24% of all U.S. adults. Only 27% of Fox viewers call coronavirus “a major threat” to the health of the U.S. population as a whole, compared to 47% among all U.S. adults.

The cost of decades of anti-intellectualism: How did we get to a point where scores of people are downplaying the risk of a pandemic for political reasons? It's a story that played out over decades . Conservative leaders spent decades denouncing the press as perniciously liberal and standing up their own news outlets for their supporters to consume instead. The strategy worked: Rank-and-file Republicans came to deeply distrust mainstream news sources; right-wing talk radio, Fox, and a variety of other outlets became profitable and influential businesses; and the right gained immense political power.

In doing so, conservatives had also created a news bubble that became increasingly difficult to penetrate. In the Trump era, the people in charge of letting information through that bubble are political hacks, trained to downplay threats except for those that can be taken advantage of by nativist and revanchist forces.

As this email has documented, leading right-wing voices like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the Fox & Friends crew all downplayed coronavirus until it was too late. Now, the virus is still spreading and we still don't know exactly how bad it will get -- but we do know that four people at Fox have tested positive.

The pivot: Fox News stops calling coronavirus a hoax -- and instead features way more bigotry and nativism

After weeks of downplaying COVID-19, Fox News coverage is shifting to racist fearmongering and perverse victory-lapping about strict immigration enforcement. For Fox and other right-wing media, this is now settling into familiar territory: racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. We can expect more of it all as the pandemic worsens.

First, conservative media outlets anti-Asian bigotry simply referred to the outbreak as the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus." Health professionals have explained time and again the dangers these racist characterizations pose. The World Health Organization chose COVID-19 as a “clinical and nondescript” name in order to avoid “stigmatization of the place from which it originated.”

Soon, it wasn’t enough to just call it the “Chinese virus.” The second strategy, just a step removed from conspiracy theories about a supposed bioweapons lab, promoted the idea that China “unleashed” it upon the world. We've seen this from the likes of Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity.

The third tactic was to accuse anyone of questioning Donald Trump or right-wing media of doing the bidding for the Chinese government.

Anti-Asian violence is on the rise. CNN's senior national correspondent Kyung Lah described how she personally experienced anti-Asian racism this week while reporting on COVID-19.

What Fox News and right-wing media want most of all is to distract from the colossal failings of the Trump administration and to make the national conversation about accusations of racism and a supposed backlash to political correctness. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer explained: “They’re far more concerned about riling up the base by drawing accusations of racism than they are dealing with the pandemic. It’s absolutely urgent to them that they be able to get into this argument to distract from Trump’s incompetence.”

There is plenty of reporting on how Trump long denied that the novel coronavirus was a problem, or how he ignored intelligence warnings of a pandemic, or how he forgot to make long-term plans, or how he and the White House have neglected to give basic instructions to those they ask for help, or how he's failed to take actions that would alleviate the imminent medical crisis that the country is facing and will continue to face.

Lou Dobbs' coronavirus poll

[grf]

Folks, this is a real poll that Lou Dobbs ran, asking if Trump's response to coronavirus has been "superb," "great," or "very good."

How Fox's medical commentators spread misinformation during the outbreak

Instead of giving sound medical advice, Fox News’ medical commentators for weeks pushed misinformation that directly echoed the talking points of both the Trump administration and Fox News opinion commentators.

Most notably was Fox’s chief medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel. Before March 13, Siegel made 47 weekday appearances to discuss the outbreak. Here are just a few examples:

Siegel excused Trump from responsibility over the administration’s failure to widely test Americans.

Siegel said the “worst case scenario” for coronavirus is “it could be the flu.” In later appearances, he would contradict what he said here.

Siegel attacked the World Health Organization as “a bunch of alarmists, they are saber rattlers.”

Siegel claimed coronavirus concerns are being intentionally overblown to hurt Trump politically.

Several other medical commentators misled Fox’s audience as the outbreak worsened, including Nicole Saphier, Manny Alvarez, Mehmet Oz, and Janette Nesheiwat.

Fox hosts quack doctor: Fox News aired dangerous misinformation from Steven Hotze , a disreputable doctor who has a history of pushing “methods [that] are not supported by science and are potentially harmful” and sells bogus colloidal silver. Hotze used his Fox News platform to dismiss concerns about the coronavirus as people going “totally crazy” and told viewers to “conduct your life normally.” He is a bigot who has claimed that “‘Satanic cults’ were driving the ‘homosexual movement,’” compared LGBTQ people to “Nazis,” and said that Houston residents should “drive” LGBTQ people "out of our city.” More recently, Hotze has been a major backer of Roy Moore in Alabama.

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[Right-wing political operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl pitch reporters their latest far-fetched scandal on a balcony outside the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 27, 2020. (Photo: Jared Holt)]

Like bees to honey, the pro-Trump fringe descended on this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference outside of the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., in hopes of stealing a sliver of the spotlight for themselves.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and a cohort of his Infowars employees roamed the conference’s exhibition hall and the escalators ?on their way to radio row, attracting a crowd of star-struck attendees with their cell phones hoisted above their heads to get video of Jones. Right Wing Watch asked Jones for his thoughts on the new coronavirus? ?now spreading around the world, a subject that Vice President Mike Pence had directly addressed on the CPAC main stage hours earlier.

“We know it’s a manmade bioweapon, produced by the U.S. government, sold to China in 2015. That was in the Journal of Science. That’s why we got a bit concerned about it. It’s a chimera cross-viral species system,” Jones said, going on to argue that the U.S. should restrict travel from China.

Right Wing Watch was unable to track down a Journal of Science article that made that assertion, which was recently floated by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, as well. According to The New York Times, former White House strategist Steve Bannon is also a purveyor of the theory, which is widely disavowed by scientists.

[Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones rides an escalator to radio row at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 27, 2020. (Photo: Jared Holt)]

Jones told journalists at CPAC that he felt at home with CPAC attendees, “But the Republican establishment, I don’t feel at home with them. But we’re here to let them know that we’re taking the Republican party over.”

On a terrace overlooking the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center lobby, Republican political personalities Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman hosted a press conference, as they did last year. In the audience, far-right political entertainer Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys hate group, accosted reporters. McInnes was later ejected from the event. One attendee told Right Wing Watch they reported McInnes to security after McInnes threatened to assault them. A request for information from CPAC about McInnes’ ejection was not immediately returned.

Laura Loomer, anti-Muslim activist who is pursuing a bid for Congress in Florida, was spotted around CPAC touting her ?campaign. Last year, Loomer had her media credentials revoked and was removed from CPAC after harassing journalists in the media filing center?; this year ?she donned standard attendee credentials.

But white nationalist organization leader Patrick Casey never made it past the conference center’s front door, according to a post in his Telegram chat channel. On days that the vice president or president speaks at CPAC, guards at the doors of the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center require conference credentials or hotel room keys to enter the building?. Casey falsely claimed to his followers that the policy was new for this year.

Tags: Alex JonesGavin McInnesJack BurkmanJacob WohlLaura LoomerPatrick CaseyCPAC 2020Identity Evropa InfoWar

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bannon

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

many lnx vids (see bak)

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

WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ

PUBLISHED 02/06/20 11:04 AM EST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video file

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

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

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

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

Video file

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

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

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

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

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

Video file

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

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

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

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

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

Video file

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

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

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

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

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

Video file

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

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

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

Video file

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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omg witchhunt vengeance conspir with real life consequences

an 220 vengeance

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/lindsey-graham-says-barr-has-process-for-biden-probe-russian-investigators-going-to-jail/

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https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/why-portland-is-wrong-about-water-fluoridation/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/heres-how-trump-weaponizes-crackpot-ideas-to-maintain-a-firm-grip-on-his-maga-base

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/outlandish-conspiracy-theories-didnt-start-with-trumps-presidency-republicans-have-been-promoting-fringe-crackpots-for-decades-political-historian/

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Outlandish conspiracy theories didn’t start with Trump’s presidency. Republicans have been promoting ‘fringe crackpots’ for decades: political historian

Written by Alex Henderson January 2, 2020

Supporters of President Donald Trump have promoted a variety of right-wing conspiracy theories, from the Crowdstrike theory (which claims that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election) to the racist “birther” nonsense (which claimed that President Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, not the United States). But author Matthew Dallek, in a January 2 article for the Washington Post, stresses that Republicans were promoting outlandish conspiracy theories long before Trump decided to run for president in 2015.

“The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks,” Dallek explains.

Back in the 1950s, Dallek recalls, two of the leading right-wing conspiracy theorists were Sen. McCarthy of Wisconsin and Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. There was very bad blood between Welch and journalist William F. Buckley, founder of the conservative National Review: Buckley had no use for Welch’s ridiculous claim that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” But Dallek emphasizes that while Birchers were not welcome at the National Review, they found their niche in the Republican Party.

Dallek explains, “Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch…. But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the Society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the Society.”

Had Gen-X radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones been alive in the 1950s and 1960s, he would have loved some of the theories that the John Birch Society promoted. For example, Dallek notes, Birchers believed that “fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.” Another Bircher conspiracy theory (which Dallek doesn’t mention in his article) was that the bad blood between the Soviet Union and the Maoist government in Communist China was a fabrication — and that the two hoped to join forces and invade the United States.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was the most conservative Democratic president in generations. Regardless, many Republicans absolutely hated him. And Dallek points out that Clinton-related conspiracy theories came from everyone from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. (founder of the far-right Morality Majority). Scaife, who later became active in the Tea Party, claimed that Clinton was part of a drug smuggling ring.

“During the Clinton years,” Dallek explains, “the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself.”

Dallek wraps up his article by emphasizing that Trump is merely a symptom of the Republican Party’s willingness to embrace far-out conspiracy theories, not the cause.

“Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: the batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them,” Dallek observes. “Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/outlandish-conspiracy-theories-didnt-start-with-trumps-presidency-republicans-have-been-promoting-fringe-crackpots-for-decades-political-historian/

no lnx

Outlandish conspiracy theories didn’t start with Trump’s presidency. Republicans have been promoting ‘fringe crackpots’ for decades: political historian

Written by Alex Henderson January 2, 2020

Supporters of President Donald Trump have promoted a variety of right-wing conspiracy theories, from the Crowdstrike theory (which claims that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election) to the racist “birther” nonsense (which claimed that President Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, not the United States). But author Matthew Dallek, in a January 2 article for the Washington Post, stresses that Republicans were promoting outlandish conspiracy theories long before Trump decided to run for president in 2015.

“The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks,” Dallek explains.

Back in the 1950s, Dallek recalls, two of the leading right-wing conspiracy theorists were Sen. McCarthy of Wisconsin and Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. There was very bad blood between Welch and journalist William F. Buckley, founder of the conservative National Review: Buckley had no use for Welch’s ridiculous claim that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” But Dallek emphasizes that while Birchers were not welcome at the National Review, they found their niche in the Republican Party.

Dallek explains, “Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch…. But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the Society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the Society.”

Had Gen-X radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones been alive in the 1950s and 1960s, he would have loved some of the theories that the John Birch Society promoted. For example, Dallek notes, Birchers believed that “fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.” Another Bircher conspiracy theory (which Dallek doesn’t mention in his article) was that the bad blood between the Soviet Union and the Maoist government in Communist China was a fabrication — and that the two hoped to join forces and invade the United States.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was the most conservative Democratic president in generations. Regardless, many Republicans absolutely hated him. And Dallek points out that Clinton-related conspiracy theories came from everyone from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. (founder of the far-right Morality Majority). Scaife, who later became active in the Tea Party, claimed that Clinton was part of a drug smuggling ring.

“During the Clinton years,” Dallek explains, “the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself.”

Dallek wraps up his article by emphasizing that Trump is merely a symptom of the Republican Party’s willingness to embrace far-out conspiracy theories, not the cause.

“Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: the batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them,” Dallek observes. “Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.”

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no lnx ref

Swamp fever

Don’t blame Trump for the rise of right-wing conspiracy theories. The GOP helped cultivate them — until they took over.

The Washington Post)

By Matthew Dallek

JANUARY 2, 2020

To explain the impeachment inquiry, the GOP has promulgated a flurry of baseless conspiracy theories about the forces arrayed against President Trump. It has been surreal to hear some of the nation’s most influential elected officials spouting ideas basically concocted from thin air. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican, Devin Nunes (Calif.), denounces “Ukrainian election meddling in 2016 .?.?. aimed against the Trump campaign.” The Judiciary Committee’s Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) claims that if Congress could only talk to a certain three Democratic officials, then “every fact of this investigation” would be unearthed. Conservatives online hold that former White House aide Fiona Hill was a mole planted by George Soros.

[Outlook • Perspective

Matthew Dallek is a professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, and is author of "Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security."  Follow @MattDallek]

Of course, no one purveys these theories with as much verve as Trump. The president has suggested that the nation’s first African American president was born abroad (he wasn’t), that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had a part in JFK’s assassination (he didn’t), that Ukraine rather than Russia was responsible for election interference (it wasn’t), that the Mueller investigation empaneled by his own administration was a Democratic plot against him, that the Clintons orchestrated the prison killing of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (who committed suicide, according to an autopsy) and that the Obama administration spied on his campaign, a claim debunked by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s recent report on the FBI’s Russia investigation.

It certainly seems, more than ever, that “the truth itself is on trial,” as Peter Baker recently wrote in the New York Times. Some conservatives say Trump, and Trumpism, represent a new frontier of conspiratorial politics — that the theories are unique to Trump’s sensibilities and peculiar to his paranoid White House. “Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” former president George W. Bush said in a 2017 speech. The “main problem” behind the proliferation of political conspiracy theories “is a president who is also a self-invented fabulist,” argued Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson.

But in truth, the stew of “alternative facts” has been simmering for more than half a century on the right fringe. The GOP had endless opportunities across the decades to banish these theories — about scheming bureaucrats, Jews, the Federal Reserve, the United Nations — and its leaders often saw them as absurd. But they were also useful, helping to rally support from an aggrieved government-hating base, so the party’s mandarins allowed them to fester and grow until they spread from the toxic fringe to the mainstream, which they have finally overtaken. It’s no wonder someone who embraced those ideas would become successful; Trump validates notions that his voters have long believed, ideas that the party refused to condemn and failed to repudiate.

Trump, then, isn’t what caused these conspiracy theories. He’s what happens when nobody stands in their way.

The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks. Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who called Dwight Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,” in an iconic moment of movement history.

But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the society. Birchers took active part in Republican election campaigns and ran right-wing bookstores packed with conspiratorial treatises such as John Stormer’s “None Dare Call It Treason” (about Soviet “infiltration of American government”) and Fred Schwarz’s “You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists).” They served as members of local school boards and state legislatures. Other Republicans rarely spoke up to debunk the Birch view that fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.

At times, the wild-eyed conspiracism came from the top. Vice President Spiro Agnew delivered speeches identifying a cabal of Washington- and New York-based power brokers who supposedly controlled the news media, whipping up what journalists at the time considered a frenzy of anti-Semitism on the far right. (In 1976, a few years after he’d been indicted on bribery and other charges, Agnew published a novel pushing the anti-Semitic trope that the media’s “Zionist lobby” was controlling America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.)

At other times, understanding that they had to court the conspiracy-minded activists of “the base,” the party’s leaders went out of their way to confer legitimacy on extremists. Take the GOP’s relationship with Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson, who won four states in the 1988 Republican presidential primary contest. In 1991, Robertson published “The New World Order,” holding that scheming government pooh-bahs were working to set up “world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.” He even suggested that President George H.W. Bush was complicit in establishing this new world order. Still, Republicans wanted votes and donations from Robertson’s acolytes, so Newt Gingrich, Oliver North, William Bennett, Jack Kemp, Jesse Helms and Dinesh D’Souza all happily spoke at his “Road to Victory” conferences. Sen. Bob Dole, a pillar of the Republican establishment and at the time a presidential candidate, told Robertson’s followers in 1995 that “I am proud to stand up here and say that I’ve been awarded a 100 percent voting record in ’93 and 100 percent in 1994 and 100 percent in 1995” from the Christian Coalition.

During the Clinton years, the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself. Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife sent investigators to Arkansas to dig up dirt on the president’s past, and when they failed, they settled for salacious fabrications that Bill Clinton was part of a drug-smuggling ring. Scaife became what The Post called “a guiding force” behind Speaker Gingrich’s Contract With America and a later generation of tea party activists. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a leader of the religious right (his son is a big Trump supporter), started selling a $43 videotape that among other charges said Clinton was responsible for the deaths of “countless people.”

Of course, Republican leaders didn’t always or uniformly tolerate gonzo conspiracy theories. Presidential nominee John McCain, for instance, contradicted one of his supporters at a 2008 campaign event, telling her that Barack Obama was not, in fact, “an Arab.” Onetime senator and 1996 presidential hopeful Arlen Specter (Pa.) also stuck up for the truth when he assailed two leading GOP conspiracy theorists, Robertson and Pat Buchanan, as leaders of the “intolerant right.”

Yet over the past seven decades, such voices — pro-fact, pro-science and pro-reason — lost the internal debate over how to treat the tinfoil-hat folks. And such moments of truth-telling by Republicans at all levels have been fleeting and rare.

While the GOP was actively courting allies who propagated conspiracy theories, the Democratic Party took much the opposite tack — mostly rejecting the left-wing theories that surfaced from time to time. Although some research has found a recent uptick in Democratic support for conspiracy theories (a jump caused by a lack of political power), elected Democrats have typically fenced their party off from wild-eyed claims promulgated on the left. They never embraced the theory that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” carried out by the Bush administration, for example. During the 2004 presidential primary race, even the most lefty antiwar candidates — Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, Carol Moseley Braun — largely eschewed conspiracy theories that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had gone to war for oil or to enrich their friends in the construction business. The left has its share of anti-vaxxers who believe that vaccines cause autism, yet Democratic officials have battled these lies (some of which Trump himself has promoted).

One reason is that Democrats have been reluctant to use anti-government theories to tear down the things they would prefer to burnish, such as government and international institutions that they believe work for social justice and economic progress. Republicans’ conspiracy theories about powerful secret actors are consistent with their small-government views; it is a shorter leap for conservatives to portray Washington as a swamp where individualism, justice and decency go to die.

Thanks to years of GOP tolerance for surreal thinking on the right, conspiracy theories have moved from the fringe to the center. A 2018 poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that 63 percent of registered voters subscribe to at least one such theory. Some social science research suggests that people who feel alienated from politics are more prone to thinking conspiratorially. Trump capitalized on that climate of suspicion.

It’s easy to see the line from older conspiracy theories to the fact-free claims by Trump supporters today. White House adviser Stephen Miller has drawn anti-immigration rhetoric from white-nationalist publications like the 1973 French novel “The Camp of the Saints,” which envisions hordes of immigrants obliterating Western civilization. Breitbart News has featured anti-immigrant, anti-gay and anti-black theories that could have been found in an earlier generation of far-right publications, including American Opinion and American Mercury.

Perhaps the biggest change of the Trump era is the approach of Republican leaders. In the past, they indulged these theories but never really espoused them. Today, elective officeholders embrace them openly, in the face of explicit counterevidence from the government they purport to run. National security officials have repeatedly warned in recent weeks that Ukraine did not meddle in the 2016 election and that those who repeat the claim are advancing pro-Russian propaganda. Yet most Republican members of Congress now seem to believe this theory. Trump’s racism (calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”; telling four congresswomen of color who are all U.S. citizens to “go back” to their “crime infested” home countries) and anti-Semitism (he thinks Jews are loyal primarily to Israel and motivated mostly by money) align well with old allegations that Jewish bankers and assorted globalists have enriched themselves while inflicting economic havoc on “the people,” as his closing 2016 television ad suggested.

Polarization has also made mainstream American culture hospitable to ideas once relegated to the margins. Voters have grown more tolerant of political leaders’ failings as long as they adhere to the correct ideological positions, opening a space for someone like Trump to win the presidency and then govern with the support of a minority of the electorate. And grass-roots opinion has shifted in favor of conspiracy theories, a pattern that both follows the cues of political leaders and incentivizes those leaders’ abasements. For instance, Twitter equips Trump to instantaneously air any theory, no matter how nutty, to raucous and affirming plaudits. Fox News also capitalizes on this shift to amplify Trumpian claims (“Russia didn’t hack our democracy,” Fox host Tucker Carlson recently parroted). It’s no wonder that, as Gallup found in February, 30 percent of Republicans see Russia in a favorable light. One recent Post survey of attitudes toward 2016 election conspiracy theories found that 26 percent of Americans believed that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, invented a story of Russian election meddling in order to hide Ukraine’s efforts to help Hillary Clinton.

Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: The batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them. Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-a-right-wing-disinformation-network-keeps-republicans-steeped-in-lies/

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How a right-wing disinformation network keeps Republicans steeped in lies

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly December 30, 2019

While Democrats continue to wring their hands over the 2020 presidential primary, Donald Trump and his enablers decided a long time ago that the eventual nominee would be Joe Biden. That explains the pressure the president put on Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens, a move that led to his impeachment.

But just as we saw with the attempts to smear Hillary Clinton in 2016, the disinformation campaign about the Bidens will continue unabated in an effort to drive up negative impressions of the former vice president. Nicholas Grosman has documented the origins of one of those campaigns that is underway.

Hunter Biden is currently involved in a paternity suit in Arkansas. The New York Post recently ran an article titled, “Private-eye firm claims Hunter Biden is linked to multiple criminal probes.” Here’s the lead paragraph.

Hunter Biden is the subject of multiple criminal investigations related to “fraud, money laundering and a counterfeiting scheme,” it’s claimed in court documents filed Monday in his Arkansas paternity case.

The documents they are referring to were filed by a Florida-based private-eye firm, D&A Investigations, and were almost immediately dismissed by the judge because they had nothing to do with the paternity case. Nowhere in the documents did D&A name the agencies behind the purported criminal probes of Biden.

Grossman did what the reporters at the New York Post apparently couldn’t be bothered to do: he googled D&A Investigations and found their web site. The home page lists “active investigations.”

D&A opened an independent investigation (Transparency) in August 2016 into Hillary R. Clinton (HRC), Jeffrey Epstein & the Democrat National Committee (DNC) claims of: Russia broke into the DNC.

At the time, William J. Clinton (WJC), HRC, John Podesta, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Kerry were in collusion with Rogue Officials in the British Isles, Hong Kong, Iran, Russia, the Ukraine, United States, et al, to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.

In other words, the firm is dedicated to spreading conspiracy theories—particularly those that originate as Russian propaganda.

Hunter Biden’s attorney, Brent Langdon, responded to the filings by saying that D&A was engaged in “a scheme by a non-party simply to make scandalous allegations in the pending suit to gain some quick media attention.” As confirmation, the charges were never substantiated and were almost immediately dismissed, and yet they’ve caught fire on right wing media.

Two days after the article in the Post, the story showed up on Fox News under the title, “Hunter Biden is subject of criminal probes, says PI firm hinting at more incriminating details.” Other than repeating what had already been reported and using the opportunity to rehash the claims about Burisma, they added that D&A told them “to expect an additional filing soon, and hinted that more incriminating details concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings would soon come to light.”

The story was then picked up by OAN and made its way to RealClearPolitics. At this point, the title simply reads: “Court Filing Shows Hunter Biden Earned $156 Million From Ukraine Corruption.” We can assume that social media feeds are now inundated with these false claims.

It is worth noting that this attempt to spread disinformation is so blatant that reputable news organizations are simply ignoring it. But as Grossman writes, “to figure out what to do about disinformation, first we need understand how it works.” This case gives us an example of how that happens. Either news organizations like the New York Post, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics are complicit with a firm like D&A Investigations or they aren’t interested in verifying information when it reinforces their biases. As a result, they spread disinformation and lies.

That is how Trump is able to maintain his 40+ percent support in the polls. Republicans have a propaganda network that keeps them steeped in lies. Back in 2016, mainstream media gave credence to those lies about Hillary Clinton in the name of balance. Beyond offering a mea culpa for their complicity, reporters should do their part to expose the propaganda network for what it is. This story would be a good place to start.

==

==

mma 1219

Media Matters' Alex Kaplan passed this along: "Trump on Friday went on a spree amplifying nearly 20 times accounts supporting the insane and dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory, which involves an anonymous user on a far-right message board claiming to have inside information on a secret plot by Trump against the “deep state” and pedophiles, has been tied to multiple acts of violence and warned about in an FBI memo as a potential domestic terror threat. It comes as Trump has already amplified dozens of accounts supporting the conspiracy theory over the past two years."

Also: A noted white nationalist fabricated a claim about guns and Virginia’s Democratic governor that has spread in the past week throughout social media and on far-right message boards. The hoax has drawn tens of thousands of engagements and views, and some have issued calls to violence in response.

Finally: A pro-Trump subreddit is full of calls for violence in response to proposed Virginia gun safety laws.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/gops-propaganda-circus-lies-yelling-and-conspiracy-theory/

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GOP’s propaganda circus: Lies, yelling and conspiracy theory

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 13, 2019

Speaker Nancy Pelosi first announced that the House would formally take up an impeachment investigation on Sept. 24. Sometime on Friday, the House Judiciary Committee will almost certainly vote to send two Articles of Impeachment to the full House. If a whistleblower hadn’t stepped up and set this ball in motion, we would still be seeing President Trump at his rallies screaming about the Ukrainian government’s interference in the election and the corruption of Joe Biden — and the mainstream media would be chasing the story like it was a private email server. Team Trump was only days away from getting away with it.

From the moment he stepped on to that  escalator in June of 2015, Donald Trump’s unethical, illegal and immoral behavior has been leading toward this day. Assuming that the full House votes to impeach and sends the case to the Senate, his name will always have the scarlet asterisk next to it as the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, a fact which reportedly upsets him greatly. In a just world, he would be the first president to be impeached, convicted and removed from office. That’s not the world in which we live, unfortunately.

The hearings this week were long and tedious, but they served an important purpose nonetheless. The two sides had different goals. The Democrats laid out the case with which most of us following this event are familiar and managed to be serious and respectful while doing it. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., kept the proceedings from careening out of control and there was even some persuasive rhetoric and memorable oratory.

Republicans had a different goal. They presented a number of defenses, much of them consisting of emotive hand-wringing, faux exasperation and yelling. As former Breitbart editor and Republican House aide Kurt Bardella wrote for NBC, this is a long-standing strategy:

Revisit the 11-hour grilling that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was subjected to by Republicans during the Benghazi hearing and you’ll see the now familiar sight of Republicans yelling and badgering their witness. As Rep. Adam Smith, R-Wash., observed that day, the Republicans’ strategy was to try and “wear you down.”

This was obviously their goal during Thursday’s marathon hearing, and it worked. It was long and tiring, mostly because Republicans kept offering amendments, many of them barely making sense, after which the whole committee had to debate them and then vote on whether to adopt them. All were voted down along party lines, votes, the final vote coming after 14 hours of debate. Clearly the Republicans had planned all along to prolong the  process so they could say that the Democrats had voted to impeach in the dead of night when nobody would see it. Nadler called their bluff announcing that the committee’s final vote would be postponed until Friday morning. The Republicans melted down into full-blown hysteria, but by that time no one was listening.

Bardella writes that Republicans’ “script is built on misdirection and moving the goalposts as their paltry strategy shifts to incorporate various conspiracy theories and outlandish claims,” observing that they consciously treat every member’s time as if he were appearing on a Fox News segment.

I think that’s literally what they are doing. They are using the formal setting and the national attention to introduce people to the alternative reality that only people who watch Fox News usually see.

Take, for instance, the big signs Republican committee members have printed up and set on easels behind them. They feature things like pictures of Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on a milk carton with the words “Where’s Adam?” obviously pushing their absurd demand that Schiff be compelled to testify as a witness. (Nobody showed up in an official Trump campaign “Where’s Hunter” T-shirt, thank goodness.) Another was titled “Coastal Impeachment Squad” featuring a picture of the Democratic leadership spelling out that they are from New York, California and Massachusetts, clearly implying they are not Real Americans. At one point, they displayed the message “0 DAYS SINCE ADAM SCHIFF FOLLOWED HOUSE RULES” but removed it when thousands of people pointed out on Twitter that zero days since something occurred, in fact, means that thing occurred today.

Knowing that the Senate will not convict Trump under any circumstances offers Republicans an opportunity to use these nationally televised hearings to spread their conspiracy theories, memes and smears to a much wider audience. They are taking full advantage.

GOP members deployed their patented “process” argument constantly, of course. That was led by Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who former GOP campaign adviser Rick Wilson aptly described on MSNBC as a “screeching histrionic drama queen.” Others repeatedly insisted that the Democrats should go through the courts rather than charge the president with obstruction of Congress. Nadler finally put that one to bed by pointing out that “no privileges have been asserted. There’s nothing for a court to review.”

Perhaps one of the most startling speeches came from Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, who took the position that Trump did nothing wrong to a new level, asking, “Is it ever OK to invite a foreign government to become involved in an election, involving a political opponent? The answer is ‘yes.’ It better be — we do it all of the time.” He later tried to explain that “involve” doesn’t mean “interfere.” It was not convincing in the least. But acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was almost certainly relieved to see someone other than him make such an incriminating comment before the whole country.

The two congressmen who really carried the ball for the president over and over again were Matt Gaetz of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas. Here are just a couple of examples of how each of them aggressively played to the cameras with Fox News talking points:

Breitbart News

@BreitbartNews

Rep. @MattGaetz (R-FL) doesn't hold back on Hunter Biden.

Embedded video

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2:19 PM - Dec 12, 2019

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CNSNews.com

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@cnsnews

.@RepLouieGohmert : ‘We’re Here Because of Fraud, Not by the President,’ But Within the DOJ http://www.cnsnews.com/article/washington/melanie-arter/gohmert-were-here-because-fraud-not-president-within-doj …

– Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said that it is because of fraud within the Department of Justice (DOJ), not fraud by President Donald Trump,...

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Louie Gohmert

@replouiegohmert

“They [Democrats] talk about “abuse of power” but they were willing to obscure evidence in a basement hearing over and over. They are willing to block witnesses from coming in here and testifying before Congress ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b3HkuOvB2o&feature=youtu.be …

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Those are just a few examples of the smears and lies those two shared on national TV on Thursday. They were bravura performances, which the president liked very much. He broke his previous record for tweets in a day, many of them retweets of the worst commentary from the Republicans on that committee.

Whether anyone who lives outside the Fox News universe would be impressed is hard to know. As I’ve written before, it doesn’t really matter. The point is to give oxygen to their disinformation and propaganda by any means necessary so it may live on. Republicans have achieved that goal. And I’m pretty sure the impeachment trial won’t be the last we hear of any of it.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

==

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/12-million-americans-believe-lizard-people-run-our-country/316706/

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NATIONAL

12 Million Americans Believe Lizard People Run Our Country

About 90 million Americans believe aliens exist. Some 66 million of us think aliens landed at Roswell in 1948. These are the things you learn when there's a lull in political news and pollsters get to ask whatever questions they want.

PHILIP BUMP

APRIL 2, 2013

About 90 million Americans believe aliens exist. Some 66 million of us think aliens landed at Roswell in 1948. These are the things you learn when there's a lull in political news and pollsters get to ask whatever questions they want.

Update, October 31: We've figured out who the government reptilians are, using science.

Public Policy Polling has raised weird polls to an art form. During last year's presidential campaign, the firm earned a bit of a reputation for its unorthodox questions; for example, "If God exists, do you approve of its handling of natural disasters?"

Today PPP released the results of a national survey looking at common conspiracy theories. Broken down by topic and cross-referenced by political preference, the results will not inspire a lot of patriotism. If you need to defend your fellow countrymen, be sure to note that the margin of error is 2.8 percent.

We took the findings and arranged them from most- to least-believed. And, just to inspire additional shame, figured out how many actual Americans that meant must believe in things like the danger of fluoride in water. (28 million, if you're wondering.)

View the full question asked for each conspiracy.

Conspiracy Percent believing Number of Americans believing

JFK was killed by conspiracy 51 percent 160,096,160

Bush intentionally misled on Iraq WMDs 44 percent 138,122,178

Global warming is a hoax 37 percent 116,148,195

Aliens exist 29 percent 91,035,072

New World Order 28 percent 87,895,931

Hussein was involved in 9/11 28 percent 87,895,931

A UFO crashed at Roswell 21 percent 65,921,948

Vaccines are linked to autism 20 percent 62,782,808

The government controls minds with TV 15 percent 47,087,106

Medical industry invents diseases 15 percent 47,087,106

CIA developed crack 14 percent 43,947,966

Bigfoot exists 14 percent 43,947,966

Obama is the Antichrist 13 percent 40,808,825

The government allowed 9/11 11 percent 34,530,544

Fluoride is dangerous 9 percent 28,252,264

The moon landing was faked 7 percent 21,973,983

Bin Laden is alive 6 percent 18,834,842

Airplane contrails are sinister chemicals 5 percent 15,695,702

McCartney died in 1966 5 percent 15,695,702

Lizard people control politics 4 percent 12,556,562

Just to further inspire conversation, PPP broke down belief in each theory by whom the respondent supported in the 2012 election. This yielded some genuinely interesting results.

==

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/report-points-to-trump-1-as-the-ringleader-of-a-global-conspiracy/

"huge" rudy

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Report points to Trump, ‘-1,’ as the ringleader of a global conspiracy

Written by John Stoehr, The Editorial Board December 4, 2019

The House Intelligence Committee released its report Tuesday. In it were phone call records showing frequent contact between Rudy Giuliani and the White House. The records suggest in the most granular detail yet that the president of the United States is the leader of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

But the call records do more than that. They offer a teachable moment. They provide an illustration, in miniature, of what a conspiracy looks like, and why it’s morally and legally wrong for the head of the world’s oldest democracy to engage in such conduct.

The House Intelligence report does not say Giuliani called Trump. Instead, it says the president’s personal attorney called a number designated as “-1.” Adam Schiff, the panel’s chairman, said his committee is investigating whether “-1” is Trump’s phone. The timing of calls and other strong circumstantial evidence, however, point to him.

Joe Biden announced his candidacy on April 25. Leading up to that date, Giuliani, Lev Parnas and John Solomon were in frequent contact, according to the call logs. Parnas was one of Giuliani’s henchmen. He’s now under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. Solomon was a reporter for The Hill, a Washington newspaper.

As mentioned in previous editions of the Editorial Board, Parnas, under Giuliani’s direction, connected Solomon to Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko used to be Ukraine’s top prosecutor. He was hugely corrupt, because he was intimately linked to Vladimir Putin. In interviews with Solomon, Lutsenko alleged that Joe Biden, when he was the vice president, tried to shield his son, Hunter Biden, from criminal investigation in Ukraine (a lie) and that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered with the 2016 presidential election (also a lie.) Lev Parnas was deeply involved in Solomon’s “journalism.” He was present at his interviews with Yuriy Lutsenko, according to reporting in Pro Publica.

This we knew. What didn’t know was the timing.

On the same day Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign, John Solomon wrote a falsehood-laden column “alleging that Ukraine had planted Russia collusion allegations against the Trump campaign,” according to the Post. “The column also described Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and questioned whether Biden had acted to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing an investigation, as the fired prosecutor has alleged.”

Coincidence? Unlikely.

The very same day, April 25, Giuliani received a call from “-1” (i.e., Trump). Giuliani then called Sean Hannity at Fox. A while later, Trump appeared on Hannity’s show to comment on Solomon’s report in The Hill. “That sounds like big, big stuff,” he said.

It could have been a coincidence, but again, unlikely. As I noted last week, Parnas’ attorney said he met regularly with the “BLT Team,” a name taken from the restaurant where the group convened several times a week on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The BLT team included Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, and US Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief aide.

Coincidence isn’t the right word to describe a president’s dirty lawyer getting a dirty prosecutor to tell a dirty reporter the president’s Democratic rival is dirty, and then getting a dirty TV host to ask the president to comment on the dirty reporter’s dirt.

The right word to describe all that is conspiracy.

Which can be criminal. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chief, is now serving time in federal prison for defrauding the United States. Legally, conspiracy doesn’t require an underlying crime. Prosecutors were only required to show Manafort conspired to “impair or obstruct the lawful function of any part of the government.”

I don’t know if the president’s conduct meets a statutory standard. I do think it meets a political one. Trump, as “-1,” is the ringleader of a global conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to consent to his leadership. There is no such thing as legitimate consent when presidents collude with enemies foreign and domestic to obstruct the free and fair process by which all Americans exercise self-governance.

This is a giant of a scandal. It dwarfs Watergate. It boggles the mind of ordinary Americans to contemplate the wide array of seedy underworld characters involved in a vast global conspiracy. (Another side of this involves another dirty former Ukrainian prosecutor who did a favor for a Ukrainian mobster fighting extradition to the US. Dmitry Firtash, the mobster, got Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor, to say Biden was dirty. That won Giuliani’s attention. His friends diGenova and Toensing went to the US Department of Justice to plead with the US attorney general to go easy on Firtash.)

As I said, giant.

But these call logs bring the vastness of the conspiracy down to a human scale. Donald Trump talked to Giuliani, who talked to Parnas, who talked to Lutsenko, who talked to Solomon, who talked to Giuliani, who talked to Hannity, who talked to Donald Trump.

==

// soros conspir theory

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/29/brazils-president-claims-dicaprio-paid-for-amazon-fires

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/here-are-5-ways-trump-and-his-supporters-are-using-the-same-strategies-as-science-deniers/

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Here are 5 ways Trump and his supporters are using the same strategies as science deniers

Written by Lee McIntyre, The Conversation November 27, 2019

While watching the House impeachment hearings, I realized my two decades of research into why people ignore, reject or deny science had a political parallel.

From anti-evolutionists to anti-vaccine advocates, known as “anti-vaxxers,” climate change deniers to Flat Earthers, science deniers all follow a common pattern of faulty reasoning that allows them to reject what they don’t want to believe – and accept what they favor – based on a misunderstanding of how science deals with evidence.

As I’ve been watching the hearings, I’ve noticed that a number of characteristics of this type of reasoning are now being embraced by President Donald Trump and his congressional supporters.

Characteristic acts

There are five common tactics used by science deniers.

In 1998, brothers Mark and Chris Hoofnagle (a lawyer and a physiologist) wrote an early blog post about science denialism. That was followed by further work by econometrician Pascal Diethelm and public health scholar Martin McKee and cognitive scientists John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. All identified the following factors as characteristic acts of science deniers:

Believing in conspiracy theories;

Relying on cherry-picked evidence;

Relying on fake experts (and dismissal of actual experts);

Committing logical errors;

Setting impossible standards for what science should be able to deliver.

These elements are present when those who deny the Earth is round or who believe vaccines cause autism insist that there is a governmental cover-up of the real evidence on their topics. They can be seen when Ted Cruz tries to discredit climate change with talk about the anomalous world weather pattern in 1998 due to El Niño. And they’re evident when intelligent design theorists complain that evolution by natural selection still has not been proven.

Alternative reality

Trump and his defenders in Congress echo this pattern. Even though Trump has firsthand knowledge of some of the facts under dispute – whereas his supporters may not – all seem to have bought in fully to the idea that the actual political situation is not the one pictured in the mainstream consensus of facts and evidence, but instead is based on an alternative reality.

Here are the five ways Trump and his allies use the same strategies as science deniers:

Conspiracy theories: During his questioning of Ambassador Bill Taylor and other witnesses at the impeachment hearings, Republican counsel Steve Castor repeatedly pursued a debunked conspiracy theory involving an alleged plot in which the Ukrainian government – and not the Russians – interfered with the 2016 presidential election because they were out to get the president.

Cherry-picking: Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that President Trump told him, “I want nothing from Ukraine. I want no quid pro quo.” Trump and his supporters focused on this statement as evidence of his innocence, despite the fact that in other testimony by Sondland that day, he said, “Mr. Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky…Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.”

Discrediting experts: President Trump has repeatedly – and falsely – claimed that State Department and CIA employees such as Bill Taylor, George Kent, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman and others who have testified in the impeachment hearings are “Never Trumpers,” a term for Republicans who do not support Trump – and who therefore have no credibility. His supporters have latched onto this tactic. GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said on Sept. 20, after the whistleblower complaint was made public: “It looks to me like another deep-state attack.”

Illogical reasoning: Trump supporters have claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky never complained that he felt pressured by Trump to do the investigations into the Bidens that Trump sought. Trump himself has described the July 25 conversation he had with Zelensky in which he asked for the investigations as “perfect.” But news reports have shown that Zelensky did in fact feel pressured, and analysts have pointed out that Zelensky would risk losing crucial U.S. support were he to anger Trump by saying that he felt pressured.

Double standard for opponents: Trump claimed that written testimony from the whistleblower was unacceptable, despite the fact that he himself had only given written testimony in the Mueller investigation. Some of his supporters seem to agree and have tried to compel the whistleblower’s in-person testimony.

Partisan logic

What might be behind the similarities between Trump defenders and science deniers?

Perhaps, like science denial, all fact denial is basically the same.

All ideology supports the reflex to believe what you want to believe.

Scholars have studied the role of identity in shaping belief and concluded that sometimes even empirical beliefs can be tribal, reflecting what the other people on your team want you to believe. Adherence to a belief is not always based on evidence.

The danger, of course, is that even as new facts come in, people won’t change their minds. This is the direct opposite of good empirical reasoning.

It is the hallmark of science that beliefs should be based on evidence, and that people should be willing to change their beliefs based on new evidence. This means that people should be able to specify in advance what evidence, if it existed, would be sufficient to get them to change their minds.

But are Trump and his congressional supporters doing that?

Like science deniers, no amount of evidence seems sufficient to change their partisan beliefs that the phone call with Zelensky was proper and that Trump “did nothing wrong.”

Even when the facts are overwhelming, congressional Republicans seem, like science deniers, willing to contort their beliefs and torture their logic, to stick to the party line because that is who they are.

As Sen. Lindsey Graham recently put it, “I don’t care what anybody else says about the phone call … The phone call, I’ve made up my own mind, is fine.”

In science, such behavior means that one is eventually read out of the profession – you’re not fired, your tenure isn’t revoked, but you’re no longer taken seriously anymore.

In politics, it is not yet clear what the consequences might be.

Lee McIntyre is the author of: Post-Truth.

MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US

manafort, solomon black ledger nunes

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/19/republicans-use-impeachment-hearings-smear-ukrainian-helped-expose-manafort

nunes 11/20/19 djt had right to be concerned about ukraine, out to get him

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/30/democrat-strategist-alexandra-chalupa-goes-on-bizarre-rant-after-devin-nunes-mentions-her-during-hearing/

no lvx twt

democrat Strategist Alexandra Chalupa Goes on Bizarre Rant After Devin Nunes Mentions Her During Hearing

Alexandra ChalupaFacebook

KRISTINA WONG

30 Sep 201929

3:50

Ukrainian-American Democrat strategist Alexandra Chalupa, who sought dirt from Ukraine on Trump campaign officials during the 2016 election, went on a bizarre Twitter rant after House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) name-checked her during a recent committee hearing.

During his opening statement at a hearing last Thursday, when Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testified, Nunes drew comparisons between the Democrats’ campaign to smear Trump through Russia collusion allegations and the current allegations about Ukraine.

Nunes began:

The current hysteria has something else in common with the Russia hoax. Back then, they accused the Trump campaign of colluding with Russians when the Democrats themselves were colluding with Russians in preparing the Steele dossier. Today, they accuse the president of pressuring Ukrainians to take actions that would help himself or hurt his political opponents.

He brought up six times when Democrats pressured Ukraine to do something, including when Chalupa — while a Democratic National Committee contractor — asked Ukrainian officials for dirt on Trump campaign officials and tried to arrange for the then-Ukrainian President to comment on the Trump associates’ alleged ties to Russia:

— Joe Biden bragged that he extorted the Ukrainians into firing a prosecutor, who happened to be investigating Biden’s own son;

— Three Democrat senators wrote a letter pressuring the Ukrainian general prosecutor to reopen investigations it reportedly froze on former Trump campaign officials;

— Another Democratic senator went to Ukraine and pressured the Ukrainian President not to investigate corruption allegations involving Biden’s son;

— According to Ukrainian officials, Democratic National Committee contractor Alexandra Chalupa tried to get Ukrainian officials to provide dirt on Trump associates and tried to get the former Ukrainian President to comment publicly on their alleged ties to Russia.

— Ukrainian official Serhiy Leshchenko was a source for Nellie Ohr, wife of Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, as she worked on the anti-Trump operation conducted by Fusion GPS and funded by the Democrats.

— And of course, Democrats on this very committee negotiated with people they thought were Ukrainians in order to obtain nude pictures of Trump.

Chalupa, about an hour later, made bizarre accusations against Nunes — who exposed that the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid for the dossier used to smear Trump with allegations of Russian collusion.

Chalupa accused Nunes of “character assassination campaigns” against the U.S. intelligence community, the FBI, and witnesses. She claimed without explanation that he was “key in obstructing justice and gaslighting Americans.”

She claimed he “made public lists of American (sic) on Putin/Trump’s enemies list.”

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Few have done more to help cover up for the crimes Vladimir Putin committed against the United States than @DevinNunes.  This includes character assassination campaigns against our Intel Community, FBI, & witnesses. He’s been key in obstructing justice and gaslighting Americans.

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Days before the secretive meeting Putin and Trump held in Helsinki in July 2018, Rep Nunes, then Chairman of the House Intel Committee, made public lists of American on Putin/Trump’s enemies lists.  It was an intimidation tactic and witness tampering. It put Americans in danger.

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6:36 AM - Sep 26, 2019

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She claimed Nunes held “secretive meetings” in Montenegro in April 2017. She then said without clarifying what she meant that the “‘Ukraine collusion’ narrative is fake.”

“They’re the ones who planted it – Manafort and Giuliani. They’re worried now because they were hoping it would give them cover in the Russia probe & a pardon for Manafort. Instead they left a two year trail of collusion,” she said.

She did not clarify whether she was referring to her efforts to seek dirt from Ukraine on former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort:

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Replying to @AlexandraChalup

The media should look into the secretive meetings Rep. Nunes held in Montenegro in April 2017, including what proxies of Manafort’s or the Kremlin were there. Same month when Deripaska was worried about sanctions. Nunes has chosen protecting the Russian mafia over Americans.

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Republicans know the ‘Ukraine collusion’ narrative is fake. They’re the ones who planted it - Manafort and Giuliani. They’re worried now because they were hoping it would give them cover in the Russia probe & a pardon for Manafort. Instead they left a two year trail of collusion.

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She then made sweeping claims that “Republicans hate [and] smear whistleblowers” and “love foreign hostile adversaries”:

Republicans hate & smear American whistleblowers who have urgent information to protect U.S. national security.

Republicans love foreign hostile adversaries who attack America’s democracy, steal Americans’ private communications & make them public to help Republicans steal power

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Republicans hate & smear American whistleblowers who have urgent information to protect U.S. national security.

Republicans love foreign hostile adversaries who attack America’s democracy, steal Americans’ private communications & make them public to help Republicans steal power

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Follow Breitbart News’ @Kristina_Wong.

2020 ElectionPoliticsAlexandra ChalupaBruce OhrDemocratic National CommitteeDNCFusion GPSJoseph MaguireNellie OhrPaul ManafortRussiaRussia collusionSteele dossierUkraine

./..

aha, anti-sem is really Ur- conspiracy?

1119 about to label him crazy but then saw ingraham BS on soros not that much worse (destroy electoral college)

Congressman Steve King wrongly outs George Soros’ son as Trump whistleblower

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, wrongly identified the whistleblower who triggered…

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an wash mo 1119

no lnx

Here are 11 absurd conspiracy theories conservatives must believe in the Trump era

.

Written by Washington Monthly November 10, 2019

As Donald Trump and his conservative defenders begin to construct a conspiracy theory that Adam Schiff  personally orchestrated a massive conspiracy to entrap Trump in Ukraine, it’s worth noting just how many conspiracy theories you have to believe in just to be a standard Republican these days. Political parties in all eras have a number of questionable orthodoxies, but the sheer number of conspiracy theories that make up mainstream Republican ideology is remarkable. A quick rundown would include but not be limited to;

  1. The belief that 10,000 climate scientists all around the world are either stupid, or engaged in a massive criminal conspiracy to concoct bad science in order to receive…more government grant funding. And that no other scientists are exposing it.
  1. The belief that there is a giant conspiracy across all of news media to make Republicans look bad and elect Democrats–in spite of continually unfair press coverage of candidates like both Bernie Sanders *and* Hillary Clinton–in exchange for…what? It’s never really clear.
  1. The belief without evidence that there is a giant conspiracy across local, state and federal elections officials all across the country to engage in mass wide-scale voter impersonation fraud. Needless to say, this would be insanely complicated, incredibly risky and hugely inefficient.
  1. The belief that that there is a giant conspiracy to push migrants to the border in order to change the demographics of the U.S., in order to…increase taxes and gain “control”? This is a pretty nonsensical conspiracy, but it’s among the most common. It’s no surprise that this sort of rhetoric echoes fascist antisemitic tropes, which is why George Soros is so commonly included.
  1. The belief that there was a deep conspiracy to elect a man named “Barack Hussein Obama” to the presidency in order to implement socialism in America…and that the shadowy socialist cabal picked a guy named “Barack Hussein Obama” for the job. Or made up his birth certificate from scratch and decided on one of the most unlikely presidential names imaginable in his birth year.
  1. The belief that the “Deep State” entrapped Trump with Russia entanglements before the 2016 in order to derail his presidency if he won, but didn’t use it to stop him from winning, but were blindsided when he won, but have stymied his every move afterward.
  1. The belief that there is a giant unexposed conspiracy of 100,000s of teachers/faculty across PreK and higher education to indoctrinate young people. Rather than, you know, people not buying into garbage and bigotry once they learn something.
  1. The belief that a tiny group of obscenely rich industrialists are the only truthtellers, the only ones looking out for the “forgotten man”, while millions of middle class professionals and civil servants are corrupt liars. This one is particularly ironic, as it represents a twisted funhouse version of Marxist theory.
  1. The belief that millions of people want to disarm them to leave them defenseless against looters, burglars and Liberal Fascism ™, rather than just want their kids not to get shot at school again and again by trigger-happy Rambo cosplayers.
  1. The belief that Green Energy is a scam to give connected companies money and make coal miners homeless, rather than an effort to save millions of lives from climate change, pollution and black lung.
  1. The belief that social services are an intentionally corrupt scam to keep minority groups on the “Democrat Plantation” ™, rather than a good-faith effort to make up for the predations of a brutal market in a society riddled with horrific structural racism.

It goes on and on. And that’s just the standard stuff you hear from most GOP politicians on any given day. It doesn’t even get into the really weird conspiracies that millions of Republican voters actively believe, like QAnon, secret 5th column communists, pedophile illuminati, etc. It also doesn’t touch the dangerously errant shibboleths like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “anyone can escape poverty if they really want to” which, while not conspiracy theories, are false articles of faith with destructive consequences.

Again, it would be one thing if these beliefs were limited to the GOP base. But it’s not just the rubes. It’s the Senators and the Representatives. It’s the President and his lawyers. They all feed from the paranoid conservative infotainment trough, which has to up the ante every year in order to make the world as it really is match up somehow with false conservative ideological orthodoxy.

It’s conspiracy theory turtles all the way down. And needless to say, in a two-party system, it’s incredibly dangerous for one party to be this far gone from reality.

new

https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclairs-boris-epshteyn-fearmongers-about-undocumented-immigrants-raping

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/bill-barrs-alternate-universe-investigation-has-a-goal-right-wing-authoritarian-rule

no lnx

Bill Barr’s alternate universe ‘investigation’ has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

Written by Heather Digby Parton October 25, 2019

Students of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.

But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.

Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)

Barr is described as supremely confident in his beliefs, which is to say that his overweening arrogance is not an act put on someone who is overcompensating to hide insecurity. He believes in this theory and when it became obvious that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not long for the  job, Barr and his legal cabal appear to have seen the clueless and corrupt Donald Trump as a perfect instrument to test their theory, and perhaps set legal precedents that would enable future right-wing presidents to use the full power of the presidency to dominate American politics without regard to democratic norms or congressional checks and balances.Indeed, they had been setting the stage for such a man for decades.

It’s also obviously the case that Barr, and perhaps his Reaganite cronies as well, are suffering from the malady known as Fox News Brain Rot, the symptoms of which are an extreme susceptibility to absurd right-wing conspiracy theories and an inability to believe anything that contradicts them. (Barr once said that there was more evidence for the bogus Uranium One charges than the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which confirms the diagnosis.)

That is the toxic combination of views has the Attorney General of the United States running all over the world seeking evidence to back up a ridiculous conspiracy theory in which Ukraine, the “deep state,” the Intelligence agencies of Italy, the U.K. and Australia, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee all conspired to frame Russia and Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They call this an investigation into the “origins” of the Russia investigation, which is also being handled by the Department of Justice’s inspector general and special counsel John Durham, appointed by Barr.

Barr’s personal intervention is outside the boundaries of the normal procedures, but that is yet another example of his “unitary executive” theory: He works for the president and the president has the power to assign him to any task, including being an international man of mystery. So far, Barr appears to be coming up goose eggs with the foreign intelligence services. The Wall Street Journal reported that he is “sparking discord in several foreign capitals, going outside usual channels to seek help from allies in reviewing the origins of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation begun during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

On Thursday night the Times set the political world aflame with a report that Durham has officially opened a criminal investigation into the matter. No one is sure what basis there is for this, but reports over the past week or so suggest Durham’s team is focusing intently on the people Donald Trump often rails against in his public statements, including former FBI agent Peter Strzok and possibly high-level intelligence community personnel such as former CIA chief John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper.

The timing of the story is obviously designed to counter the very bad news coming out of the House impeachment investigation in the House on a daily basis. This isn’t surprising. We’ve been expecting that Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., would hold parallel hearings into the origins of the Russia investigation, as promised. Graham is now balking because the Senate rules would require that he allow Democratic participation. (The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released two substantial reports on the 2016 election, making clear that they came to the same conclusions as the FBI and the intelligence community regarding Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, also complicates matters for him.)

So Graham has been reduced to introducing a meaningless resolution saying that the House is being unfair, obviously hoping to appease Trump and keep his homegrown followers happy.  According to the Daily Beast, it’s not working. In fact, TrumpWorld wants Graham to call House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to testify before Graham’s Senate committee, which would be a serious violation of congressional norms. He seems reluctant for the moment, but who knows what he’ll be willing to do as time goes on?

So for the moment the task of bringing the Fox News alternate-universe conspiracy theory to the mainstream falls to Barr and Durham. They have both reportedly been to Ukraine in recent weeks, presumably searching for that elusive “DNC server” that Trump constantly babbles about.  Maybe they will manage to delight the Trump base by trying to prosecute some FBI and CIA personnel. Barr seems willing to push the boundaries beyond anything we could have imagined, so that’s not as outrageous as it sounds.

The only remedy for this is for Congress to reassert its own prerogatives and impeach the president and, if necessary, his henchmen. If they fail to hold him accountable for the vast abuse of power and corruption of his office, the precedents will be set and the “unitary executive” will become the working model for all Republican presidents, just as Barr intends. The next one will no doubt be more efficient at using it than Donald Trump.

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mick sinks trump b/c of: ?

an 919

no lnx

Who fed Donald Trump his bogus Ukraine conspiracy theories?

Written by David Atkins / Washington Monthly September 30, 2019

One of the more bizarre elements of Donald Trump’s self-inflicted Ukraine scandal is his seemingly genuine belief that some nefarious Democratic scheme is hidden on Ukrainian computers. And one of the most important questions we should be asking is where he got that information.

First, some context: while most of attention has focused on the White House’s hamfisted attempt to gather dirt on the Biden family and its apparently widespread (and illegal) misuse of classification to hide politically damaging and legally incriminating information, there is also another sideplot: his conspiracy theory that Clinton’s missing emails, and perhaps other nefarious things, are somehow being stored on Ukrainian servers. This is a reference to what is known as the “Crowdstrike” conspiracy theory, a very fringe right-wing conspiracy theory so bizarre it barely makes it way onto onto Fox News. Rachel Sandler breaks it down at Forbes thus:

Silicon Valley-based CrowdStrike was hired in 2016 by the DNC to investigate the origins of the hack. The company didn’t give the DNC’s physical server to the FBI, which has been seized on by conspiracy theorists as evidence of a cover up.

According to the theory, which has been prominent on right-wing blogs and news websites and repeated by Trump and former campaign consultant Roger Stone, Democrats and CrowdStrike concocted evidence to frame Russia for the hack in order to discredit Trump’s win in 2016.

The supposed evidence of Russia’s innocence relies on the belief that a DNC server has been hidden in Ukraine, possibly by CrowdStrike’s cofounder Dmitri Alperovitch.

That belief may stem from a statement by President Trump in a 2017 interview with the Associated Press, in which he questioned why the FBI didn’t look at the DNC server, that CrowdStrike is owned by “a very rich Ukrainian.” Alperovitch is actually a Russian-born American citizen.

The theory is, of course, totally bogus. It’s also an attempt to absolve Russia of its culpability in the hacking of the DNC:

Ultimately, the president seems to be alluding to an idea that alt-right commentators and pro-Russia sympathizers have pushed for years: that CrowdStrike was wrong about Russia hacking the DNC—and, moreover, that CrowdStrike intentionally blamed Russia for political reasons. CrowdStrike’s findings have, of course, been repeatedly affirmed by the intelligence community, the Justice Department, members of Congress, and the office of Robert Mueller. Last year the government indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hacking plot…

These straw-grasping claims and distortions of fact are fuel for the fire of disinformation. Further, the notion that there is some missing “server,” and that the server might exist somewhere—like in Ukraine—has no basis in reality. The DNC’s network consisted of many servers and computers which either had be put out to pasture, rebooted, or rebuilt to rid them of malware and intruders. As the DNC explained in a 2018 lawsuit filed against the Russian government, it had to “decommission more than 140 servers, remove and reinstall all software, including the operating systems, for more than 180 computers, and rebuild at least 11 servers” as a result of the hacking.

The unanswered question in all this is how Donald Trump came to believe in this nonsense, and why he continues to believe it. His own employees and administration official tried again and again to disabuse him of these notions, but he refused to give them up:

President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday.

Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Mr. Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said he told the president there was no basis to the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and did so on behalf of the Democrats. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Bossert said he was “deeply disturbed” that Mr. Trump nonetheless tried to get Ukraine’s president to produce damaging information about Democrats.

Rudy Giuliani has been significantly involved in the obsession over Ukraine, as his bizarre spiels on cable news networks have amply demonstrated. Most recently he claimed to have been attempting to prove that Donald Trump (and, by extension, the Russians) was “framed by the Democrats”–a notion that Trump recently promoted on twitter.

But it seems unlikely Giuliani has been Donald Trump’s primary conspiracy theory conduit. Rather, he seems to have been roped into it by Trump, and enjoys the cable news limelight.

One might think that Trump got the information from random corners of the internet. But the problem there is that the president barely knows how to use a computer, and has to have articles printed out for him and put on his desk.

So who was feeding him these conspiracies? Why did he continue to believe them even as his own intelligence services and White House staff were attempting to disabuse him of them?

We still don’t know. But we deserve to find out.

David Atkins is a writer, activist and research professional living in Santa Barbara. He is a contributor to the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal and president of The Pollux Group, a qualitative research firm.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-conspiracy.html

How a Fringe Theory About Ukraine Took Root in the White House

President Trump has promoted a false conspiracy theory involving Democrats, an obscure security firm and the 2016 election — including on a call with the Ukrainian president that has led to an impeachment inquiry.

/The New York Times

By Scott Shane

Oct. 3, 2019

In an April 2017 interview with The Associated Press, President Trump suddenly began talking about the hack of the Democratic National Committee a year earlier, complaining that the F.B.I. had not physically examined the compromised server.

“They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based,” the president said.

“CrowdStrike?” the surprised reporter asked, referring to the California cybersecurity company that investigated how Russian government hackers had stolen and leaked Democratic emails, disrupting Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

“That’s what I heard,” Mr. Trump resumed. “I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian; that’s what I heard.”

More than two years later, Mr. Trump was still holding on to this false conspiracy theory. In his July call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, he summed it up in a sort of shorthand — at least according to the White House memorandum, labeled “not a verbatim transcript.”

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people …,” the president said. It is unclear whether the ellipses indicate that words were omitted or that Mr. Trump’s voice was trailing off.

Then he added one novel detail: “The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

Now, Mr. Trump’s call for Ukraine to look into his CrowdStrike story forms the background to the House impeachment inquiry, which is focused on the second request he made: that Mr. Zelensky investigate Mr. Trump’s possible 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Trump has placed a concoction of disprovable claims, of the kind usually found on the fringes of the web, squarely in the middle of American politics and diplomacy.

The tale of the supposedly hidden server may have appealed to Mr. Trump because it undercut a well-established fact that he has resented and resisted for three years: The Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to help him win, an effort thoroughly documented by American intelligence agencies and amply supported by public evidence.

By contrast, there is no evidence to support the president’s vague suggestion that Ukraine, not Russia, might be responsible for the hacking, or that CrowdStrike somehow connived in it. But his alternate history has provided a psychological shield for the president against facts that he believes tarnish his electoral victory.

Mr. Trump has long called for better relations with Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and brushed aside complaints about its conduct. So there is a certain symmetry to his suggestion that Ukraine, Russia’s opponent and the victim of its territorial grab, may somehow have framed Russia for the 2016 election activity.

“Ukraine is the perfect scapegoat for him, because it’s the enemy of Russia,” said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington who regularly visits Ukraine and is writing a book called “How to Lose the Information War.”

She noted that a number of Ukraine-linked stories, some of them distorted or exaggerated, have been pulled together by Mr. Trump’s supporters into a single narrative.

For example, there is the idea, promoted by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, that Ukraine’s government actively sabotaged Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. A Ukrainian-American lawyer who consulted for the D.N.C. looked into the finances of Paul Manafort and spoke with Ukrainian embassy officials. But there appears to have been no organized Ukrainian government effort to intervene — certainly nothing comparable to the activities of Russian intelligence agencies ordered by Mr. Putin.

It is true that a Ukrainian legislator helped publicize documents on Mr. Manafort’s multimillion-dollar payments from a Ukrainian political party, leading to his resignation as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman. But the claim of Mr. Manafort’s wrongdoing turned out to be justified. He is now serving seven and a half years in prison for financial fraud and other crimes.

In May, Mr. Trump recalled the American ambassador to Kiev, Marie L. Yovanovitch, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2016, telling others she was scheming against his administration. She has denied it.

And Mr. Trump has repeatedly charged that Mr. Biden, who handled Ukrainian affairs as vice president, tried to get a prosecutor fired for investigating a Ukrainian energy company that paid his son, Hunter, handsomely as a board member despite a lack of experience in Ukraine. In fact, multiple countries were pressing for the firing of the prosecutor, who they thought was turning a blind eye to corruption.

“Now it seems like all of these conspiracy theories are merging into one,” Ms. Jankowicz said. She studies disinformation, she said, but Mr. Trump produced one claim she’d never come across.

“I do this for a living, and I’d never heard anyone say the servers were in Ukraine,” she said.

Twitter removed a video posted by Mr. Trump that showed a meme of Nickelbacker’s lead singer, edited as an attack on Joe Biden.

In the 27 months between Mr. Trump’s two citations of the CrowdStrike-Ukraine conspiracy theory, it has survived despite many denials from CrowdStrike, the F.B.I. and people directly involved in the investigations. It has survived despite the fact that the D.N.C. put one of its hacked servers on display — not in Ukraine but in its Washington offices beside the filing cabinet pried open in 1972 by the Watergate burglars (and a photo of the two artifacts ran on The Times’s front page). It has survived despite the indictment prepared last year by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, laying out in extraordinary detail the actions of 12 named Russian military intelligence officers who hacked the D.N.C. and other election targets.

The speculation springs from what Mr. Trump has called a “big Dem scam” — the false notion that the F.B.I. never really investigated the D.N.C. hack. In fact, according to people directly involved, CrowdStrike was in regular contact with the bureau in spring 2016 as it examined dozens of servers used by both the D.N.C. and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

It is true, as Mr. Trump has often tweeted, that F.B.I. agents never took physical possession of the Democrats’ servers. But CrowdStrike supplied the F.B.I. with digital copies of the servers so that the bureau could assess the Russian malware infecting them. The Mueller investigation later confirmed CrowdStrike’s findings.

Still, the president has clung to the theory linking CrowdStrike, Ukraine and the D.N.C. servers despite the repeated efforts of his aides to dissuade him, Thomas Bossert, his former homeland security adviser, said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “The D.N.C. server and that conspiracy theory has got to go,” he said. “If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”

To go in search of the roots of Mr. Trump’s CrowdStrike-Ukraine conspiracy theory is to travel the internet’s most peculiar provinces and the darkest threads on Twitter and Facebook. On 4chan and pro-Trump spaces on Reddit, on websites like ZeroHedge.com and Washington’s Blog, you can find plenty of speculation about evil manipulation by CrowdStrike and secret maneuvers by Ukrainians — often inflamed by Mr. Trump’s own statements.

Until the president’s statements, however, even internet speculation did not attribute CrowdStrike’s ownership to a rich Ukrainian or suggest that the D.N.C. servers were hidden in Ukraine.

George Eliason, an American journalist who lives in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists fought Ukrainian forces, has written extensively about what he considers to be a “coup attempt” against President Trump involving American and Ukrainian intelligence agencies and CrowdStrike. He said he did not know if his writings for obscure websites might have influenced the president.

“CrowdStrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove,” he wrote in an email. “Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the U.S. to take a hardline stance against Russia? Are they using CrowdStrike to carry this out?”

Mr. Eliason and other purveyors of Ukraine conspiracies often point to the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, as the locus of the schemes. The Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk has made donations to the council and serves on its international advisory board; Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder, who was born in Russia and came to the United States as a child, is an Atlantic Council senior fellow.

That connection seems slender, but it may be the origin of Mr. Trump’s association of a wealthy Ukrainian with CrowdStrike.

Pro-Trump media leaped last week to defend the president’s Ukraine theories. Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show that Mr. Trump’s “reference to CrowdStrike, mark my words, is momentous,” though he did not say why.

And Russian state news outlets are always ready to cheer on Mr. Trump’s efforts to point the blame for the 2016 hack away from Moscow. On Sept. 25, after the White House released its memo on the Zelensky call, Russia’s Sputnik news website ran a story supporting Mr. Trump’s remarks.

The Sputnik article cited Mr. Eliason’s writings and suggested that CrowdStrike might have framed Russia for the D.N.C. hack — if it occurred at all. It quoted a Twitter account called “The Last Refuge” declaring: “The D.N.C. servers were never hacked.”

All this mythmaking about the 2016 hack frustrates Robert Johnston, who was the lead investigator for CrowdStrike on the D.N.C. inquiry. Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and Cyber Command operator, said he could make no sense of Mr. Trump’s assertions.

“It doesn’t connect with anything in my experience,” he said. “I’d be interested in the president of Ukraine’s impression.”

Mr. Johnston, now chief executive of the cybersecurity company Adlumin, said he was weary of the conspiracies surrounding what he considered a straightforward conclusion. Having seen the digital fingerprints of Russian intelligence in earlier hacking cases, he felt there was little doubt about the identity of the perpetrators.

“I don’t know how you get to this point,” Mr. Johnston said of the fantasies Mr. Trump has promoted. “This is a story that just won’t die.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Tale of Sabotage Took Root in Oval Office.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-conspiracy.html

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/mike-adams-via-infowars-impeachment-inquiry-against-trump-part-of-plan-to-genocide-human-race

Mike Adams via Infowars: Impeachment Inquiry against Trump Part of Plan to Genocide Human Race

mike Adams, a far-right conspiracy theorist and scam artist behind a site called Natural News, warned Infowars listeners that “globalists” are orchestrating genocide against the humans, and that part of that plan is the announcement of an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. If impeachment fails, Adams says, the globalists will simply assassinate Trump.

Since Infowars was banished from nearly every social media site, viewership of the network and its lead star Alex Jones has plummeted. Jones has been ensnared in a handful of defamation lawsuits brought against him, and his network has been ratcheting its typically bizarre and nonsensical message to new levels of nihilistic weirdness.

On yesterday’s episode of Jones’ program, Adams was an in-studio guest, assisting Jones in providing commentary on a press conference at the White House with Trump and President Sauli Niinisto of Finland. But before the press conference started, Adams launched into a rant about his frustrations that humanity was “failing right now to get angry enough” about a supposed “globalist” plot to kill all humans.[cf larouche hit on aoc]

“There’s a soft kill of humanity, and there’s a soft coup of Trump right now. Both of these are going to go to the hot phase. Both of these are going to go to hard kill and hard coup. This is what’s crucial to understand. They’re happening in parallel. They are the exact same globalists—they are, and they are linked. If they destroy Trump, they also succeed in destroying humanity because Trump represents the last hope for humanity to have a free nation on this planet,” Adams said.

Jones burst in, saying, “And that’s what’s so crazy is he really is for real and then people aren’t going, ‘This is wonderful!’ They’re like, ‘No! We don’t want it!’”

“Well, right. And humanity is going to be overrun here. Humanity is going to be absolutely destroyed if we don’t turn this around and wake people up enough,”Adams said. He insisted “there should be a million people swarming Washington, D.C., peacefully and lawfully right now” to put pressure on the nation’s leaders, presumably to stop the apocalyptic plan Adams believes is taking place. Jones agreed, urging what viewers he still has to track down their elected officials and “get in their face” and intimidate them.

In an unexpected twist, Adams distorted what a NASA scientist told The Telegraph about plans for NASA and the European Space Agency to send two rovers to Mars to drill into surfaces and search for life on the planet, and used the mischaracterization to further warn about what he foresees as the coming systemic murder of the human race by elites.

“It’s going to be life on Mars, death on Earth. They are genocidally cleansing, ethnically cleansing this planet to try to kill us off while they’re going to announce, ‘The universe is filled with life, but you don’t deserve it because you’re a lowly Earthling, a lowly human,’” Adams said.

Jones replied, “Yeah, it’s obviously the big secret,” and theorized that this plan to genocide the human race is “why they’ve got Trump compartmentalized.” Jones said that the shadowy elites plotting the destruction of the world are also trying to prevent Trump from learning that cures for cancer have already been developed.

Adams said, “You can’t even say it enough. The American people think that they’re in a fight right now with Trump, trying to save Trump from this illegal treasonous coup carried out by these seditious crisis actors in the media—who are CIA puppets, by the way. This is just the beginning of the fight. If Trump survives impeachment, don’t run around and think that, ‘Victory, victory!’ No. They’re going to try to assassinate Trump. They’re going to use area-effect weapons.”

It’s worth remembering that Trump appeared as Jones’ guest on this program during his campaign for president.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/are-conspiracy-theories-really-on-the-rise-in-the-us-the-answer-might-surprise-you/

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-friends-rudy-giuliani-links-911-terrorism-venezuela

video:

On Fox & Friends, Rudy Giuliani links 9/11 terrorism to Venezuela

Giuliani: “We have to get rid of Maduro”

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/the-myth-of-eurabia-how-a-far-right-conspiracy-theory-went-mainstream

guk no lnx

The long read

The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

Once an obscure idea confined to the darker corners of the internet, the anti-Islam ideology is now visible in the everyday politics of the west. How did this happen? By Andrew Brown

Fri 16 Aug 2019 01.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 16 Aug 2019 07.48 EDT

In July 2011, a quiet European capital was shaken by a terrorist car bomb, followed by confused reports suggesting many deaths. When the first news of the murders came through, one small group of online commentators reacted immediately, even though the media had cautiously declined to identify the attackers. They knew at once what had happened – and who was to blame.

“This was inevitable,” explained one of the anonymous commenters. And it was just the beginning: “Only a matter of time before other European nations get a taste of their multicultural tolerance that they’ve been cooking for decades.”

“Europe has been infested with venomous parasitic vermin,” explained another. “Anything and everything is fine as long as they rape the natives and destroy the country, which they do,” said a third.

As the news grew worse, the group became more joyful and confident. The car bomb had been followed by reports of a mass shooting at a nearby camp for teenagers. One commenter was “almost crying of happiness” to be proved right about the dangers of Islam. “The massacre at the children’s camp,” another noted, “is a sickening reminder of just how evil and satanic the cult of Islam is.”

A couple of hours after the first reports of the bomb explosion in central Oslo, a few doubts emerged to cloud the picture: “Because the targets in the shooting were all good little leftists, won’t the shooter be played up as a rightwing extremist, whatever his actual motives?” one person asked.

When information emerged to suggest that the attacker might be a “tall Nordic guy”, one of the commenters, who called himself “Fjordman”, realised the true nature of the disaster: “Judging from some of the recent information, it must be treated as a serious possibility that this is actually some Timothy McVeigh, not a Muslim. It is too early to tell. If that is indeed the case … it would practically destroy my country, and make the working conditions for people like myself incredibly difficult for a long time to come, I’m afraid.”

The truth turned out to be worse than Fjordman feared. The massacre in Oslo had not been committed by Muslims. It was the work of a white supremacist, Anders Behring Breivik, who had detonated a bomb in Oslo, killing eight people, and then shot dead 69 others, many of them teenagers, at a youth camp run by Norway’s Labour party. And, according to the manifesto he published online, Breivik had been directly inspired by Gates of Vienna – the blog where all these comments appeared on the day of his massacre. Breivik called the ideology that justified his murders “The Vienna school”, after the blog.

Fjordman, whose real name is Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, now lives in obscurity in provincial Norway. He outed himself as the man behind the pseudonym to a Norwegian tabloid in the weeks following the massacre – but managed to avoid testifying at Breivik’s trial, thanks to the intervention of high-powered lawyers paid for by the Middle East Forum, a rightwing American group that would later sponsor Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – in Britain. Nonetheless, Jensen’s influence on Breivik, however indirect, had been considerable.

Breivik borrowed part of the title of his manifesto, A European Declaration of Independence, from one of Fjordman’s blog posts, and many of the chapters in it were simply reprintings of Fjordman’s postings on various blogs, mostly Gates of Vienna, but also a far-right and passionately anti-EU site called the Brussels Journal.

Gates of Vienna was, and still is, run by Edward “Ned” May, an American computer programmer from Washington DC. It was among the first in a wave of blogs that urged the US to war after the shock of 9/11, and almost certainly the most fanatically anti-Muslim. It takes its name from the siege of Vienna in 1683, when an Ottoman Turkish army was defeated by a Polish-led one. Its essential thesis is that this was only one battle in a long war and that Europe and its civilisation are constantly threatened by a Muslim invasion.

On these varied online forums, the narrative was always the same: a liberal cabal was conspiring with hostile Muslim powers to hand over the decent working people to Islam. This was the animating myth of the bloggers, calling themselves the “counter-jihad”, who congregated at Gates of Vienna and other like-minded sites – and inspired both the violence of Breivik and the message of the racist far-right parties that have transformed European politics in the past decade.

But all of these later conspiracy theories took inspiration from a founding myth of contemporary Islamophobia: an invented plot, known as “Eurabia”, to destroy European civilisation. This is the doctrine that Jensen promoted and Breivik acted on, a hidden underpinning of a movement that has changed the world.

Once an ideology confined to the kookier corners of the internet, the idea of Eurabia is now visible in the everyday politics of the US, Australia and most of Europe: when Trump tweets about stabbings in London and falsely claims that crime in Germany is “way up”, he is invoking the Eurabian myth, taken as fact on Fox News, that European liberals have surrendered their cities to Muslim criminals.

The spread of the belief that elites conspired to push Muslim immigration on their native populations is also the story of a conspiracy theory that was nourished on some of the very first blogs and message boards, started appearing in mainstream discourse after 9/11, and then took on a life of its own, even while the supposed facts behind it were exposed as ridiculous. It is a lesson in the danger of half-truths, which are not only more powerful than truths but often more powerful than lies.

Eurabia is a term coined in the 70s that was resurfaced by Gisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband. She wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”). In a series of books, originally written in French and published from the 1990s onward, she developed a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims in exchange for oil.

The original villain of Littman’s story was General Charles de Gaulle. It is difficult for an outsider to understand how De Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazis and was probably the greatest conservative statesman in French history, could be reinvented as the man who betrayed western civilisation for money. But Littman had lived many years in France, and the French far right hated De Gaulle, and indeed tried several times to assassinate him. Not only had De Gaulle fought the Vichy government, he had also admitted defeat in the long and hideously bloody war of Algerian independence – granting an Arab Muslim country its freedom at the expense of the French-Christian settler population, who had to retreat to France (and whose descendants formed the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front).

Agreeing to Algerian independence was understood by the French far right as a betrayal. De Gaulle had been brought out of retirement and restored to power in 1958 because he was believed to be on the side of the settlers in their war, which was opposed by much of the left. And so, to the far right, the Mediterranean came to seem like the frontline in a long, shifting struggle between rival colonialisms, Christian and Muslim, in which the Muslims had won a great victory in Algeria. Where would their new advance stop?

Littman’s argument, framed by her experience in Egypt (which a French force had invaded, along with the British and Israelis, in 1956), was that Islam imposed a second-class status on all non-Muslims, whom they ruled. This status of “dhimmitude” – a coinage of Littman’s, meaning subjection to Islamic rule on pain of “forced conversion, slavery or death” – was now to be extended to Europe.

According to Littman, her books describe “Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilisation, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilisation that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.”

She saw tentacles of the great conspiracy in committees of blameless tedium and obscurity, such as the Euro-Arab Dialogue, an institution set up by the European Economic Community and the Arab League in the 70s to promote greater discussion between the regions. Her conspiracy theory was dismissed in 2006 by the Israeli historian Robert Wistrich as “the protocols of the elders of Brussels”, but what mattered more was the place he chose to challenge her ideas: a conference in Jerusalem on antisemitism to which she had been invited despite her lack of academic status. September 11 had changed everything for Littman, she told Haaretz after the conference: “In the United States, I am certain that the September 11 attacks woke people up, including the Jewish community that had previously ignored me, because it belongs more to the left.”

She explained to Haaretz the future she saw for Europe. “We are now heading towards a total change in Europe, which will be more and more Islamicised and will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world.”

This was the idea that the Norwegian Jensen was enchanted by, and which, as Fjordman, he transmitted to Anders Breivik.

Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far-right National Rally (formerly National Front) party, applauds the former US presidential adviser Steve Bannon after his speech at the party’s annual congress in March 2018.

Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far-right National Rally (formerly National Front) party, applauds the former US presidential adviser Steve Bannon (left) after his speech at the party’s annual congress in March 2018. Photograph: Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images

Jensen is unusual among Eurabia believers in that he has actually had some experience of the Muslim world and even speaks Arabic. He is the son of a socialist politician in Norway and studied Arabic in Cairo – his earlier university studies in Bergen had included English (which he writes fluently), Russian, Arabic and Middle Eastern history. In 2000, he had been interviewed by the local paper back in Norway, and spoke enthusiastically about his hosts in Egypt: “Outside the tourist areas, you meet friendly, hospitable, curious and open people who want to get to know you. I have been part of their daily lives. We’ve been invited to their homes, and talked and smoked shisha together.”

That was Jensen’s first encounter with Islam, and he was still in Cairo at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He says he saw then that there were some Muslims who celebrated the slaughter, and he also saw that this wasn’t reported in the Norwegian papers. The next year, he worked for the Norwegian Refugee Council in the disputed city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Unusually among Scandinavians who have worked with Palestinians in Israel, he identified with the Israelis. He narrowly escaped a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, at a bar where two of his colleagues had been killed in another attack the previous year. The experience cemented his growing fear and loathing of Islam.

The fact that the Norwegian press took a generally pro-Palestinian line while he and his friends had been the victims of Palestinian terrorism helped to convince Jensen that Islam was an existential threat to European civilisation which the politically correct establishment was wilfully ignoring. Like Littman, he seems not to acknowledge any element of nationalism in Palestinian consciousness: it is all either Arab or Muslim. In fact, the belief that Islam is hostile to national consciousness is quite widely held on the right: the philosopher Roger Scruton brought it up in a controversial speech on nationality in Hungary in 2013, in which he contrasted European Christian nations with Islamic empires.

In 2003, Jensen returned to Norway, where he attempted to make a name for himself as a public intellectual. At first, he was hostile to feminism, accusing feminists of destroying Norwegian manhood. But the focus of his concerns soon switched to Islam. He started writing under the pseudonym “Norwegian Kafir” on an American blog called Little Green Footballs, which loudly and fervently supported the invasion of Iraq. From then on, his writing appeared in English, on American-hosted blogs. There, he hammered into shape the narrative of elites, specially identified with the EU, who are destroying and betraying Europe by the deliberate encouragement of mass immigration.

At this point in time, the Eurabian conspiracy appealed largely to those who had long perceived a conflict between Islam and the Judeo-Christian west – with Israel as a beleaguered and persecuted outpost of western values. These people, largely on the American right, were among the earliest exponents of Eurabia – but as they never ceased to complain, theirs was not an attitude very widely shared in Europe. What would soon supply the emotional force of the fantasy was another set of ideas about global migration, less conspiratorial in their essence, but much more widely accepted among generally apolitical Europeans. These, also, originated in France, where they were known as the “great replacement”.

The idea of the great replacement had its origin in a blatantly racist French novel of the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints, in which France is overthrown by an unarmed invasion of starving, sex-crazed Indian refugees when the French army is not prepared to fire on them. The moral of the book is that western civilisation can only be saved by a willingness to slaughter poor brown people. Steve Bannon, among the founders of the rightwing news site Breitbart and a former adviser to President Trump, has referred to it repeatedly.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the naked racism of The Camp of the Saints kept it largely out of public debate. But the rise of Islam as a global force allowed the question to be recast. If the threatening masses were defined by religion rather than by skin colour, then hating them could be presented as an intellectual commitment rather than a racist one.

And the paranoid did have a large, shadowy half-truth to fall back on. The demographic shrinkage facing Europe is real and undeniable, and it was obvious in the early years of this century, too. So are the much greater birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. In 2002, Russia and Pakistan both had populations of about 145 million; by 2017, Russia’s population was 144 million while Pakistan’s was 200 million.

The next stage in the development of a xenophobic populist worldview was for the two narratives to merge, so that Islam and Muslims became both a conspiracy and a demographic threat.

The 9/11 attacks changed attitudes to Islam in much of Europe and the US. Israel and the US now shared a sense of being under attack from Muslims. Without 9/11, Littman would have remained an obscure crank, and Jensen more obscure still. But the assault on the twin towers unleashed an immense backlash of wounded American pride and nationalism that led to the devastation of two whole countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, and countless deaths. It also fuelled a demand for explanations. Theories about the unique malevolence and danger of Islam answered a popular hunger. George W Bush declared at the time that the US had no quarrel with Islam, but many of his compatriots disagreed.

One of the many bad fruits of 9/11 was the new atheist movement, a phenomenon marked by mutual self-praise and undeviating hostility to Islam. Even if the ostensible target of much of the hostility was Christianity, the new atheists tend to consider Islam far worse and more “religious” a religion. The American writer Sam Harris’s breakthrough book The End of Faith from 2004 now reads like Bat Ye’or without the inconvenient scaffolding of easily disproved facts. “We are at war with Islam,” he writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists … Armed conflict ‘in the defence of Islam’ is a religious obligation for every Muslim man ... Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”

In the run-up to the Iraq war, and after the invasion, coverage in American newspapers and on television was, to a European eye, jingoistic in the extreme. The possibility of defeat was unthinkable. Nonetheless, a new wave of bloggers began using the term “MSM” for “mainstream media” as a disparaging reference to the large media organisations’ pretended neutrality. One of the earliest and most influential of these was Little Green Footballs, founded and run by Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles-based former session guitarist with an interest in web design. It was typical of the moment that he was an opinionated amateur with no credentials, whose real advantage was that he could build websites at a time when this required some programming skill.

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Jensen, commenting on Little Green Footballs as Norwegian Kafir, made it a distribution point for Eurabian ideas. Another was Gates of Vienna itself, run by Ned May under the moniker Baron Bodissey after a sage in the sci-fi novels of Jack Vance. Then there was Jihad Watch, run by the American author Robert Spencer. Both Spencer and his frequent collaborator Pam Geller were banned from the UK in 2013 for making statements likely to foster hatred and violence between communities.

The only European blog of note in this constellation was the fanatically anti-EU site the Brussels Journal, where the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan was a contributor. The Brussels Journal was run by Paul Beliën, a far-right Belgian journalist and author. Jensen was active on all these sites, taking part in discussions in which the Eurabian beliefs gave rise to something that called itself the counter-jihad movement.

Nowadays, when Facebook effortlessly spreads disinformation around the world, it is difficult to recapture the sense of revelation, and of belonging, that once accompanied the discovery of a new blog. The cramped but, to its adherents, strangely comforting thought world of the counter-jihad blogs turned politics into a gigantic online game. Anyone could play and everyone could find in it their inner child: “Some people think I’m weird; some think I am exceptionally intelligent,” Jensen had told a reporter when he was still a student in Cairo.

The boundaries between these blogs and the “MSM” they affected to despise were porous. Some writers aimed for a high-minded tone about the dangers of Muslim immigration: the former Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell published in 2009 a book, Reflections on a Revolution in Europe, that recapitulates the idea of a slow-moving Muslim barbarian invasion from a position of Olympian disdain: “Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury and crime … Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation … If you walk north across the Piazza Della Repubblica in Turin, you see, mutatis mutandis, what the Romans saw. To the east, two well-preserved Roman towers remain, and so do the walls built to separate citizens from barbarians. Today, in the space of about 60 seconds on foot, you pass from chic shops and wine bars through a lively multiethnic market into one of Europe’s more menacing north African slums.”

Some were less highbrow. In 2004, the Daily Telegraph gave a column to the Canadian prophet of American greatness Mark Steyn, who had originally made his name as a witty critic of musical theatre. Doom and horror was all he saw in Europe’s future. As early as 2002, he said: “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark” – a remark he was still proudly quoting for Telegraph readers in 2005, when Iraq had become a slaughterhouse.

In terms that anticipated Jensen, Breivik and the alleged manifesto of the man charged with the Christchurch massacre, Steyn wrote (and the Telegraph published) this prophecy: “In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Yugoslavs figured that out. In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43% to 31% of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26% to 44%.”

‘Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’!’ reads a campaign poster in Berlin for the far-right party during this year’s European elections.

‘Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’!’ reads a campaign poster in Berlin for the far-right party during this year’s European elections. Photograph: Clemens Bilan/EPA

Compare Steyn in 2005 with the manifesto of Patrick Crusius, who confessed to murdering 22 people in El Paso earlier this month: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion ... America is rotting from the inside out, and peaceful means to stop this seem to be nearly impossible.”

In 2007, the believers in a counter-jihad began to meet up in the real world. After a preliminary meeting of bloggers, commentators and Danish and Norwegian sympathisers in Copenhagen, attended by Jensen, a conference was arranged by May and the far-right Flemish party Vlaams Belang, in Brussels in 2007. This brought together most of the ideologues of Eurabia, as they attempted to transform it from an idea into a movement. Littman was the keynote speaker. Others present were Geller and Robert Spencer from the US, and Gerard Batten, later briefly the leader of Ukip in Britain. Ted Ekeroth, of the nationalist, rightwing Sweden Democrats, also attended.

As both Ukip and the Sweden Democrats rose to become powerful political forces, anxieties about terrorism were subsumed into much wider anxieties about demography, and about status within the old order. The American anthropologist Scott Atran has carried out extensive research into the mindset of the young men who become Islamic terrorists: the combination of wounded pride with the delight of belonging to a movement which has both global, apocalyptic significance and a living presence in a friendship group is tremendously important in recruiting jihadis. The same dynamic operates among their enemies: Breivik was remarkable chiefly in that he was so solipsistic that he could radicalise himself without the aid of any friends in real life, only those he imagined on the internet. He had at one stage approached his intellectual idol, Jensen, via email, who brushed him off as “boring as a vacuum cleaner salesman”.

You do not have to be a jihadi to feel the tug of these compulsions. The counter-jihadis, just as much as their enemies, believed they were entering an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. This is a century of wounded pride and anxieties about status for almost everyone.

Despite all this, there were some signs, even before the Breivik killings, that the original Eurabian front would break up. Those who were opposed to immigrants in general began to separate from those who hated Muslims in particular. Johnson, the founder of Little Green Footballs, excommunicated most of his followers in 2010 because of their increasing closeness to parties of western Europe that he regarded as being descended from fascists – the Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the Sweden Democrats, although he also denounced the English Defence League. Johnson was a genuine philosemite, who could not forgive the taint of antisemitism.

The anti-immigrant right had good reasons for separating itself from the anti-Muslim right. If the logic of the “Vienna school” – Jensen, Spencer and Geller, May and Littman – led inexorably to civil war and the righteous slaughter of Muslims and their leftie enablers, then most of the right shrank back from it. Commenters such as Douglas Murray and Caldwell quite genuinely believed that Breivik was insane, and that his actions had no relation to the ideas that he espoused. There may in this have been an element of self-deception, but it is also a testimony to the sort of instinctive, unthinking decency we all need sometimes to rescue us from the consequences of our ideas. It seemed that some kind of pragmatism would prevail.

The hope now seems deceptive. What changed this was above all the election of the US president, Donald Trump, whose then adviser Bannon was a believer in a “brutal, bloody ... global war” against “Islamic fascism”. They showed that there was a huge constituency for racialised hatred and despair and – for them – no real negative consequences, electoral or otherwise, in pandering to it.

Since Breivik’s massacre, his own beliefs have only become more widespread. They have spread into the politics of all European countries. In the campaign for the European elections this May, the German far-right party AfD ran posters showing a naked white woman being pawed by dark-skinned men in Arab headgear. One had stuck his fingers in her unresisting mouth. “Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’,” said the caption. Millions of people who have never heard of Bat Ye’or, of Fjordman, or even of Breivik and Bannon, now understand that poster at a glance, and no amount of evidence will shake their certainty. They now believe all politics comes down to the words of one of Trump’s more recent tweets: “The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them … Be strong & prosper, be weak & die!”

But who, in this situation, are the losers, and who are the strong? Last week, in an apparent attempt to emulate Breivik, a rich, disaffected young Norwegian, Philip Manshaus, shot his way through the entrance gates to a mosque in the upmarket suburb of Oslo where he lived and started firing at the congregation. He was wrestled to the ground by an unarmed 65-year-old Muslim, Mohammed Rafiq, who then held him down, with the help of another man, until the police arrived. On the Gates of Vienna blog, this episode was not deemed worthy of mention. Instead, its devoted readers were told that Muslims had been responsible for a recent outbreak of animal cruelty in Sweden.

•Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/spider-man-far-from-home-is-a-rumination-on-fake-news/

...

Surprisingly enough, one of the first films to seriously engage with this reality is the latest offering of the Marvel superhero franchise, Spider-Man: Far From Home. Featuring Tom Holland’s playful, web-slinging hero on a school trip to Europe, the film’s initial conflict is set as typical space-drama Marvel fare: Earth is under attack from “Elementals,” an invading class of giant monsters from a parallel universe, which can be thwarted with the help of superhero Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio, who inadvertently came to our world with the monsters.

While Spider-Man and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury buy this preposterous story, it is later discovered to be a ruse. The Elementals and their violent attacks are actually the carefully choreographed products of Beck and his colleagues, all disgruntled ex-employees of the late Tony Stark’s weapons manufacturer. Beck’s superpowers and the Elementals are merely sophisticated 3D projections, but the damage they cause is real, thanks to an army of invisible drones. Beck and company’s goal is simple: to “save” the world from their own attacks, so they may finally bask in the hero status denied to them when Stark misused their creations.

Far From Home is not exactly subtle about its real-world implications. Like the premise of Homecoming—where a resentful blue-collar contractor, played by Michael Keaton, becomes the super-villain Vulture—it feels a tad ripped from the headlines, with the use of the phrase “fake news” eliciting chuckles from the Brooklyn audience I watched it with. Nevertheless, Far From Home is one of the few mass-market films to seriously engage with how demagogues can employ false military conflicts to their own advantage.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/qanon-conspiracists-appear-at-trump-rally-only-hours-after-fbi-warning-on-far-right-conspiracy-group/

no lnx ah

Far-right proponents of the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory — which claims that an alliance of Hollywood actors and Washington, D.C. politicians, among others, have been engaging in an international child sex ring — are not only unhinged; they are also potentially dangerous, according to the FBI. And this week, the Washington Post reports, some QAnon proponents turned up at a rally for President Donald Trump on the same day the FBI issued a bulletin warning that the group could be dangerous.

According to the bulletin, proponents of QAnon as well as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory have the potential for violence. In 2016, Pizzagate proponents claimed that Democrats were using a Washington, D.C. pizzeria for child sex abuse.

The bulletin reads, “The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts. And it goes on to say that reports “of a sudden rise in threats and unfounded accusations against a given individual or business may indicate impending conspiracy theory-driven crime or violence.”

On Thursday at a Trump rally in Cincinnati, according to the Post, a supporter named Brandon Straka used a QAnon slogan: “where we go one, we go all.” And other QAnon proponents were seen at the rally as well.

In the cultish QAnon community, Trump is held in high regard: QAnon theorists believe his presidency is meant to help carry out a worldwide battle against a child sex ring — and Q is an anonymous figure who sends sporadic messages on the battle.

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aha "agenda" means  secret (long term) plan to do evil, get control tyranny that takes our freedom sovereignty liberty etc thus conspiracy theory

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/facebook-algorithm-changes-suppressed-journalism-and-meddled-with-democracy/

no lnx many graf

Facebook algorithm changes suppressed journalism and meddled with democracy

July 24, 2019 7.07am EDT

Jennifer Grygiel

Assistant Professor of Communications (Social Media) & Magazine, News and Digital Journalism, Syracuse University

[Disclosure statement

Jennifer Grygiel owns a small number of shares in the following social media companies: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Alibaba, LinkedIn, YY and Snap. Grygiel also owns nominal amounts of the following cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum.]

Facebook’s News Feed algorithm determines what users see on its platform – from funny memes to comments from friends. The company regularly updates this algorithm, which can dramatically change what information people consume.

As the 2020 election approaches, there is much public concern that what was dubbed “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential election could happen again. But what’s not getting enough attention is the role Facebook’s algorithm changes play, intentionally or not, in that kind of meddling.

A key counterpoint to the Russian misinformation campaign was factual journalism from reputable sources – which reached many of their readers on Facebook and other social media platforms. As a social media researcher and educator, I see evidence that changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm suppressed users’ access to credible journalism in the run-up to Trump’s election.

Political operatives know Facebook serves as a gatekeeper of the information diets of more than 200 million Americans and 2 billion users worldwide. Actions and abuse by others on the platforms have generated much concern and public discussion, including about how much disinformation and propaganda Americans saw before the election. What has not been talked about enough is the effect that Facebook’s algorithmic shifts have had on access to news and democracy.

Changing the system

In mid-2015, Facebook introduced a major algorithm change that pivoted readers away from journalism and news, to deliver more updates from their friends and family. The change was couched in friendly language suggesting Facebook was trying to make sure users  didn’t miss stories from friends. But social media data shows that one effect of the change was to reduce the number of interactions Facebook users had with credible journalism outlets.

A few months before the 2016 election, an even bigger algorithm change toward friends and family posts took a second toll on publisher traffic. A wide range of news publishers found that their content was significantly less visible to Facebook users.

Examining the numbers

In my research, I looked at Facebook engagement for mainstream news outlets surrounding the 2016 election. My findings support others’ conclusions that Facebook’s algorithm greatly suppressed public engagement with these publishers.

Data from CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring company, shows that Facebook traffic dropped noticeably at CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, The New York Times and The Washington Post after the company updated its algorithms to favor friends and family in June 2016.

That proves the algorithm worked the way it was designed to work, but I am concerned that major U.S. publishers were suppressed in this way. Voter interest in the presidential election was higher in 2016 than in the previous two decades, and misinformation was rampant. Facebook’s changes meant that key news organizations across the political spectrum had a harder time getting the word out about credible election news and reporting.

Alarm bells

Facebook was aware of concerns about its algorithm even before the election happened. One of Facebook’s own engineers flagged these potential effects of Facebook’s algorithm changes in July 2015. Three months later, Zuckerberg’s mentor, Roger McNamee, also attempted to alert Zuckerberg and Facebook executives that the platform was being used to manipulate information about the election.

Just after the election, reporter Craig Silverman’s research at BuzzFeed showed that fake election news had outperformed “real news.” In late 2018, Facebook’s own company statement revealed issues with how its algorithm rewarded “borderline content” that was sensational and provocative, like much of the hyperpartisan news that trended in advance of the election.

More recent research by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center shows that Facebook traffic continued to decrease significantly for publishers after a further Facebook algorithm change in January 2018.

Prof. Grygiel calls for algorithmic transparency on MSNBC.

Algorithmic transparency

To date, research on how Facebook’s algorithm works has been limited by the lack of access to its proprietary inner workings. It’s not enough to investigate the effects of the changes in Facebook’s News Feed. I believe it’s important to understand why they happened, too, and consider Facebook’s business decisions more directly and how they affect democracy.

Recent insight into the company’s internal processes suggest that Facebook is beginning to understand its power. In July 2019, Bloomberg News revealed that the company had deployed software on its own platform to look out for posts that portrayed Facebook itself in potentially misleading ways, reducing their visibility to safeguard the company’s reputation.

Some international legal scholars have begun to call for laws to protect democracies against the possibility that algorithmic manipulation could deliver electoral gain. There’s no proof that Facebook’s changes had political intentions, but it’s not hard to imagine that the company could tweak its algorithms in the future, if it wanted to.

To guard against that potential, new laws could bar changes to the algorithm in the run-up periods before elections. In the financial industry, for instance, “quiet periods” in advance of major corporate announcements seek to prevent marketing and public-relations efforts from artificially influencing stock prices.

Similar protections for algorithms against corporate manipulation could help ensure that politically active, power-seeking Facebook executives – or any other company with significant control over users’ access to information – can’t use their systems to shape public opinion or voting behavior.

tags: Facebook

Google

Mark Zuckerberg

2016 US Presidential Election

Peter Thiel

2020 US Presidential Election

Social media and democracy

Algorithm transparency

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/when-right-wing-fake-news-gets-someone-killed/

no lnx

Martin Longman / Washington Monthly July 23, 2019

In March 2019, when I heard the head of the Gambino crime family, Frank Cali, had been gunned down in his front yard on Staten Island, I assumed that we were entering into another power struggle between New York’s five families. Little did I know that the murderer was not a gun-for-hire, but a Trump-supporting lunatic who had become so deluded by the QAnon deep-state conspiracy theory that he decided to attempt a citizen’s arrest. Or, at least, that’s what the shooter’s lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb, wants us to believe.

On the evening of March 13, twenty-four year old Anthony Camello arrived alone at Mr. Cali’s home in Todt Hill, Gottlieb says, believing that he could lure the mob boss out of his home, place him in handcuffs, and bring him to the police station. Only the first part of his scheme worked out as planned.

Apparently, Camello rammed his pickup truck into Mr. Cali’s Cadillac, which was parked outside his home. When Mr. Cali came out of his house to see what the hell was going on, there was some kind of confrontation, most of which was captured in grainy surveillance footage. I’m not sure how well that video evidence lines up with what Gottlieb is saying, but here goes:

“He ardently believed that Francesco Cali, a boss in the Gambino crime family, was a prominent member of the deep state, and, accordingly, an appropriate target for a citizen’s arrest,” wrote Mr. Comello’s lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb…

…Mr. Comello had become convinced that Mr. Cali was part of the so-called deep state, a cabal of criminals that conspiracy theorists claim controls the United States government. Mr. Comello also believed he was a chosen vigilante of President Trump.

“Mr. Comello became certain that he was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself, and that he had the president’s full support,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote.

There had been early speculation after Comello’s arrest that he was romantically interested in one of Mr. Cali’s relatives, but Mr. Gottlieb doesn’t mention anything along those lines. Instead, he says that his client just went down a QAnon rabbit hole.

That delusion will be part of a package of evidence that Mr. Gottlieb says he plans to submit to the court that prove Mr. Comello is not guilty by reason of mental defect. Mr. Gottlieb is seeking to have the court place Mr. Comello in psychiatric treatment, rather than prosecute him on murder charges. Mr. Comello is being held in protective custody as he awaits trial.

Now, here’s a description of what actually happened:

But [the video] shows the suspect’s truck apparently deliberately hitting the vehicle — perhaps to get Cali to come out of his home. The two shake hands, the license plate from the suspect’s vehicle falls off, the suspect picks up the license, hands it to Cali, then pulls a gun and shoots as Cali puts the license in his own car, according to the source.

Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said Thursday that 12 shots were fired, with at least six striking Cali.

Shea said Cali tried to use his car as a shield to protect himself during the shooting.

“Mr. Cali was struck several times by gunfire. In trying to elude additional gunfire, [he] fled to the rear area of his private vehicle,” he said at a press conference.

And here is what Gottlieb apparently plans to say happened when his client appears in court:

Mr. Comello took handcuffs with him to Todt Hill on March 13, Mr. Gottlieb said, but his plan was foiled when Mr. Cali refused to submit to a citizen’s arrest. Instead, Mr. Gottlieb said, the Gambino leader reached toward his waistband. Fearing for his life, Mr. Comello shot Mr. Cali 10 times and fled, Mr. Gottlieb said.

Comello was arrested three days later in nearby Brick, New Jersey.

At Mr. Comello’s first court appearance in March, he displayed symbols and phrases associated with QAnon scrawled on his hand in pen. He first began to take an interest in political conspiracy theories, Mr. Gottlieb said, in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s 2016 election.

“Mr. Comello’s support for ‘QAnon’ went beyond mere participation in a radical political organization,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote. “It evolved into a delusional obsession.”

Prior to murdering Mr. Cali, Comello reportedly attempted two separate times to effect a citizen’s arrest of New York City mayor and now presidential candidate Bill de Blasio. He also tried to convince the U.S. marshals at the Federal District Court in Manhattan to help him arrest Democratic congressional members Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff, whom he believed were in Manhattan at the time.

Now, I don’t know if the video footage will support Gottlieb’s assertion that Mr. Cali reached for his waistband and that Mr. Comello therefore feared for his life. But if he wants to try to convince a jury that Mr. Comello is not guilty by reason of mental defect, the fact that he decided to deliberately ram a mob boss’s Cadillac seems like all the evidence he needs to prove that his client is out of his mind. The QAnon stuff is superfluous.

On the other hand, someone was very nearly killed as a result of the similar Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In both cases, a supposed pedophilia ring was involved. In both cases, the suspect believed themself to be the hero who would set things right. Edgar Maddison Welch showed up at a Chevy Chase, Maryland pizza parlor armed with an AR-15 and fired three shots, striking the restaurant’s walls, a desk, and a door. Apparently, he stopped when he realized there was no evidence that any pedophilia was occurring on the premises.

After his arrest, [Welch] told police that he had made the 350-mile drive up to the capital to investigate claims regarding a conspiracy theory, circulating online, that quickly came to be called “Pizzagate.”

According to this outlandish set of claims, leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, contained coded signs and messages revealing that Comet Ping Pong was actually a front for an occult, child sex slave ring involving the owner of the restaurant, James Alefantis, Podesta, and Clinton herself.

Of course, there has been a real pedophilia ring surrounding Donald Trump’s good friend Jeffrey Epstein. But talking about that doesn’t exactly serve right-wing interests. They got their claws into both Mr. Welch and Mr. Comello. Both of them were absolutely marinating in right-wing conspiracies about the Clintons and Nancy Pelosi. Comello saw Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters as criminals because they were critical of the president, and he was convinced the president would support him, his lawyer says, if he arrested them and Bill de Blasio and the head of the Gambino crime family.

There are lot more people out there who are convinced by this stuff than are willing to bring a gun somewhere to try to address the supposed problem. The president claims that a lot of real news is actually fake, but he doesn’t talk about the genuinely fake news that benefits him and gets other people killed.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-donald-trump-era-requires-a-new-theory-of-conspiracy-theories/

Drutman

Richard Nixon may have had his enemies list, but no president has ever publicly embraced conspiracy theories quite like Donald Trump. From claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States to insisting that millions of people voted illegally in 2016, Trump’s rise and presidency have been filled with vague, false accusations targeting his enemies. When one drops, another follows. Trump only gave up on birtherism during the presidential campaign by preposterously declaring that it was his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, who had first raised doubts about Obama’s origins.

Trump’s taste for the conspiratorial might be a source of idle curiosity were he not the president of the United States. But he also might not be the president of the United States if his style of rambling insinuation and intimidation didn’t resonate with many voters. More than two-thirds of Republicans have consistently expressed doubts about Obama’s citizenship, making Trump’s birtherism an early campaign asset. Trump leaped to the top of primary polls on the strength of an announcement speech filled with baseless assertions, including the claim that Mexicans were sending “rapists” across the border. And now that he is president, his style is spreading, taking on a self-reinforcing logic.[LOIO ?!] ...new book by political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum offers timely and insightful answers to these questions. They call this practice “the new conspiracism.” And in their book, A Lot of People Are Saying, they explain why this nihilistic form of political discourse is so hazardous.

Conspiracist thinkers have long claimed special knowledge about the secret workings of the world and its hidden levers of power. But the new conspiracism is, Muirhead and Rosenblum write, “something different.” If classic conspiracism is corkboards overloaded with index cards and string, the new conspiracism is messy spaghetti tossed angrily and performatively against the wall, sauce and all. It is Alex Jones claiming that the parents of Sandy Hook victims were “crisis actors.” It is William Barr saying that he thought the FBI spied on the Trump campaign. Unlike the conspiracism of the Progressives, who saw corruption everywhere, these assertions are not ideologically coherent. They don’t hint at remedies. The goal is simply to make a hash of things by casting doubt on the motives and workings of one’s opponents, undermining the foundations of compromise.

This, Muirhead and Rosenblum worry, “makes democracy unworkable.” Democracy, after all, requires a degree of shared understanding and the potential for legitimate agreement. It requires faith in the ability of knowledge-producing institutions to generate basic facts, and for politicians and political parties to argue over which facts are most important and what to do in response to them. The new conspiracism takes a hammer to these possibilities. It sets out to sabotage government agencies, universities, political parties, and other key institutions, leaving only authoritarian demagogues to impose their own reality on the wreckage.

Trump, for example, sought to delegitimize an unfavorable court ruling by pointing out that the judge had Mexican ancestry and was therefore presumptively untrustworthy. He chalks failures up to a bureaucratic deep state determined to sabotage him. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” he once told a Kansas City crowd.

This has a self-reinforcing logic. If government agencies are made to seem illegitimate, for example, morale falls. Good people leave. Government agencies perform worse, thereby justifying the criticism. The cycle feeds on itself.

Over time, people acclimate themselves to the disorienting feeling that everybody in power is lying to them, and nothing can ever be believed—what historian Robert Jay Lifton calls “malignant normality.” The disappearance of common sense (in the most literal meaning: widely shared understanding) means that collective political action is, as Muirhead and Rosenblum write, “closed down by disorientation.” Adding to the danger is that, like many slow-moving processes, this one is hard to detect, because we adjust. The new conspiracism “hollows out our democratic institutions little by little, day by day.”

Muirhead and Rosenblum offer two main explanations for the new conspiracism’s emergence: technology and tribalism. Technology has cast aside traditional knowledge gatekeepers, like newspaper editors and television news producers. Things used to be “true” because they came from trusted news sources. Today, they become “true enough” through sheer repetition—because a lot of people are saying it. You see enough people in your social media network sharing stories about Pope Francis endorsing Trump (to pick just one prominent example), and of course it must be true. (It was not.) Retweets and Facebook shares have replaced editors as validators and judges of newsworthiness.

Us-versus-them tribal politics contributes to the problem by obviating the need for verification. If “we” believe that “they” are evil, then bare assertion is all the proof that is needed: My opponents are bad people. Of course they’re out to get me. In the world of highly polarized politics, we already know we’re right. Who needs more evidence?

Muirhead and Rosenblum are keen to the asymmetries of the new style. Though the new conspiracism isn’t inherently a partisan project, it is far more aligned with the antigovernment agenda of the Republican Party. Most government programs are actually quite popular. But by tearing down faith in government through nihilistic attacks, antigovernment elites can win the support of voters who might otherwise be turned off by an agenda that includes cutting social safety programs.

Antigovernment activism helps explain why the new conspiracism is most evident in the United States. The Republican Party is an outlier among major right parties in advanced democracies, which have all accepted broader government involvement in the economy and the modern social welfare state in some form. No other major right party wants to return to its country’s pre-1932 approach to economic policy.

American two-party polarization is also relatively unique, and this binary lights up ancient and emotionally charged friend-versus-foe switches in our brains, shutting down reason. Comparative studies of “affective polarization” (how we feel about other partisans) find that cross-partisan hostility is highest in the U.S., precisely because our elections pose a simple us-or-them choice. In other countries, where the presence of more viable parties keeps politics from collapsing into a long-standing, one-dimensional political conflict, partisans tend to be less hostile to each other. [altho in recent elections EU centrists got hollowed out by far rt and left?] ot of People Are Saying is a tremendous contribution because it identifies and names a new style of political discourse and clarifies the danger it poses. Yet, as is common with many scholarly books that bring great insight into describing problems, the solution section falls flat.

For example, Muirhead and Rosenblum argue that political leaders should be “speaking truth to conspiracism . . . even if it means electoral defeat.” This is fine advice on paper. But it is hard to heed, since reelection is the primary incentive guiding most politicians. There is a reason that most elected Republicans, despite their original opposition, are far more likely to cheerlead and defend Trump than criticize him.

In making their peace with Trump,[gop]  they’ve updated their mental models. Trump may not be perfect, but the Democrats are the real danger. And at least Trump is supporting the right policies, even if his behavior is reckless. And besides, if I challenge him, I’ll lose, and be replaced by somebody else who’s even less likely to control his excesses. The human mind is capable of remarkable gymnastics in the art of self-preservation and self-justification.This is the same underlying partisan polarization that powers the new conspiracist mind-set in the first place. In a two-party political system with distinct, sorted parties, dissenting voices have no place for representation. Once they dissent, they are quickly out of power, where far fewer people listen to their speeches.

Perhaps, then, one way out of the destructive political binary that helps power the new conspiracism is to support electoral reforms that would create a system of proportional representation, enabling multiparty democracy. In such a system, Never Trump conservatives might have formed a party that could win political offices, fighting back against the new conspiracist mind-set from a place of power.

Reforming our electoral system is a tall task. But it may be vital. As Muirhead and Rosenblum show, our current political discourse existentially threatens American democracy. At a time when so much attention focuses on Trump’s formal abuses of power, A Lot of People Are Saying shines an illuminating spotlight on the even more destructive power of his words, and the wild eddies of unreason they unleash.

Unfortunately, tearing down is far easier than building back up. Whether American democracy can contain and marginalize this new conspiracism remains to be seen. But we are running out of time. The more it grows, the harder it becomes to stop.

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journalist Anna Merlan explains in her new book, “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power,

Republic of Lies book started w/ cruise

https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-june-27-2019/

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an hnn

Moon landings’ Nazi problem

History News NetworkJune 24, 2019

Somewhere in the scarier reaches of the internet, a conspiracy theory circulates that the Nazis landed on the moon in 1942. Maybe you’ve never heard that 27 years before Apollo…

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an

Apparently a little thing like starting, then pausing, a war, and leaving half the nation’s military swirling around the Persian Gulf in confusion, isn’t enough of a distraction for Donald Trump’s morning. He took time away from his detailed military planning to take to Twitter and plop down  a brand new the-media-is-out-to-get-me conspiracy theory.

According to Trump, The New York Times was “feeding false stories about me, and those associated with me, to the FBI.” Trump then says that this shows how the Times had “unprecedented hatred” toward him. In follow-up tweets, Trump even blames the Times for initiating the Russia investigation. hat’s actually behind this enormous media and FBI conspiracy that’s so important Trump took time out from starting a war to whine about it? Just this—A New York Timesreporter called the FBI and asked for confirmation on a story they were already working on concerning Jared Kushner. And when the Times ran the story three days later, it mentioned that it had called the FBI for that confirmation.

But now right wing media sources have apparently obtained the email asking the FBI to confirm the story. Which, like the word “insurance” in a tweet is being ripped into pieces and turned into “proof” that the media was feeding stories to the FBI to initiate investigations. Which is wasn’t. But confirmation starts with a ‘c’ and conspiracy starts with a ‘c’ so … how much proof do you need?

And now, back to your already scheduled war-related chaos.

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mma tag 619 grab

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/conspiracy-theories/

MAY 31, 2019 11:28 AM

Here’s Who Fox News Considers ‘Prominent’ Conservative Voices

MAY 21, 2019 2:58 PM

Snopes Puts Kelly Kullberg at Center of Anti-Muslim, Pro-Trump, Conspiracy-Promoting Network

MAY 17, 2019 12:15 PM

Trump-Approved Conspiracy Kook Says Military Sprays Chemicals in the Sky to Sow Societal Chaos

APRIL 12, 2019 10:37 AM

TPUSA Shares Photo with Visual Nod to ‘White Genocide’ Conspiracy Theory

MARCH 25, 2019 4:26 PM

Fox News White House Correspondent Inflames QAnon

MARCH 19, 2019 1:27 PM

Man Accused of Murdering a Mob Boss Was Interested in QAnon

MARCH 13, 2019 2:21 PM

Jacob Wohl is in the Hot Seat (Again)

MARCH 4, 2019 6:17 PM

CPAC Unable to Separate Itself From the Right’s Formerly Fringe Elements

FEBRUARY 25, 2019 12:41 PM

Pennsylvania GOP Candidate Shared ‘Pizzagate’ Post

FEBRUARY 12, 2019 5:09 PM

Owen Benjamin: Another ‘Red Pill’ Overdose Victim

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/this-is-what-happens-when-conspiracy-theories-go-mainstream/

Conspiracy theories can seem so absurd they’re almost funny: major politicians are actually 12-foot lizard people, the U.S. government was responsible for 9/11, the fluoride in our drinking water is there not to strengthen our teeth, but to control our minds. It’s easy to dismiss such ideas as nonsense.

Sometimes, however, theories escape the confines of online message boards and social media and turn dangerous, even fatal. No one laughed when a man named Edgar Welch drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., and fired shots at innocent people in a pizzeria because he was a “believer in Pizzagate,” a theory spread by people like right-wing radio show host Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton and her close advisers ran a pedophilia ring out of the pizzeria’s basement. There also was no laughter when James Alex Fields drove his car into a crowd at a 2017 white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Va., killing anti-racist protester Heather Heyer As journalist Anna Merlan explains in her new book, “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power,” “While conspiracy theories are as old as the country itself, there is something new at work: people who peddle lies and half-truths have come to prominence, fame, and power as never before,” thanks to the Trump administration’s outward embrace of some of their biggest boosters.

As a reporter for Jezebel and Gizmodo, Merlan covered various conspiracy theories, including those held by white nationalists, UFO enthusiasts and anti-vaccine advocates. After one story, for which she attended a conspiracy-themed cruise aptly called “The Conspira-Sea,” Merlan writes, “I tried to forget about it. I had done a kooky trip on a boat, the kind of stunt journalism project every features writer loves, and it was over. Conspiracy theorists, after all, were a side show.”

Ater the 2016 elections, however, such theories went from cultural sideshow to political main event. People like Michael Flynn, who spread Pizzagate theories on social media, was briefly the national security advisor and had the ear of President Trump, for example.

“Republic of Lies” is an illuminating, occasionally scary book that explains conspiracy theories, how they spread, their history in the United States, and what, if anything, can be done to  prevent them. Truthdig spoke to Merlan by phone to learn more.

Ilana Novick: Your book starts with a story about attending “The Conspira-Sea,” a conspiracy-themed cruise featuring UFO experts, Sandy Hook “truthers” [people who believe that the 2012 mass shooting never happened], and anti-vaccine advocates, among other groups. What made you decide to go from one story about a cruise to a whole book about conspiracy theories?

Anna Merlan: The impetus was Trump’s election. When I went on the cruise, it was very much with the understanding that Trump was sort of reviving a lot of interesting conspiracy theories and a lot of energy in conspiracy communities, because they thought that he was going to break open all these dirty secrets and dark schemes. I had also written about the ways that he was generating a lot of excitement among white supremacists, and so I was thinking about what all those communities were going to do when he lost, and then he didn’t. It seemed like a valuable time to really consider what I did and didn’t know about this country, and also the ways that these communities that I had thought of as fringe were taking a more central role in our politics and our culture.

IN: You focus on multiple groups and their conspiracies, ranging from white supremacy to UFOs to Pizzagate. How did you decide which groups to profile, and why?

AM: I really wanted to do a survey, first of all. I didn’t want to focus narrowly on one conspiracy community, because I was aware of the diversity of views in that world. I also felt like all of these groups had something to teach us about the way that the history of secrecy in politics and government, and the history of inequality in America, are reflected in conspiracy communities. The only group I would say that I didn’t really spend any time with—well, there are two groups: climate change skeptics, which I wish I had done more with, and flat-earthers, which I didn’t, because I didn’t feel like I had a lot to learn about flat-earthers. Maybe I was wrong.

IN: In the book, you cite academic studies of conspiracy theorists and theories that found people who were disadvantaged—economically, socially, culturally—were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Now, it seems, they’ve reached the highest, most privileged levels of society, with even the president and members of his administration claiming they are victims of witch hunts and cover-ups. Why do you think that shifted?

AM: I think that one thing we know generally is that people who are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories believe themselves to be under threat. For some people, like black Americans, that threat is more real, and for others, like white supremacists, for instance, who believe that they are at risk of being invaded and put under Sharia law, that threat is not real. But certainly the sense of personal and economic and social instability is a predictor of believing in conspiracy theories. It’s interesting—the ways that even a belief that is not rational, like the idea that the government is going to break into your home and take your guns, does predispose you to believing in conspiracy theories.

IN: From the Pizzagate group that believes that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta have a pedophilia ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza place, to the UFO truthers who discuss sexual abuse at the hands of aliens, it seems that child abuse, and pedophilia in particular, is at the heart of some of these theories. Why do people get so obsessed with the idea of children being hurt as part of conspiracy theories?

AM: The oldest conspiracy theory about child abuse is the blood libel, which is the conspiracy theory that Jews were kidnapping and murdering Christian children to use their blood in matzo. The blood libel has been incredibly durable as a conspiracy theory. You hear it being repeated in literal form all over the world. You also see what I would argue are extensions of it, like the satanic panic and Pizzagate, which are both predicated on this idea of a powerful group of evildoers meeting in secret. I think some of it is that, in America, the suspicion of ritualistic abuse is never far away. I think it has something to do with the religious roots of this country. We tend to believe in a powerful, evil, satanic group of evildoers, and see that as literally possible. The other thing that I would argue is that if you believe that your ideological enemies are hurting children, there’s nothing that isn’t justified against them. I came to see that particular conspiracy theory as sort of a rhetorical justification for violence, because nothing is worse than hurting children, and nothing is not excusable if you are trying to prevent a child injury. If you’re trying to up the rhetorical stakes, that is a logical place to go.

IN: Is that true even for people like Alex Jones, who promotes a crisis-actor theory—the idea that the school shooting at Sandy Hook never happened, or was a false flag designed to clear the way for the government to take people’s guns and attacks parents whose children died and survivors of that shooting?

AM: I think that he and other people who have promoted the crisis-actor conspiracy theory would argue that what they’re doing is important for nothing less than the fate of humanity. They are justified in attacking people who look like grieving parents, but who they would argue are not. The other thing, of course, is that with the crisis-actor conspiracy theory folks—Alex Jones and others—they’re trying to claim this gigantic conspiracy theory to stage mass shootings, and of course they can’t find the actual culprits because they don’t exist. The only people who are visible to them are the parents, are the survivors of these people who have died. It is both ghoulish and not surprising that they tend to fixate and fasten on those people, because they are the only people who are real people. They have never successfully made a case for who in government, for instance, is staging false flags. They obviously can’t call for any kind of drastic action against those people.

IN: You write that throughout its history, the United States has spied on civil rights leaders, performed sometimes dangerous medical experiments on unwilling participants, and otherwise abused its power, often trying to cover it up. Given that history, does the United States government bear any responsibility for the spread of many of the ideas you discuss?

AM: There are so many conspiracy theories that are based in a somewhat contorted but basically reasonable historical understanding of what the American government has done. There are a ton of medical conspiracy theories that really do refer back to a history of sometimes secret medical experimentation on unwitting, socially disadvantaged people, like inmates and children in state care. And there are a lot of conspiracy theories, even conspiracy theories about things like false flags, that do refer back to actual action by the American government and other world governments. So arguably, the thing that the U.S. government could do better to prevent the spread of conspiracy theories would be to be a more just and transparent government to begin with. That would have been great, but at this point, some of the sort of conspiratorial nature of the U.S. is almost like a form of generational trauma—that so many things that seem outlandish had been proven to be real over the course of American history that there is almost this permanent, unfixable sense of distrust and suspicion.

IN: I remember early coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign seemed almost like a joke. This was despite the fact that he opened his campaign calling Mexican immigrants rapists, and promising a Muslim ban. Many people found him funny. Even as measles rates were trickling up, I remember some pundits brushing off anti-vaxxers simply because celebrities like actress and former co-host of “The View” Jenny McCarthy were promoting the theory that vaccines are dangerous. Does our mockery lead us to ignore the true danger behind these groups?

AM: Yeah, I think historically we have downplayed the role of conspiracy theories in American politics. And as you’re pointing out, when we do discuss them, a lot of times there’s a lot of mockery. There’s so many jokes about conspiracy theorists, including the sort of prototypical one, which is that they all wear tinfoil hats, right? And so it can make it really hard to assess when they are becoming genuinely influential or important. Because we know that they do tend to wax and wane in strength and importance throughout American history. And it’s an interesting balancing act, too. And it’s one thing that a lot of journalists who cover this stuff grapple with—how do you write about these things without either giving them more prominence or pretending they have any legitimacy, but also while genuinely trying to understand their importance and the sort of effects that they have? I think it’s really, really hard to assess. Something like QAnon I never thought would have become as large as it is.

IN: Can you talk a little bit about what QAnon is?

AM: QAnon is essentially an internet-based conspiracy theory that is focused on the idea that there is a secret, high-level Trump operative who is leaving clues about a future mass arrest of Trump’s opponents or some gigantic consequential action that Trump is about to take. And so this person calling themselves Q appeared on 4chan and started leaving these clues, which they called “crumbs.” And it became a really popular conspiracy theory among people who like the idea that Trump was doing a really good job and was not under any kind of investigation and was, in fact, preparing to arrest all of his political opponents and usher in this sort of glorious new age. And so there’s been a lot of attempts to figure out where QAnon came from—if it was a prank, if it was deliberately planted, or how exactly it came to be. But I think it can speak to the fact that internet-based conspiracy theories especially can spread in a way that is really surprising, even if they seem nonsensical to outsiders.

IN: Tell me about your experience covering white supremacist groups.

AM: I think that the sort of resurgence of open white supremacist communities in the United States is obviously something that has been fed by the politics and rhetoric of the Trump era. And I think it is very much tied to the resurgence in certain kinds of far-right conspiracy theories. I don’t think the two phenomena are separate. Also, white supremacists especially traffic in very old conspiracy theories, whether it’s the blood libel, Holocaust denial. They employ a lot of conspiracy theorist rhetoric. And so I wanted to spend time with those people to better understand how they fit into the conspiracy world. There were several white supremacist podcasters who just focus on conspiracy theory stuff and love talking about things like reptilians. There are a bunch of white supremacist folks who have gotten very engaged in the idea of tall lizards ruling the world. So, I would say that writing about them is hard, because the temptation to make fun of them is so strong, because they are really such a pathetic and comical group of people. But then, both in the book and in other times that I have interviewed white supremacists, the most alarming, upsetting thing is how young some of the people in those crowds are and this realization that there is a new generation of racists coming up all the time, who can find an ever-increasing justification for violence. The rally that I was at, as I write about in the book—one of the groups that was there with Vanguard America, who later attended the Charlottesville rally, and one of whose marchers, James Fields Jr., is the person who killed Heather Heyer by driving into the crowd in his car. So in a lot of ways, that particular section of the book for me was the point where I thought a lot about the ways that violence can be not unpredictable. It’s almost like it’s a place where I thought a lot about how I have to take people’s rhetoric seriously, even if by my assessment they look pathetic or stupid or disorganized. Those people were saying that they were looking forward to a violent confrontation with anti-fascists. They were really, really excited about it. They were disappointed that it didn’t happen in Kentucky. And arguably, if law enforcement communities had been paying more attention to those groups, maybe what happened in Charlottesville could have been avoided.

IN: How can journalists cover these groups without simply giving them an extra platform for hate speech and disinformation, both for the right, and even for the #resistance groups and Louise Menschs of the world who promote various falsehoods about the Mueller report?

AM: I’ve definitely seen a couple of examples recently of stories that I felt like were mostly just a platform for hateful ideas and weren’t super responsibly reported. And I would say I think the most important thing when we’re covering these groups is, rather than giving them an endless amount of space to explain their viewpoints and espouse their hateful ideas, I think it’s much more useful to understand the means that they’re using to organize, the avenues through which they’re spreading hate or disinformation, and, crucially, who is funding them. Some of the best reporting about some of these groups is about the ways that they are tapping into mainstream power and influence and money. So I do think that there’s value in covering these groups, but I don’t think there is value in covering youth groups just to say, “This is what they believe, and they have a lot of YouTube subscribers.” I think we need to go a little bit deeper than that.

IN: I’ve seen a lot of discussion in the media about intent, when it comes to people like Alex Jones, who are making money off spreading their ideas. I was wondering if you think it matters whether or not people like him believe what they’re promoting—if intent matters when their words lead their followers to do things like try to shoot up a pizza place or harass the parents of school shooting victims.

AM: That that is a very common question—whether Alex Jones or whomever believes what he’s saying. And I would argue, first of all, that that’s not really something that is [knowable] for us. We’re not omniscient, we’re not his spiritual confidant or his spouse or whatever. There are some things that are simply not knowable to outsiders. What I care about is what they have spent their time doing. Alex Jones, for instance, has had a 25-year career that is based around making outlandish claims that are very often about false-flag conspiracy theories. That was one of the earliest things that he did with the Oklahoma City bombing. So whether or not he believed that, we certainly know how much time he has invested in claiming it to be true.

IN: Looking ahead, do you think that there is anything to be done to combat the spread of these ideas?

AM: I think we know that conspiracy theories especially flourish during times of social upheaval, and when we are asking big questions about who we are socially and politically and what we want to be as a country or the world. And we also know that conspiracy theories flourish in climates where people feel dispossessed, locked out of systems of power. They don’t understand the institutions that are governing their lives and they can’t influence them. So I do think, as idealistic as this is, that if we put ourselves in the world of building a more just and transparent society, conspiracy theories will lose some of their grip. They’re never entirely going to go away, because they’re part of a free and open and sort of tumultuous discourse, but they don’t have to be what they are now, which is this increasingly sort of influential and often malevolent force.

IN: As we all witnessed during the 2016 election, social media was a critical part of the spread of conspiracy theories, on both the left and the right. What do you think about Facebook and Twitter’s attempts to deal with the spread of conspiracy theories on their platforms?

AM: Every social media platform has shown that they are really bad at policing themselves. All of their attempts, especially Facebook’s, but not just Facebook, has been incredibly confused. The rollouts have been really strange. The people that they choose to ban from their services and the people they allow to stay can often be completely bizarre. I think we’re seeing that a lot of social media companies really just respond to public pressure and try to do whatever they can to get people to stop yelling at them. I also just fundamentally hate the idea of Facebook being left to police itself, for instance, because I think they’ve proven that they can’t do it. I think that social media bans in general inarguably make individual people less powerful. They are having an effect on Alex Jones’ audience, or Milo Yiannopoulos’ or Gavin McInnes’. Those people have less of an audience than they did, but I’m not sure that it actually does a whole lot to slow down the ideas that these people are promoting. I don’t think that there are fewer anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, for instance, or fewer anti-immigrant or white nationalists ones. I think it’s just sort of a matter of weakening individual people. So I don’t think that we have really come up with a satisfying explanation yet. And I would argue that a lot of the focus on social media bans is looking for sort of a technological solution to what is really a much more complex problem. So I think this is something we’re going to be arguing about for a long time, and I think, unfortunately, some of this is just coming far too late to begin with.

IN: On a lighter note, what is it about UFOs that makes them such an enduring obsession, even, as you note in the book, for politicians like former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid?

AM: I think that the belief in aliens is one of the oldest and largest and sort of most stable conspiracy subcultures there is, not just in the U.S., but around the world. And some of that is due to just the sheer number of people who have seen something that they can’t explain, the amount of information that we have about governments researching UFOs, sometimes in secret, as with the case of the Department of Defense program that was revealed at the end of 2017. And some of it, too, is just because I think a lot of people believe that we are not alone in the universe, and are keenly interested in the idea of finding out who else is out there. At its most benign end, UFO and alien subcultures are really kind of a positive thing, because they really have to do with human curiosity about the rest of the universe and a real desire to look beyond what is going on in our day-to-day lives and reach out and touch something bigger and more mysterious than us. So, I have to say that my time with UFO books is definitely the most restful, and in some ways made me the most optimistic about the future of this country.

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-approved-conspiracy-kook-says-military-sprays-chemicals-in-the-sky-to-sow-societal-chaos/

Lionel Lebron, a YouTube conspiracy theorist who posed for a photo with President Trump in the Oval Office last year, claims that the federal government and military are manipulating the climate over the United States to sow chaos and disorder in society.

Dan Wigington of Geoengineering Watch joined Lebron on his YouTube podcast yesterday to discuss the government’s alleged routine of spraying chemicals into the sky in order to influence the climate in ways that shape world events and sow chaos into the American population. The duo specified that they wouldn’t call the chemicals sprayed in air “chemtrails” because the word “chemtrail” is too often associated with conspiracy theories. Rather, the duo opted to say that their theories are about “geoengineering.”

“Semantics are important and I don’t want to be an anti-semantic,” Lebron joked.

The science community has debated the ethics of using chemical agents to curb the effects of climate change, but the ideas are often considered to be far-fetched and too risky to attempt on a large scale. However, Lebron and Wigington pile conspiracy theories onto that scientific debate—theories about military forces using geoengineering to “topple nations” in “weather warfare,” and to destabilize society.

Wigington said that government agencies use chemicals sprayed in the sky to keep portions of the United States cooler than the rest of the planet so that it “confuses and divides the population as to the true state of the climate while the planet descends into total meltdown.”

“Not only is climate modification used for weather warfare, to topple nations without those nations ever knowing they were at war—nations in the Middle East and Africa and elsewhere that are forced to allow U.S. occupation. It’s used as a weapon of war, but also it’s used to confuse, divide, and thus pacify populations,” Wigington said.

Lebron agreed.

“Just like free radicals are so dangerous because they’re always trying to cleave and grab something, the worst thing that the military industrial complex, cabal, whoever you want to call these people—the asset-stripping jackals—the worst thing they could have happen is stability, calmness, power, strength, a sense of solemnity, purpose, cooperation. They don’t want that,” Lebron said. “Anything that makes them skeptical, that makes them run to the streets, run to the religions, run to their science—just run.”

Wigington went on to claim that weather forecasters are able to read scripts predicting the path of hurricanes because the government is using microwave beams and Raytheon military products to steer the aquatic cyclones.

Lebron is a QAnon conspiracy theorist who posed for a photo in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump last year. The Daily Beast reported that Lebron claimed to have taken the picture with Trump after he received a “special guided tour of the White House,” and that an Oval Office photo op with the president is something that would typically require a senior administration official’s blessing. Earlier this week, Lebron filmed an interview with actress Roseanne Barr, who is a QAnon believer.

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nice case study: escalator effect

ref no lnx twit

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2018/10/31/george-soros-and-migrant-caravan-how-lie-multiplied-online/1824633002/

How a lie about George Soros and the migrant caravan multiplied online

USA TODAY followed the rapid spread of a social media conspiracy theory about George Soros and migrants that grew from obscurity to the political mainstream.

Brad Heath, Matt Wynn and Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY

Updated 12:27 p.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

How a George Soros conspiracy theory spread from online to cable news

USA TODAY followed the spread of a social media conspiracy theory about George Soros and migrants that grew from obscurity to the political mainstream.

This is the life of a lie.

Three weeks ago, a caravan of Hondurans began walking nearly 2,000 miles to the United States. Their ranks grew as they inched north and, along with them, falsehoods grew, too. But one stands out: a conspiracy theory that liberal billionaire George Soros, a Jewish immigrant, is paying the migrants to make the journey – or even orchestrating it.

Members of Congress and the president’s son both repeated it. Conservative celebrities, too.

It also may have resonated in darker places. Cesar Sayoc, the man charged with mailing pipe bombs to Soros and other prominent critics of President Donald Trump, dwelled at length online about conspiracy theories involving the Hungarian-American philanthropist.

Robert Bowers, charged with killing 11 people worshiping in a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, used his social media accounts to post extensively about the caravan, including circulating an image of refugees in Guatemala purportedly climbing into a truck with a Star of David on the side.

But it began with a handful of posts in the caravan’s early days.

One of the first was from a North Carolina writer who goes by the screen name “lorettatheprole.” Loretta Malakie has more than 6,000 followers on Twitter, to whom she directs frequent posts about “white genocide,” Jews and the “invading force” approaching the border.

On Oct. 14, Malakie posted a link to an article about the caravan, with a single word of commentary: “Soros.”

That same day, identical posts appeared over the course of 20 minutes in six pro-Trump Facebook groups. Combined, those six groups had 165,000 members. A user who gave the name Philip Balzano, a Trump supporter from Chicago, wrote to the Trump Train group: “Here Comes ANOTHER Group of Paid for New Demoncratic Voters Just in Time for the Primaries... The Financier aka ‘Win at All Costs’ ‘Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste’ the Evil George Soros and His 140+ Orgs, Should Be Classified as Terrorist and Terrorist Orgs.”

Malakie declined to comment, though on Twitter she panned the USA TODAY reporter who called her as “evil.” Balzano did not respond to an interview request sent through Facebook.

The Soros theory was not new – it had made the rounds during previous caravans in the spring and again in August. In fact, one Facebook user posting in October provided as evidence a video of Glenn Beck discussing the spring caravan’s alleged connections to Soros.

GEORGE SOROS WEBSITE

This time, though, the theory snowballed, gaining political purchase as the caravan became a flashpoint in the final weeks of a contentious midterm campaign.

“It’s really significant how these memes can go from feverswamp-ish places to be amplified by lawmakers, even the president," said David Carroll, associate professor at The New School's Parsons School of Design in New York. “From there, the impact on world events can’t be underestimated.”

Lies, of course, are not new either. But social media can turn a breeze into a hurricane. It carried this falsehood to millions with a few taps on a screen. It also left a distinct trail that makes it possible to follow how lies spread and who told them, a map of their trajectory from the darker corners of the internet to the political mainstream.

USA TODAY followed that path by examining tens of thousands of social media posts on three major mainstream social media sites: Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

Over the next three days, a few louder social media voices weighed in. By Oct. 16 – four days after the caravan departed – the combined following of accounts mentioning both Soros and the caravan had reached 2 million, still a pebble in the flood tide of social media. (The total includes some duplicates because people follow more than one account.)

On Twitter, someone with the username “LibertyBell1000” warned about 42,000 followers that Soros had “manufactured yet another immigrant caravan ‘crisis.’ ” Another, using the name “WhoWolfe,” asked “Anybody else think Soros and the Dirty Dems are behind this?”

More posts spread across Facebook. Trump supporter Randy Penrod posted in a group called “The Deplorable's,” with about 186,000 members, “Our stable leader just called out the Soros conspired invasion of new Democrat voters in a tweet just moments ago.”

Tap, tap, tap.

It took just one more day for the theory to reach critical mass, breaking through into widespread public consciousness.

The evening of Oct. 17, a Republican member of Congress posted a video on Twitter of what he said was people in Honduras handing out small sums of money to migrants.

“Soros? US-backed NGOs? Time to investigate the source!” he wrote.

Rep. Matt Gaetz would later concede that he was mistaken about where the video was shot (it was Guatemala). But by then his message had metastasized, spreading far beyond the 153,000 people who follow the north Florida congressman’s tweets.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter retweeted it to her 2 million followers. So did Sarah Carter, a journalist who’s a frequent guest on Fox News.

Jack Posobiec – a correspondent for conservative cable news television channel One America News Network – got more specific, implying Soros was renting RVs for the migrants.

Posobiec was among the early proponents of “Pizzagate,” a social-media conspiracy that falsely claimed then-candidate Hillary Clinton and other Democrats were running a pedophile sex trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. It drew a man with a gun to Comet Pizza, where he intended to rescue the children.

The next day, even more influential voices repeated it.

One was the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who retweeted Gaetz’s post to his 3.1 million followers. The younger Trump has been actively campaigning for Republicans on television and the campaign trail in the lead up to the midterm elections. A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. declined to comment.

On Twitter alone, at least 43,000 accounts with a combined 127 million followers carried some message linking Soros to the caravan over those two days; most fanning the conspiracy, a few seeking to knock it down.

On Reddit, where users share and comment on news and memes, the lie exploded. Five posts in The_Donald subreddit tied Soros to the caravan. Within a week, there would be 10 times more. The_Donald has 675,000 members.

Ten days after the caravan began in Honduras, police started intercepting what appeared to be pipe bombs – PVC tubes packed with what the FBI later called “energetic material,” wrapped with tape and attached to a clock – that had been sent to Soros and other prominent critics of President Trump.

By the time police found the first of those bombs in Soros’ mailbox in Westchester County, New York, the lie about his involvement with the caravan had been posted by 20,000 more users on Twitter – to a combined audience of 117 million – and more weighed in on Facebook, Reddit and other sites.

It was like a runaway train. Unstoppable.

Another member of Congress, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, said in a Fox News interview that he couldn't “help but think that Democrats, perhaps Soros and others, may be funding this thinking it will help them.”

By then, the lie also was at an inflection point. Online, the biggest voices were those debunking it. The day before the bomb was found at Soros’ house, the most prominent people mentioning the theory on Twitter had no longer been conservative commentators but instead New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Chelsea Clinton.

But researchers say repetition is repetition. Even exposing a lie plays a central role in mutating fantasy into fact, or at least a matter of debate. Here, news coverage – including this story – play a significant role.

“The choices reporters and editors make about what to cover and how to cover it play a key part in regulating the amount of oxygen supplied to the falsehoods, antagonisms, and manipulations that threaten to overrun the contemporary media ecosystem,” Syracuse University professor Whitney Phillips wrote in a paper this year on disinformation.

Attention alone can lend credence to the very information critics mean to undermine.

By Oct. 22, posts debunking the theory also emerged. One from Arizona Christian conservative Joshua Feuerstein was among Facebook’s most-viewed videospushing the Soros-caravan connection. Feuerstein is best known for characterizing Starbucks’ shift to generic red holiday cups as a war on Christmas.

His video purported to show Honduran migrants on a truck. Accompanying text popularized a direct connection not just to Soros, but to the midterms: “They are not coming on foot as CNN #FakeNews says! George Soros is paying for them to show up at the border by mid term elections!”

The video and text drew 137,000 views.

Exactly how far the lie linking Soros to the migrant caravan has traveled is impossible to measure in full. Messages on 4chan and other sites where conspiracies germinate disappear quickly. Gab – a social media site that attracted right-wing figures banished from more mainstream platforms – itself was on the verge of disappearing this week. Even on mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram, many messages are private.

Still, by the morning of Oct. 27, it had spread to hundreds of millions of users on mainstream social media, and found its way to many more on cable news.

That morning, federal prosecutors allege that trucker Robert Bowers stormed into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot 11 worshipers to death. The authorities have offered few details about what might have motivated him to attack, but online Bowers left his own trail of grievance and conspiracy.

Using the handle OneDingo on Twitter, Bowers shared anti-Jewish content and criticized President Trump. Since January, he was a regular on Gab, too, where his bio read: “Jews are the children of Satan.” The image on his Gab account referred to a white supremacist meme. His last message read: “Screw your optics, I'm going in.”

And by the next day, he did.

In the aftermath, as the news media rushed to cover the killings and to explain the internet conspiracies that might have precipitated such a massacre – the lie spread anew.

Originally Published 6:54 a.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

Updated 12:27 p.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

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

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

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

ref

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/02/26/robert-mueller-hoax-how-jacob-wohl-created-sexual-harassment-plot/2993799002/

THREE END