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mma 9 25

Right-wing media rushed to blame killing of Charlie Kirk on trans people

Authorities pushed back on unverified claims that the alleged shooter's ammunition was inscribed with “transgender ideology”

Special ProgramsLGBTQ

Written by Gideon Taaffe, Jack Winstanley & Noah Dowe

Published 09/12/25

After the September 10 killing of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, right-wing pundit Steven Crowder and The Wall Street Journal separately reported on an internal law enforcement bulletin claiming cartridges possibly connected to the shooting and recovered by police were engraved with “transgender and anti-fascist ideology.”

Some media figures seized on the scant reporting as key evidence of the suspect’s motivations, with right-wing commentators and outlets claiming the killer was a “leftist Trans radical,” labelling the killing an act of “trans terrorism,” and calling for the “trans movement” to be labeled “as a terrorist movement.”

Following a September 12 press conference with law enforcement that detailed the messages inscribed on the ammunition, initial reports suggesting a connection between trans people and the phrases on the bullet casings appear to be based on a misinterpretation of evidence.

] VID]

mma //

On the killing of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and the right’s response

09/12/25 1:22 PM EDT

  1. ### Right-wing media endorse a potential Supreme Court challenge to same-sex marriage

08/28/25 2:42 PM EDT

  1. ### Anti-trans pundits who championed the idea of protecting women’s sports now say that throwing sex toys at women athletes is hilarious

08/12/25

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DEFUND LEFT SOROS PAID PROTESTERS

mma

On the killing of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and the right’s response

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 09/12/25

Charlie Kirk, a powerful right-wing activist, popular podcaster, and close friend and ally to President Donald Trump, was shot and killed while speaking at a college in Utah on Wednesday. Politicians of both parties and commentators across the spectrum, including myself, have responded with condemnations of the act as both the tragic murder of a young husband and father and an act of political violence that must be anathema if we hope to preserve our country as a liberal democracy.

Rational people on all sides of the political spectrum abhor political violence and want to ratchet down the temperature, but this requires an honest assessment of what is happening: There have been far too many cases of political violence in recent years, and the targets are not limited by party, ideology, or creed.

Yet within the right-wing media bubble, long before there was even a suspect in custody, commentators cited Kirk’s killing as proof the left is at war with them. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Thursday called out right-wing pundits who took Kirk’s death “as an opportunity to say we're at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this.” He added: “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you're a leader of a conservative movement.”

Tillis cited two commentators in particular, but such rhetoric has been a staple throughout the right-wing media ecosystem since news broke that Kirk had been shot. It is what right-wing audiences are hearing right now — and what they have been hearing, to one extent or another, for quite some time.

“They are at war with us!” Fox News star Jesse Watters said on The Five, his network’s most-watched show, shortly after Kirk’s passing was announced.

“Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us,” he continued. “And what are we gonna do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just gonna have to ask ourselves.”

“THIS IS WAR,” posted Libs of TikTok. “Civil war,” was Andrew Tate’s take. “This is war,” commented Ian Miles Cheong. “This is a war, this is a war, this is a war,” Alex Jones said on his livestream. According to Steve Bannon, “We are at war in this country.” “We’re not supposed to say this,” posted Shaun Maguire. “But the truth is we’re at War.”

Many on the right were Kirk’s friends and are mourning his death. Some of them may fear for their own safety. But the narrative they have constructed relies on ignoring the recent spate of attacks targeting Democrats, the gruesome contemporaneous response to those attacks from some of the most influential voices on the right, and the chorus of Democratic officials who have condemned Kirk’s assassination.

There is no war, no righteous, violent struggle between a “left” and a “right.” A man was killed. His killer deserves to be brought to justice. Turning that into a “war” can only make the situation worse.

Terrorists have targeted political leaders of both parties

It is not true, as Eric Trump andDonald Trump Jr. both claimed in right-wing media interviews since Kirk’s slaying, that violence is “only going one way,” or, as right-wing radio host Dana Loesch put it on Watters’ prime-time show, that “it's not the right killing the left, it's the left killing the right.”

It seems both pointless and morally inappropriate to try to weigh attacks against one another to determine who has it “worse,” but it’s impossible to have a conversation if we can’t agree that political violence goes both ways.

The ideology of people who attack political figures doesn’t always map neatly onto a political party, in no small part because the assailant typically suffers from some form of mental illness. But Democrats have certainly been the targets of political violence in recent memory: In October 2022, a man broke into the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeking to kidnap her, and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul. In June, an assassin allegedly murdered a Democratic state legislator and her husband and wounded a second and his wife in Minnesota. Last month’s lethal attackon the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by someone who authorities say “wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines” should also be placed in this category.

It’s worth revisiting how right-wing media covered those domestic terror attacks, as it speaks to how its audience likely interprets them in an increasingly fragmented media landscape in which people can pick and choose news sources that confirm their biases.

After a man broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, MAGA influencers claimed based on effectively no evidence that the attacker, who turned out to be a deranged individual steeped in right-wing fever swamp conspiracy theories, had actually been let into the speaker’s house by her husband for the purposes of sex and subsequently attacked him as part of a lovers’ quarrel.

Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo of a pair of briefs and a hammer on a bed with the caption: “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”

For months afterwards, Fox hosts including Watters alluded to such wild claims on their nationally broadcast programs, undeterred by body camera footage from the scene of the attack or basic human dignity.

Prominent MAGA social media influencers likewise responded to the Minnesota shootings by spinning up a false profile of the killer — in reality a Trump supporter who railed against abortion and the LGBTQ community — as a far-left supporter of Gov. Tim Walz. Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich even suggested Walz might have orchestrated the attacks as political hits.

Fox’s right-wing propagandists, meanwhile, all but buried that story. There were no soul-searching reflections about political violence targeting the left on the programs of Watters, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or Greg Gutfeld — instead, discussion on those shows the week after the attacks was limited to correspondent reports and headline reads. The week after the CDC shooting, those programs didn’t cover it at all.

Looking further back, the leading lights of the right-wing media aggressively sought to minimize and sanitize the Trump mob’s assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, and they alternatively blamed “incivility” from the left for a Trumpist sending mail bombs to a host of left-wing and Democratic targets and suggested those attacks were a “false flag.” And that’s to say nothing of other attacks apparently fueled by right-wing extremism that targeted Jewish, Latino, and Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; and El Paso, Texas.

If you downplay right-wing violence against left-wing targets, it’s much easier to convince your viewers that the violence is all going in the other direction.

While the repeated declarations that they are at “war” with a murderous left are obviously corrosive, there have not been widespread direct calls for retaliatory violence from prominent right-wing media figures. But many are urging President Donald Trump, his administration, and congressional Republicans to respond with widespread political repression of the left and the Democratic Party.

“We can honor him [Kirk] and honor his memory and make it a living thing that we use this to take down the apparatus that's well-funded that is at the core of this anti-Americanism,” Steve Bannon said on his streaming show Friday. “It has to be a all-of-government approach. ... Let's go kick down some doors and perp walk some folks today.”

Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and streamer who has Trump’s ear and regularly gets federal officials fired for insufficient demonstrated fealty to the president, declared Wednesday, “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She later added: “All of the Leftist groups that pay for these radical protests need to be prosecuted. … More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”

MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich demanded “congressional hearings now” on Wednesday, which he said should include “every billionaire funding far left wing extremism,” naming George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman. He also called for “massive RICO investigations now” to scrutinize “every dollar” and tagged Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Former GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters echoed Cernovich, adding, “Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments” violence, “or it will destroy us.”

Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, posted Wednesday that “the Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization” and “terrorist Democrats will not stop. … And until they are stopped—until every single nutjob inciting this madness and cheering it on is held accountable and removed from civil society—it will not stop.” His outlet published a piece which declared that Democrats “need to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are.”

“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo said. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

YouTuber Benny Johnson claimed that “the modern Democrat party is a terrorist organization” and that the left-wing movement must be “ripped root and stem from our American republic and thrown into the fire where it belongs.”

Some are even suggesting that because the threat to the right is so clear, if Republican leaders don’t respond with such steps, the result will be some on the right taking matters into their own hands.

Davis posted on Thursday that if congressional Republicans don’t take “proper action” to protect “a population being hunted for sport,” then the result would be “improper reaction,” which he described as “a response that cannot be contained once it is out.”

Likewise, Cernovich wrote: “I’m choosing my words mindfully, don’t twist them. This is a prediction, not a preference. If Congressional GOP and Trump don’t act swiftly and ferociously, there will be retaliatory actions due to lawful means not being used. This is always what happens. RICO these fucks now!”

Trump appears to be responding to these demands for political retribution.

It is impossible to have a rational conversation about topics like lowering the political temperature and pushing back against the spread of political violence when the president of the United States is interested in those issues only as a cudgel against his political opponents.

On Wednesday evening, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal urged Trump, himself the victim of two assassination attempts, to take advantage of “an opportunity for leadership” by seeking to lower the tenor of political rhetoric.

Any other president would not need to hear such advice — but Trump’s previous responses to attacks on Democratic targets demonstrate his lack of interest in bringing the country together. He mocked the brutal assault against Pelosi, said following the Minnesota shooting that it would be a “waste of time” to call Gov. Tim Walz because he is “so whacked out,” and completely ignored the CDC attack.

In an Oval Office address a few hours after Kirk was killed, Trump characteristically ignored the Journal’s counsel. He offered a testament to Kirk’s life and promised that the shooter, who at that point had not been publicly identified or taken into custody, would be brought to justice.

But he also attributed blame far beyond the person who took Kirk’s life, saying that the “rhetoric” of “the radical left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” He went on to promise that his administration would go after the individuals and organizations he said “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” adding that “radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

Trump did not name the targets of the action he promised to carry out. But a “straightforward reading of his rhetoric,” as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait noted, is that “the president of the United States is treating the political opposition as accessories to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack it.”

On Friday, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt pointed to “radicals” on both the right and left and asked the president, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”

Trump’s response made clear that he is uninterested in doing so. He excused “radicals on the right” as people who “don’t want to see crime,” saying, “They don't want these people coming in, we don't want you burning our shopping centers, we don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”

“The radicals on the left are the problem, and they are vicious and they are horrible and they are politically savvy,” he added, before running through a litany of grievances with his critics.

That message is echoing across MAGA media, a powerful information apparatus with a rare and unmediated grasp on its audience. It will fuel more vitriol, making it harder, not easier, to have honest conversations and reduce the threat of political violence in this country.

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MMA 7 25

President Donald Trump appointed conspiracy-obsessed MAGA media favorites to the highest levels of federal law enforcement, and now those figures are coming under fire from the right-wing fever swamp for failing to confirm their bullshit.

Axios reported on Sunday night that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation had concluded that there was no evidence convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “blackmailed powerful figures, kept a ‘client list’ or was murdered.” Those findings repudiated claims that had for years permeated the MAGA influencer ecosystem and been promoted by the stars of Fox News and the broader right-wing media.

The Trump-appointed leaders of both the FBI and DOJ had previously stoked the same conspiracy theories their agencies rejected. “As social media influencers and activists, Kash Patel (now the FBI's director) and Dan Bongino (now deputy director) were among those in MAGA world who questioned the official version of how Epstein died,” Axios noted. Moreover, Attorney General Pam Bondi had claimed in a February interview on Fox News that the purported “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

While the Epstein saga is a bit of a sideshow in the grand scheme of things, what it highlights about the underlying dynamics of the MAGA movement is deeply unsettling. It demonstrates that the Trump administration is in hock to some of the most deranged conspiracy theorists imaginable, treating them as among its closest allies and devoting substantial resources to their care and feeding.

The White House brought 15 MAGA influencers in to meet with Bondi in February, sending them home with glossy binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” When those binders did not satisfy the MAGA faithful, the attorney general reportedly tasked “hundreds of FBI employees” with reviewing Epstein investigation documents for release. In May, Patel and Bongino were sent to Fox to make the case, with the fervor of the converted, that Epstein had actually killed himself. And now the FBI and DOJ have produced a memo detailing their findings and released footage taken from outside Epstein’s cell in the hours surrounding his suicide.

The final result left Trump’s most zealous online allies with two options: They could finally acknowledge that they had been peddling nonsense for years — or they could insinuate that the Trump administration itself is part of the cover-up.

MAGA’s Epstein conspiracy theorists lash out at Bondi — and even Trump

In the hours after Axios’ story broke, several prominent MAGA influencers took the latter path, hammering the administration for failing to confirm their Epstein hypotheses.

“This new DOJ memo admits there are countless victims of Epstein on video but no client list or evidence of other rapists they can charge. Oh it claims Epstein wasn’t using videos as blackmail,” Robby Starbuck sneered on X. “NO ONE believes this for very good reason.”

Starbuck put the blame squarely on the attorney general.

“Bondi just made it all worse with this memo,” he wrote. “What a terrible, terrible idea it was to write this memo. It’s also incredibly insulting to our intelligence.”

Noting her prior claim on Fox that she was in possession of Epstein’s “client list,” he commented, “Was she lying then or is she lying now?”

Laura Loomer also blamed Bondi.

“Blondi lied,” she posted on X, using the nickname she typically utilizes for the attorney general. “She was always lying.”

Others were less specific about who was responsible for the cover-up.

“We were all told more was coming,” Jack Posobiec lamented. “That answers were out there and would be provided. Incredible how utterly mismanaged this Epstein mess has been. And it didn’t have to be.”

Tim Pool suggested that the administration was protecting “the adult child rapists who were blackmailed” and floated the possibility that they were protecting “shareholder value” from “the economic fallout if say, hypothetically, Bill Gates was revealed to have been flying around with Epstein and then we got videos of him abusing underage girls.”

And Mike Cernovich suggested that the buck stopped with the president.

“No one is believing the Epstein coverup, @realDonaldTrump,” he wrote. “This will be part of your legacy. There’s still time to change it!”

The right-wing media ecosystem is built to manufacture and distribute conspiracy theories to an audience trained to believe them. Under the incentive structure this ecosystem creates, it makes sense that the Trump campaign relied on conspiracy theorists to bolster its position, that Patel and Bongino boosted their standing within that ecosystem by echoing such claims, and that Bondi kept claiming an Epstein reckoning was imminent.

But eventually, the Trump administration trapped itself. Bondi, Patel, and Bongino were unable to produce the information that the MAGA faithful demanded, and they seem unable to convince them the information does not exist. It is the nature of conspiracy theorists to insist that anything which appears to rebut their claims actually confirms it. And now they’re turning on their erstwhile allies.

The truth about Epstein and Trump

One ironic aspect of the Epstein saga is that while MAGA influencers were apparently certain that the Trump administration was going to implicate a wave of prominent individuals in Epstein’s sex crimes and, perhaps, his death, there are few figures as prominent with ties as close to Epstein as Trump himself.

Consider:

  • Trump was quoted in a 2002 profile describing Epstein as a longtime friend and “terrific guy” about whom “it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
  • Trump was among the politicians and celebrities who hitched rides on Epstein’s private plane in the 1990s.
  • In 2019, shortly before Epstein’s arrest on sex charges, longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon prepped Epstein for a potential interview.
  • Trump chose for labor secretary in his first term Alex Acosta, who as a U.S. attorney oversaw a sweetheart plea deal for Epstein that a judge later ruled illegal.
  • Alan Dershowitz, the Trump supporter who served on the president’s second Senate impeachment trial team, was one of the defense lawyers who helped Epstein secure that plea deal.
  • Epstein’s 2019 suicide occurred while he was in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, an agency overseen at the time by the Trump-appointed attorney general, William Barr.
  • After longtime Epstein associate Ghislane Maxwell was arrested on sex trafficking charges in 2020, Trump told reporters: “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.”
  • Trump waffled about whether he would “declassify the Epstein files” during a Fox interview — but the network edited out that portion of his answer.
  • Trump appointed as attorney general Bondi, who was “Florida's attorney general 2011-2109 -- a period of time when Jeffrey Epstein's plane records became public, victims' lawsuits were filed and a lot of new evidence against Epstein surfaced –” but she did not take action.

None of this is actually proof that Epstein was killed to cover up the fact that he had possessed evidence that he had sex-trafficked underage girls for Trump. He killed himself, and the idea of a “client list” was, as the reporter who exposed Epstein put it, “a figment of the internet's imagination -- and a means to just slander people.”

But if, say, a similar set of facts linked former President Joe Biden and his associates to Epstein, you can bet that MAGA’s conspiracy corps would treat them as clear evidence. And so it will be interesting to see, as they scrounge for an explanation for the Bondi/Patel/Bongino about-face, if any of them eventually land there.

Why the right’s conspiracy theory engine matters

The Epstein saga is ultimately a minor drama. It is embarrassing for the right that so many of its leading lights pushed the conspiracy theories for so long, and it’s unnerving that some of those conspiracy theorists now occupy the highest levels of government, but on its own terms, the stakes for the public are relatively low.

But this treatment of the Epstein saga is not an anomaly — the right responds in this same fashion to every news event. Its ecosystem is constantly pumping out new conspiracy theories intended to prove the perfidity of the left, its audience is trapped in a bubble in which it is constantly bombarded by such claims, and the consequences can be real and dire.

Following MAGA media’s fervid promotion in September 2024 of the racist, baseless lie that Haitians were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, local institutions received bomb threats and residents kept their children home from school out of fear for their safety.

Officials at all levels of government seeking to respond to a devastating hurricane in North Carolina the next month were forced to spend precious time debunking that ecosystem’s deranged lies because those were the sources some victims counted on for their information.

When the Epstein conspiracy theories are firmly in the rearview, everyone involved in propagating them will retain their influence over a Trump administration that is more concerned with placating them than in acting in the public interest. And that is truly dangerous.

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mma

After Israel launched airstrikes at Iranian nuclear and residential infrastructure on June 12, right-wing media figures rushed to fearmonger that supposed Democratic “open border” policies allowed Iranian “sleeper cells” into the country that might now execute terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

Israel announced it had initiated a series of strikes aimed at Iran’s nuclear facilities and missile factories which have reportedly killed top Iranian military commanders and civilian scientists. In response, Iran vowed retaliation against what it called the country’s “foolish act.” President Donald Trump called the attack “excellent” and warned that there would be “more to come.”

Some right-wing media figures have already started fearmongering about the possibility of Iranian sleeper cells committing terrorism on U.S. soil in response to the Israeli strikes. Several have also blamed former President Joe Biden for this threat due to his alleged “open border” policies.

Right-wing figures fearmonger about the possibility of “terror attacks” from Iranian sleeper cells supposedly let into the U.S. under Biden

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk warned his followers: “Keep your head on a swivel. Biden let millions of people into America. Iran might activate some sleeper cells against Americans. Stay armed.”

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Trump ally and self-proclaimed “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer urged people to be “very careful today and this weekend in American cities and tourist locations” because “Iran has many sleeper cells in the US. Iranian proxies from HAMAS and Hezbollah will likely retaliate on US soil to kill Americans in acts of Islamic terror as a form of retaliation to the Israeli air strikes.” She also claimed “there are millions of jihadi sleeper cells in our country thanks to the Democrats open border polices.”

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On former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room, MAGA media influencer Jack Posobiec also suggested that the U.S. is “very vulnerable” to attacks planned inside the country because “under four years of the Biden administration, … the border was completely open,” adding later that the U.S. is “vulnerable to this type of attack from sleeper cells from any of our adversaries or potential sabotage teams around the world.”

Video

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From the June 13, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

On The National Report, Newsmax host Jon Glasgow said, “We’ve had millions of people pour in over the borders. Is there a possibility of some sleeper cells here in the United States that Iran might try to activate?” Newsmax host Rob Astorino replied, “There's no question. I mean, that's been their plan the whole time.”

Appearing on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight, retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer claimed that Israel “could well have essentially limited all options that the Iranians have, except for potentially some sleeper cells, which we are definitely still worried about here in the United States.” Newsmax host Bianca de la Garza responded, “As we have to be. Joe Biden opened borders for four years.”

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Mike Cernovich.

Advice to Young Men - Tucker Carlson and Mike Cernovich

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AN 6 25 STATES N

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

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

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

They were deeply ignorant about the MinnesotaCare issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*“The far left is murderously violent.”

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

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

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

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

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an 3 25

Amy Coney Barrett, the conservative Supreme Court justice appointed by Donald Trump, has sparked controversy among right-wing figures after voting to reject Trump's attempt to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid. Barrett, along with Chief Justice John Roberts, sided with a US district judge's ruling that ordered the Trump administration to release the congressionally approved funds for foreign aid work already performed.

The decision prompted swift backlash from pro-Trump commentators and activists.

As the Guardian notes, Mike Cernovich, a right-wing influencer, labeled Barrett a "DEI hire," referencing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Fox News host Mark Levin claimed Barrett had "deceived people into thinking she was a reliable constitutionalist." Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist, went as far as posting a picture of Barrett's family, which includes two adopted Black children, and called her a "DEI appointee."

Mike Davis, who was involved in confirming Trump's previous Supreme Court nominees, criticized Barrett on Steve Bannon's podcast, calling her a "rattled law professor" and suggesting that future Supreme Court picks should be "more bold, more fearless, less DEI, and more of a sure bet."

However, Justice Barrett has established a conservative legal legacy since her appointment to the Supreme Court in 2020. As a staunch originalist, she has issued rulings that align with the Republican party's agenda on several high-profile issues.

In the area of abortion, Barrett has been instrumental in the Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, effectively eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion. She has also voted to uphold restrictions on access to abortion services, aligning with the Republican party's goal of limiting reproductive rights.

On gun rights, Barrett has consistently ruled in favor of expanded Second Amendment protections. In the landmark case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, she joined the majority in striking down a New York law that required individuals to demonstrate a specific need to carry a concealed firearm in public.

Barrett's conservative views have also been evident in her rulings on immigration-related issues. She has supported the Trump administration's efforts to limit asylum seekers and has ruled in favor of the government's authority to detain undocumented immigrants without bond hearings.

NOW READ:‘I miss lynch mobs’: The secretary of retribution's followers are getting impatient

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COMRADE KAMALA: The Communist Candidate – The First TV

cernovich

jk media goes along w/ aparachiks

politifact says walz did not dodge deploy

lankford OK rino grabs ankles for commies?!

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mma

right-wing media falsely and dishonestly claim that Hurricane Helene survivors are only entitled to $750 in aid

According to FEMA, survivors can also qualify for “tens of thousands more dollars” in disaster-related financial assistance

Written by Alicia Sadowski & Isabella Corrao

Published 10/04/24

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, right-wing media falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration are ignoring millions of Americans impacted by intense flooding. Media personalities and MAGA influencers have falsely and dishonestly claimed that victims are only entitled to $750 in aid, when in reality that is just the start of federal benefits.

FEMA can provide assistance for victims of Hurricane Helene, but chronic underfunding and climate change, not undocumented migrants, threaten future aid availability

To wit, on Thursday, Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters aired a clip of Vice President Kamala Harris speaking in hurricane-ravaged Georgia the previous day. As Harris spoke on Ingraham’s show, the Fox News chyron read, “Kamala: Here’s $750 that’ll do the trick.”

…

As X/Twitter super-poster Acyn Torbai noted in the video below, Fox News actually carried Harris’s speech live the previous day. The vice president explained that the $750 is just the beginning of the assistance available to impacted residents. Mediaite, [10/3/24]

* Anti-Muslim activist Brigitte Gabriel claimed that victims of Hurricane Helene would get “$750” but that a “criminal thug from South America” would get “a 4-star hotel with credit cards.” She posted, “If you lost your entire house during Hurricane Helene, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will give you $750. If you are a criminal thug from South America and cross the border illegally through Mexico, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will put you up in a 4-star hotel with credit cards.” Twitter/X, [10/3/24]

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The FBI killed a Utah man who issued numerous death threats. Far-right figures are now claiming the Biden administration is coming to kill conservatives.

Emerging narratives echo right-wing reaction to the infamous 1992 raid in Ruby Ridge, Idaho

WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ

PUBLISHED 08/11/23

After a Utah man was shot and killed by the FBI following a months long investigation into threats against President Joe Biden, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and other public officials, some extremist right-wing media figures are now spinning the incident to claim the federal government is willing to kill any critic of Democrats.

In the early morning hours of August 9, the FBI served warrants at the home of Craig Deleeuw Robertson, who was killed by an agent. According to CBS News, charging documents against Robertson alleged that he made multiple explicit “online posts” that “showed an intent to kill Mr. Biden,” who was scheduled to appear in Utah later that day. The charging documents reportedly claim Robertson also wrote about fulfilling a “dream” of killing Bragg, the New York DA who earlier this year indicted former President Donald Trump. NBC News reported that the FBI alleges Robertson’s social media posts also “mentioned many other politicians, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.”

There is a significant lack of information regarding Robertson’s death so far. NBC reports that the raid is “under review by the FBI’s Inspection Division,” and according to CBS, “authorities have not publicly confirmed the man who was killed is the man named in the complaint.” And any government killing is worth giving heavy scrutiny to, regardless of the circumstance. There are reasonable questions here and the FBI must answer them or be held accountable.

Some right-wing media figures, however, have already jumped to extreme fearmongering about the incident to claim the Biden administration is intentionally using deadly force against Democrats’ online critics.

“Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander wrote on Telegram: “The FBI is now killing online critics of Biden. This is all by design."

Ali Utah

CitationScreenshot from Ali Alexander's Telegram channel

On his Real America’s Voice show, neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec said, “This looks like a show of force. This looks like a message. This looks like a message being sent to the people of this country — threaten us and we’ll show up at your home at 6:15 in the morning and take you out. That’s what it looks like, folks.”

On Twitter (recently rebranded as X), “alt-right” activist and rape apologist Mike Cernovich wrote that Robertson’s death “was to send a message” after the “FBI assassination team” had “sworn an oath to demons.”

Cernovich

CitationScreenshot from Mike Cernovich's Twitter account

On Fox News, Laura Ingraham said the killing “kind of amounts to a smear” with the “implicit” message to “millions of Americans who may have supported President Trump or other conservatives implying that they can’t be trusted or, I don’t know, is it when in doubt, shoot first, ask questions later?”

Other far-right figures posted similar comments about the incident on social media, writing that the FBI had shot Robertson “in cold blood because he criticized Joe Biden online,” and claiming that the government “basically said that they wanted to kill a Biden critic to set an example.” On GETTR, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon simply wrote, “In Cold Blood,” and linked to a tweet from Posobiec. 

This commentary is reminiscent of the radical right’s reactions to the Ruby Ridge incident of 1992, an 11-day standoff in Idaho between federal agents and the family of Randy Weaver, a Christian fundamentalist affiliated with the far-right white separatist movement. The standoff resulted in the deaths of Weaver’s wife, son, and a federal marshal.

On the August 10 edition of his show THOUGHTCRIME, Charlie Kirk specifically invoked Ruby Ridge and the deadly 1993 siege on a cult compound in Waco, Texas, saying “We know from Waco and Ruby Ridge that there's some really bad people that could be in the FBI. We know that.”

Video

CitationFrom the August 10, 2023, edition of Thoughtcrime

Rudy Ridge became a critical political touchstone among far-right activists and inspired acts of domestic terrorism, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured 759.

In a 2017 interview with ABC News, Jess Walter, a reporter who covered the incident of Ruby Ridge, explained, “The fallout from Ruby Ridge was [that it] sort of mainstreamed some of those really right-wing conspiratorial beliefs and, in many ways, when you have conspiracy buffs saying the government’s out to kill you, and then a case like that happens, it just continues to reverberate and echo.” 

“Right-wing media starts in the era after this,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich also noted. “All of this builds out of the rage that was symbolized with this event.”

…

IN THIS ARTICLE

Ali Alexander

ali alexanderMORE

Related

Neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec: “I'm sure that you know someone in your life” who posts explicit, repeated death threats against government officials

08/11/23 1

Laura Ingraham suggests the FBI executed man who had made repeated threats to assassinate multiple political enemies of Donald Trump

08/10/23

Media Matters weekly newsletter, August 11

08/11/23

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Beclowning Themselves: The Far-Right Reacts to the Jan. 6 Committee Hearings | Right Wing Watch

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beclowning themselves...

the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has been holding public hearings for two weeks now, but take a look at right-wing media and its personalities and you’d hardly know it.

Right-wing and far-right activists have largely ignored the hearings or, when they have addressed it, painted the hearings as “propaganda” or a “partisan witch hunt.” Others, still, haven’t been able to resist criticizing those Republicans they feel betrayed by.

Here’s how a few right-wing activists, many of whom have been subpoenaed for their role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, have responded. 

Mike Cernovich—a far-right activist and conspiracy theorist with the so-called Stop the Steal campaign—had this to say about the Jan. 6 hearings: “Nobody cares, dude!”

Cernovich had joined former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon a day before the opening hearing on the June 8episodeof Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. Asked how right-wing media, including the “War Room,” should respond to the Jan. 6 hearings—whether or not they should mention it or launch counterprogramming—Cernovich offered some counterintuitive advice. 

“Whatever we can do to get Democrats to talk more about Jan. 6 we should do, so whatever gets them hyperventilating, crying—oh, seven people died that day? Yeah, they were Trump supporters,” Cernovich said. 

In fact, five police officersdied and about 150 were injured as a result of Trump loyalists’ attack on the Capitol. Another four in the crowd died.

“But what we don’t want to lose sight of is that they are beclowning themselves, so the key for us is to stay on message. Yeah, a woman was shot in the neck and bled out,” he said. “The key to keep in mind is the Democrats look like unserious people, unfit to govern because they’re hyperventilating over an event they compare to 9/11.”

Cernovich has since called the hearings “propaganda.”

Bannon—who was indicted for refusing to respond to a Jan. 6 committee subpoena—referred to the Jan. 6 hearings as a “show trial” and lambasted Fox News for its coverage.

While major news networks carried the first primetime hearing live on June 9, Fox airedcounterprogramming by Tucker Carlson, who took no commercial breaks less his viewers be tempted to tune into the hearing. 

But since then, the network hascovered the Jan. 6 hearings held in non primetime hours, and network analysts were so moved by Republican testimonies during Tuesday’s hearing that one said it suggestsTrump “may be guilty of a crime” and that it “shows his unfitness” for office. And that Bannon finds to be sinful.

“Fox News shows their hand—all in on taking down President Trump—now it’s out in the open—IF YOU WATCH FOX U ARE ONLY AIDING AND ABETTING THEIR ANTI-TRUMP HATE,” Bannon wrote in a June 21post on GETTR.

[pix]

“If this was a real committee, they would have another panel of witnesses like me!” said Trump lawyerCleta Mitchell—who was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee for her role in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Last Tuesday, Bannon had Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell onhis show. Mitchell—who was on the infamous call on which Trump asked Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find votes for him—lashed out at Raffensperger. Raffensperger had testified to the Jan. 6 committee that same day aboutTrump’s efforts to pressure him to overturn the election results.

“All Raffensperger cared about was getting good press from the liberal media and having all of the left-wing reporters fawning over him, and that’s why they were there today, because that’s his number one priority,” Mitchell claimed.

“If this was a real committee, they would have another panel of witnesses like me!” said Mitchell—who was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee for her role in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. She went on to call the Jan. 6 committee a “kangaroo committee.” 

Other political operatives involved in the so-called Stop the Steal disinformation campaign to keep Trump in power were clearly watching.

Ed Martin—a mentor to Ali Alexander who was subpoenaed for his role in the so-called Stop the Steal campaign—portrayed the hearings as “pure propaganda,” held “just to destroy Donald Trump.”

Ali Alexander—theleader of the so-called Stop the Steal campaignwith a penchant for violent rhetoric—doubled down on his criticism of former Vice President Mike Pence. “Pence betrayed us,” he declared on June 16, the day after the committee detailed Trump and his allies’ pressure campaign on Pence to illegally overturn the election. The committee also illustrated how this pressure campaign led rioters to call for Pence’s hanging on Jan. 6 when he refused to do Trump’s bidding. 

“Mike Pence is WRONG,” Alexanderwrote in the June 16 Telegram post. “No one asked him to overturn the election.”

“Pence was the presiding officer,” Alexander continued. “He could do nearly anything he could justify. The body could overrule him with a 2/3rds vote but that’s it. Pence betrayed us and is lying about the law and the rule.”

[twt]the second hearing featured prominent Republican voices, like former Attorney General Bill Barr, who said that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were false, as was Dinesh D’Souza’s“2000 Mules” video, whose claims of voter fraud were so preposterous it elicited laughter from Barr during his testimony.

D’Souza fumed. “Bill Barr is the stereotypical small-town sheriff, overweight and largely immobile, whose rank incompetence results in the whole town being robbed from under his nose,” he wrote onTwitter, adding, “Fatso.” 

Trump confidant Roger Stone, meanwhile,slammedfellow Trump ally Jason Miller, calling him a “lying scumbag” for his testimony. Miller testified that Trump lawyer RudyGiuliani encouraged Trump to falsely declare victory on election night and that he was intoxicated while doing so. 

“What a backstabbing asshole,” Stone wrote in a June 13 Telegrampost. Stone has beensubpoenaed by the select committee.

Some, like Alexander, made it clear they stood by their actions on Jan. 6, 2021. 

As Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol behind him, Ali Alexander pointed to the unfolding scene and said, “I do not denounce this.” While he once tried to claim the video published on his campaign’s page (and captured by Right Wing Watch) was a “deep fake,” he reversed his stance this week and said he stood by his comments on the roof that day. 

“If I had stood on this rooftop and denounced our movement instead of doubling down on it, I would’ve saved myself a lifetime of grief and $100,000 in legal bills,” Alexander wrote in a June 20 post. “And I would’ve lost my soul. I have no regrets. … a government for and by the people.”

That didn’t stop him from claiming persecution. After the June 23 hearing, which revealed the lengths to which Trump and Republican members of Congress went to corrupt the DOJ, Alexander took to Telegram. “We’re being persecuted by the Security State (SS) and our ‘team’ doesn’t even have a response,” Alexander wrote.

When on Monday, reporters briefly speculated that Alexander might be the select committee’s “surprise witness” for Tuesday’s hearing, Alexander released a statement that he would not be testifying publicly but that he would like to do so. Alexander—who spread disinformation about the 2020 election and Jan. 6—then had the gall to declare that “Misinformation is polluting the January 6th narratives.”

[twt]

during Tuesday’s hearing, Cassidy Hutchinson, the top aide of White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, presented damning testimony about Trump’s knowledge of the potential for violence on Jan. 6 and painted an unhinged portrait of the president who went so far as to lunge at his own Secret Service detail.Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene urged Trump to sue her, while white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has been subpoenaed by the select committee, applauded Trump’s alleged violence, declaring “choking a guard and throwing food at the wall” an “EPIC REACTION.”

Tags: Ali Alexander Cleta Mitchell Dinesh D'Souza Ed Martin Jason Miller Marjorie Taylor Greene Mike Cernovich Mike Pence Nick Fuentes Roger Stone Stephen K. Bannon William Barr Capitol Insurrection conspiracy theories House select committee on Jan. 6 Jan. 6

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Echoing ‘Vladimir Putin’s talking points’ is putting Fox News at odds with ‘pro-Ukraine’ Republicans: conservative

Fox News' Tucker Carlson speaking at the 2020 Student Action Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida,

Alex Henderson January 28, 2022

During the George W. Bush years, the right-wing media, including Fox News, were quick to parrot neoconservative talking points. But Fox News has since taken a much more Trumpian turn, and its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, often promotes MAGA isolationism and a hypernationalist “America first” ideology. That isolationism, Never Trump conservative David Frum stresses in an article published by The Atlantic on January 28, is putting Fox News pundits at odds with more hawkish conservatives when it comes to Russia and Ukraine.

“Night after night,” Frum explains, “the host of the top-rated show on Fox News repeats Vladimir Putin’s talking points justifying aggression against Ukraine and opposing U.S. aid to that threatened sovereign country. Tucker Carlson’s influence is felt across right-wing social media, where it is amplified by figures such as Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Glenn Greenwald and Mollie Hemingway. A highly visible coterie of socially conservative intellectuals also argues the case against helping Ukraine.”

Frum continues, “Meanwhile, day after day, Republican officeholders in the House and the Senate urge more support for Ukraine. That list includes not only traditionalists such as Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, but also, many legislators who got close to former President Donald Trump, such as Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.”

President Joe Biden has had a much more hawkish tone with Russia and President Vladimir Putin than Trump, and Frum notes that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has “backed the Biden Administration’s approach, as have the top Republicans on the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committees.”

“Broadly, Republican elected officials and the think tanks that advise them are staunchly pro-Ukraine; conservative talkers, especially on TV and social media, are varying degrees of anti-Ukraine,” Frum observes. “Russia-Ukraine is becoming a trial of strength, not only between Putin and NATO, but between different parts of the conservative world…. As powerful as Fox News messaging is, scenes of violence after Russian aggression sends Ukrainian refugees streaming westward to safety would be powerful too.”

Frum adds, “Americans are never eager to get involved in other people’s fights, but they remain deeply committed to a vision of their country as a force for good in the world.” many twt

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https://theintercept.com/2020/08/27/tucker-carlson-defends-kenosha-shooter

no twt pix

TUCKER CARLSON set off a firestorm of criticism on Wednesday — by describing a 17-year-old Trump supporter who opened fire on protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday, killing two, as a well-meaning kid who decided he “had to maintain order” in the Democrat-run state because “no one else would” — the Fox News host was surfacing an idea that had already spread widely on the far-right.

“The chaos that began with the first George Floyd protests on Memorial Day has reached its inevitable and bloody conclusion,” Carlson told viewers tuning in for his buildup to the Republican National Convention, which had featured, on its first night, two speakers lionized for threatening to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters outside their mansion in St. Louis.

[twt pix]

Last night, three people were shot on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Two of them have died. Police say they’ve charged a 17-year-old with murder,” Carlson reported, without revealing that the suspect, Kyle Rittenhouse, was not the anti-fascist radical his viewers might have been led to expect, but a conservative vigilante who had posted video from the front row of a Trump rally in January, and written “BLUE LIVES MATTER” and “Trump 2020″ on his TikTok bio, as Buzzfeed first reported.[twt tucker]

rittenhouse was reportedly charged with six crimes on Thursday, including first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety, attempted first-degree intentional homicide and possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18.

The incident came after a third night of protests in Kenosha over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black father who was critically wounded by a police officer who fired seven shots into his back, but throughout his report on the fatal shootings Carlson pretended, as he has for months, that there were no non-violent protests over police violence against communities of color, just “riots.”

In Carlson’s telling, the moral of the story was not that Rittenhouse — who was photographed and caught on video from multiple angles shooting three men — had provoked trouble by responding to a militia group’s Facebook call for “patriots willing to take up arms and defend” the city from “evil thugs,” but that he was something closer to a victim, prodded to fill a vacuum by the misrule of the city’s Democratic mayor, John Antaramian, and the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers.

[pix  Kyle Rittenhouse was photographed hours before the shootings on Tuesday, among a group of volunteers who cleaned anti-police graffiti from a high school in Kenosha.

Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images]

“Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it,” Carlson told Fox viewers unaware that the city had not, in fact, collapsed into chaos just because they were being shown isolated scenes of violence on a loop.

“People in charge, from the governor of Wisconsin on down, refused to enforce the law. They stood back and they watched Kenosha burn,” Carlson claimed, oblivious to the fact that video recorded by witnesses to Tuesday’s events showed Rittenhouse and other heavily armed young vigilantes had spent most of the night standing close to armored police vehicles outside a business they appointed themselves to guard.

[twt vid]

at one point in a livestream broadcast that night, a police officer could be heard offering water to the militiamen, including Rittenhouse, and telling them: “We appreciate you guys, we really do.”

Later that night, after Rittenhouse wandered a short distance away and got into a confrontation with a man he shot in the head, video recorded by a pro-Trump YouTuber, Drew Hernandez, seemed to show Rittenhouse running back down the street in the direction of the police vehicles. As he retreated from the scene, the video appeared to catch Rittenhouse telling someone on his phone: “I just killed somebody."

[twt vid]

according to the police complaint against Rittenhouse, released on Thursday evening, his friend Dominic Black told a detective that he received a call from his friend Kyle at 11:46 pm on Tuesday, in which the gunman stated that he shot someone.

A subsequent analysis of the video by the New York Times visual investigations unit suggested that, moments before Rittenhouse opened fire, a single gunshot was fired into the air for unknown reasons by someone standing near the parking lot where the confrontation took place.

Shelby Talcott, a video journalist for the Daily Caller, a conservative site founded by Carlson, captured footage of Rittenhouse fleeing the scene of the first shooting, as protesters shouted that he had shot someone.

[twt vid]

video shot by another pro-Trump YouTuber, Brendan Gutenschwager, appeared toshow Rittenhouse pursued by several protesters who suspected him of carrying out the first shooting. After he tripped and fell, just a block away from the police, two of those men attempted to disarm him, one by kicking him and another by hitting him with a skateboard.

[vid]

rittenhouse fired at both of them, apparently killing the skateboarder, Anthony Huber, with a shot to the chest as they struggled for the rifle, and then shooting a third protester, Gaige Grosskreutz, causing a gaping wound in his arm. Grosskreutz, a member of a social justice group who was wearing a hat with the word “paramedic” emblazoned on it, also appeared to be armed with a handgun.

In a remarkable scene at the end of Gutenschwager’s video, Rittenhouse can be seen walking with his hands up, apparently trying to surrender to the police officers he had been chatting with earlier in the evening, as a bystander shouts that he shot the protesters, but the officers drive right past him in the direction of the men he shot.

while all of this footage was available to Carlson before he went on air, later in his monologue he professed to have no idea what exactly had happened or whether — because the men who had attempted to disarm the vigilante after he had shot someone in the head could be seen kicking and hitting Rittenhouse — a jury might ultimately decide that he had acted in self-defense.

In this, Carlson was closely following a consensus explanation that had formed during the 24 hours after the shooting by pro-Trump YouTubers, bloggers, and commentators, who decided, after studying slow-motion imagery and still photographs, that the young man who had traveled to Kenosha from his home in neighboring Illinois to defend the city from residents enraged by the shooting of Jacob Blake, was merely acting in self-defense.

rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, suggested on Twitter that the slow-motion video convinced him that the killings were “100% justified self defense.” Hours before Carlson went to air, Gosar also blamed the violence on Kenosha’s local government. “Armed citizens defending themselves will fill the vacuum,” he wrote[twt dr paul gosar az cernovich?]

one of Rittenhouse’s defenders was Elijah Schaffer, a freelance producer for Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV and a pro-Trump political activist who releaseda misleading accountof a fight involving Black Lives Matter protesters in Dallas in May. Writing on Twitter on Wednesday, Schaffer described the Turkish journalist Tayfun Coskun’s photograph of the protesters attempting to disarm the gunman as Rittenhouse “being attacked by #BLM rioters.”

“One of the attackers,” in Schaffer’s words, was “about to assault him with a skateboard."

[twt pix]

that “assault” by the skateboarder Anthony Huber ended with his failed effort to wrest the gun away from Rittenhouse and being fatally shot in the chest.

Schaffer also thought a 20-second interview he did with Rittenhouse before the shootings provided important “context” as to what took place later, since the vigilante did not say anything racist or political in that third of a minute.

[twt vid]

as Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times opinion columnist, noted on Twitter, an obvious flaw in the conservative argument that Rittenhouse was just defending himself from the second and third men he shot is that they were only “attacking” him because he had just shot someone else in the head[twt]

carlson’s defense of Rittenhouse also hinged on the false idea that he had taken to the streets to oppose a phantom movement of violent radicals using the protests as cover. “The Justice Department could have stopped all of this months ago,” Carlson ranted over footage of Kenosha recorded by another of the conservative gonzo video bloggers who descended on the city this week, searching for images of chaos to discredit the protest movement. “If federal prosecutors had treated the organizers of BLM and antifa the way they treated Roger Stone, our cities wouldn’t look like Kosovo tonight.”

Another conservative journalist who interviewed Rittenhouse earlier in the evening was Richie McGinniss, who directs video for the Daily Caller, the website that was once used to smear Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer.

[twt vid]

mcGinniss appeared on Carlson’s show on Wednesday to discuss what happened in Kenosha and his own effort to save the life of the first man shot and killed by Rittenhouse, who was later identified as Joseph Rosenbaum.

What made Carlson’s interview with McGinniss odd, however, was that the Daily Caller videographer repeatedly referred to Rittenhouse as “the alleged shooter,” even though he was standing just six or seven feet away from Rosenbaum when he was shot and seemed to have been filming the confrontation at the time.

[twt vid]

it  is unclear if McGinniss has video of Rittenhouse shooting Rosenbaum, but he told Carlson that he witnessed the crime at close range. Even so, Carlson failed to ask him directly if he could say for certain that Rittenhouse did shoot Rosenbaum in the head and cause his death. Instead, McGinniss offered what sounded like testimony to the gunman’s good character. “The 17-year-old who I interviewed earlier in the night, he actually mentioned that he was there to maintain peace, in the absence of police,” McGinniss said.

“It’s just hard to believe this is America,” Carlson said. “We can’t put up with this.”

When the complaint against Rittenhouse was released late Thursday, it said that McGinniss told a police detective that he did clearly see the teen shoot Rosenbaum at close range as the victim reached for the rifle. Footage recorded earlier in the evening showed that Rosenbaum was incensed by the presence of the armed militia members in the neighborhood.

The complaint cited a coroner’s report which “indicated that Rosenbaum had a gunshot wound to the right groin which fractured his pelvis, a gunshot wound to the back which perforated his right lung and liver, a gunshot wound to the left hand, a superficial gunshot wound to his lateral left thigh, and a graze gunshot wound to the right side of his forehead.”

As the momentum to excuse Rittenhouse’s crimes as justified spread online Thursday, amplified by far-right figures around the globe, Jamelle Bouie called it “the single most ominous development of the year."

[twt]

the journalist Matt Prigge noted that the increasingly obscene lionization of Rittenhouse echoed the wave of praise in 1970 for the National Guardsmen who killed four anti-war protesters at Kent State, documented by the historian Rick Perlstein in his book, “Nixonland."

at  a news conference on Friday, Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth said that he did not want armed volunteers like Kyle Rittenhouse on the streets during protests.

“This group of people that are carrying weapons here, if they’re in their house — and again, I support the Second Amendment — if they’re in there protecting their property, I have no issue with that,” the sheriff said. “The people that have been here carrying guns, they haven’t been arrested because it’s a right that they have. Have we asked for them to come? Are we asking for them to come in and support things? I’m not.”

“You could clearly see the situation escalated Tuesday night because a 17-year-old boy carrying what appears to be an assault rifle, who has no idea how to handle a situation like this,” Beth added. “I don’t care if he had the right intentions or not, two people are currently dead, and one almost had his arm blown off.”

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/soy-boy-conspiracy-theory-why-alt-right-believes-soybeans-are-part-vast-left-wing

Nutritionists have had many debates about the health benefits of soy products; some are very pro-soy, others are critical of it. Their debates are scientific in nature, but on the alt-right, soy is being discussed in stridently political terms—and one of the leadingalt-right conspiracy theories is the “soy boy” conspiracy, which claims that soy products are a vast left-wing conspiracy designed to emasculate men and turn their bodies estrogenic.

The alt-right has an abundance of vocabulary that one doesn’t find in more traditional conservatism. In 2018, the term “soy boy” is as common on the alt-right as “cuckservative” (right-wingers who aren’t right-wing enough) and “snowflake” (a hypersensitive liberal or progressive). “Soy boy” isn’t a term that one typically encounters in more traditional conservative outlets like the National Review and the Weekly Standard, but alt-right outlets—from Alex Jones’ Infowars to the misogynist Return of Kings website—have been a frequent source of anti-soy conspiracy theories.

Jones has long been promoting conspiracy theories involving government operatives and “The New World Order” using products to turn male bodies estrogenic. In 2013, Jones argued that juice boxes were feminizing male children, declaring, “After you’re done drinking your little juices, you’re ready to go out and have a baby. You’re ready to put makeup on. You’re ready to wear a short skirt….You’re ready to put lipstick on.”[hayes frogs atz?]

Jones has asserted that left-wing male commentators are often “latte addicts” and soy addicts” who lack masculinity—and earlier this year, Jones’ colleague, Paul Joseph Watson posted an eight-minute video describing the alleged attributes of a “soy boy.”

Watson asked, “What is it about soy that turns men into such spineless wimps? Soybeans contain high amounts ofphytoestrogens: organic compounds that mimic the female hormone estrogen in the human body. This reduces testosterone and lowers male sperm count.”

Watson elaborated, “Men with high estrogen take on feminine traits. They find it harder to handle stress. They become less assertive. They become low-energy. Their voices get higher, their genitals shrink.”

According to Watson’s video, “environmental estrogens” are causing males to develop female-like breasts—and one of the most prominent “environmental estrogens” is soy. The use of soy baby formulas, Watson said, suggests that “rather than people with already preexisting left-wing beliefs being attracted to vegan-style tofu soy diets, we’re actually creating an army of soy boys from birth.”

Alt-right blogger Mike Cernovich is not only a leading proponent of the bizarre Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which in 2016, claimed that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring in a Washington, DC pizzeria—he is also a strident critic of soy products, arguing that there is a correlation between liberal and progressive beliefs and use of soy products. And “soy boy” is one of his favorite insults.

Roosh Valizadeh’s misogynist Return of Kings website has also been the source of numerous anti-soy diatribes, and on April 1, 2018, Valizadeh devoted an entire article to “soy face”—an open-mouth smile the alt-right believes is specific to “soy boys.” Valizadeh wrote, “There is no doubt that decreasing testosterone levels among American men are causing them to behave in childish and feminine ways. This is most clearly displayed in the ‘soy boy face’ pose that combines the feelings of excitement and fear.”

In one on his anti-soy videos, Watson focused on “soy face” exclusively—arguing that because “soy boys” have lower testosterone, it shows in theirfacial expressions. Watson declared, “Look a little closer and see what soy face truly represents: weakness and fear….The globalist chemical warfare program to make men effeminate so they vote more like women and generally vote for left-wing policies and big government is still in full swing. But now that the testosterone-decimating effects of soy and plastics are being exposed, the reign of the soy boys is coming to an end.”

Health-related websites will continue to debate the merits of soy products, doing so in a non-political way. But to the alt-right’s conspiracy buffs, the use of soy is very much a political issue—and nothing says “giant left-wing conspiracy” like the abundance of mythical “soy boys.”

==

==

capt 818

Far-right commentator Mike Cernovich is on a bus tour with Republican Arizona Senate candidate Kelli Ward. He was recently one of the main trolls organizing against liberals like James Gunn, Michael Ian Black, Patton Oswalt, and Sarah Silverman, focusing largely on digging up old tweets and then gleefully portraying them out of context.

Cernovich's own history has been far more obscured. While he has been recording videos and tweeting for years, he's deleted numerous videos to cover-up his toxic record. Some thought that this archive was lost forever.

It wasn't.

We've put together a lengthy history of Cernovich's malfeasance. We have video of him pushing the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. We have numerous documented examples of Cernovich pushing vile, false accusations against his critics and politicians he disagrees with. We have numerous examples of Cernovich pushing forged documents. We have documentation of Cernovich pushing the conspiracy regarding murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich. We have numerous examples of Cernovich pushing conspiracy theories about mass shootings. And we have a long list of Cernovich's racism, sexism, rape denial, and overall bigotry.

One warning: This is seriously disturbing stuff.

==

ref

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/08/21/mike-cernovichs-far-right-conspiracy-theories-bigotry-and-association-white-supremacists/221046

no lnx twit vid: many pix

mike Cernovich's far-right conspiracy theories, bigotry, and association with white supremacists

An abundance of tweets, blog posts, and on-air appearances -- many of which he has now deleted -- reveal the conspiracy theories, rape denial, and “alt-right” shilling that brought Cernovich fame

Blog ››› August 21, 2018 4:35 PM EDT ››› CRISTINA LóPEZ G. , BRENDAN KARET & JOHN KERR

Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Far-right grifter and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich is putting his star power behind Republican Kelli Ward by joining her on a bus tour before the Arizona primary on August 28. Ward, who is competing for the GOP nomination to represent Arizona in the U.S. Senate, described Cernovich in her announcement of the bus tour as “a social media personality and the author of several books examining political and social trends,” forgivingly glossing over Cernovich’s record of peddling disgusting conspiracy theories, shilling for the “alt-right,” dismissing date rape, and endorsing misogyny.

Kasie DC

@KasieDC

AZ GOP Sen candidate Kelli Ward will go on a bus tour w/ Mike Cernovich, an alt-right activist associated w/ the PizzaGate conspiracy.

JUST NOW: "I don't really know what Mike Cernovich's views are. I know he's got an audience and I want to serve everyone" Ward said

5:05 PM - Aug 19, 2018

9,528

10.8K people are talking about this

Questioned about the decision, Ward hilariously claimed to not know what Cernovich’s views are. Ward, along with her husband, is an administrator of a Facebook group that traffics in some of the same conspiracy theories that Cernovich pushes. Ward has also been an ally of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Cernovich has done frequent work with Jones’ Infowars in recent years.

Despite running with Cernovich’s crowd for years, Ward can try to get away with claiming to not know who he is perhaps because of his attempts to scrub a lot of his caustic record from his online portfolio. However, an abundance of deleted tweets, blog posts, and videos reveal him for the unhinged conspiracy theorist, rape denier, and “alt-right” shill that he became famous for being.

Cernovich repeatedly pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory

Cernovich has pushed conspiracy theories about pedophilia, Satanism, “spirit cooking,” and more

Cernovich pushed forged documents and propaganda

Cernovich spread a conspiracy theory about murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich

Cernovich falsely claimed a Roy Moore accuser forged his signature in a yearbook

Cernovich pushed conspiracy theories about mass shootings

Cernovich has made journalists a target of many attacks

Cernovich has repeatedly pushed bigotry, and shilled for white supremacists and the “alt-right”

Cernovich repeatedly pushed rape denial and misogyny

Cernovich repeatedly pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory

During the 2016 presidential election, some supporters of President Donald Trump baselessly claimed Democrats and powerful celebrities were tied to a pedophilia ring hiding in a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. As a consequence, a man went to the restaurant to “self-investigate” and opened fire inside.

Cernovich said, “Pizzagate is real. There are pedophiles at the highest level of media, Hollywood, and in government.”

Cernovich has attempted to scrub his wide-ranging “Pizzagate” record to obscure his role in propagating it. But since-deleted tweets show evidence of his responsibility.

In one video, Cernovich said, “If you want to have the real power, they force you to rape children and they record it. And that does two things. One is you are now blackmailed forever. ... And then two is only someone depraved enough to rape a child is going to be allowed in the shadow government.”

Cernovich has pushed conspiracy theories about pedophilia, Satanism, “spirit cooking,” and more

In a video that can still be found on far-right misogynist Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube channel, Cernovich claimed John Podesta, chairman of the campaign of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, was involved in “spirit cooking” rituals, during which he claimed participants mixed “semen with breast milk” to drink.

Besides pushing the baseless claims on his website, Cernovich also suggested that then-candidate Donald Trump should have addressed the conspiracy theory during one of his rallies and accused the Clinton family of “100 percent” being connected to pedophile rings. On another occasion, he also suggested a visit to Haiti was evidence that the Clintons were trafficking children.

Cernovich also accused former President Barack Obama of giving children to human traffickers.

Cernovich also claimed to have heard that Obama’s children are not actually his children.

In another video, Cernovich said, “We have to purge the satanists from the FBI,” noting that he thought former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe was a satanist, while he was unsure about former FBI special agent Peter Strzok.

As reported by The New Yorker, Cernovich was “among the first” to falsely claim that Hillary Clinton “had a grave neurological condition.”

Cernovich has also tried to smear all of his protesters and critics as pedophiles.And while he has avoided to outright endorse it, he is one of the far-right figures who amplified the QAnon conspiracy theory on their social media platforms.

Cernovich pushed forged documents and propaganda

Cernovich promoted a forged document that accused Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) of sexually harassing a former staffer, then quickly walked back the claim when the document was reported to police as a forgery.

He also promoted forged documents about Emanuel Macron before he was elected president of France.

Cernovich has also reportedly help spread pro-Assad propaganda. Cernovich declared that he was “not buying” that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad carried out chemical attacks against Syrians.

Cernovich spread a conspiracy theory about murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich

Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2016. On August 9, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange brought up Rich unprompted on a Dutch TV program, implying (but refusing to confirm) that Rich was his source for the DNC emails Wikileaks made public before the presidential election. Cernovich promoted the interview while questioning point-blank if Rich was Assange’s source.

Following Cernovich’s tweet, Fox’s Sean Hannity picked up the baseless story.

Cernovich falsely claimed a Roy Moore accuser forged his signature in a yearbook

Cernovich falsely claimed that Beverly Young Nelson, who has reported that former Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 16, admitted that she forged Moore’s signature in her high school yearbook. Nelson actually said she added some notes next to the signature but that it was Moore’s signature. In fact, Cernovich cast doubt on all of the reports made against Moore.

Cernovich pushed conspiracy theories about mass shootings

In a since-deleted blog post, Cernovich claimed that “there was more than one shooter at Pulse in Orlando,” referring to the 2016 mass shotting at Pulse nightclub in Florida. Cernovich wrote, “As you follow the story, look for” certain “evidence.” He added, “If we don’t see all of this, then there was a second shooter.”

He also attempted to blame a mass shooting in New Mexico on anti-fascist protesters and made similar comments following a series of bombings in Austin, TX.

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

Cernovich has made journalists a target of many attacks

Cernovich lashed out at a HuffPost journalist for reporting on a notorious anti-Muslim social media account. He also once planned a website to harass journalists and since then has set out to get some journalists fired by weaponizing fake outrage over past tweets taken out of context, unleashing his followers on harassment campaigns against targeted journalists on the way. He has said, “Most people in journalism are pedophiles.”

After Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte assaulted Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, Cernovich told Alex Jones that it was “a total set up.”

He also implied on Twitter that Jacobs may have had the assault coming.

Cernovich has repeatedly pushed bigotry, and shilled for white supremacists and the “alt-right”

Before rebranding away from the term when it became unpopular, Cernovich was among the main online proponents of the “alt-right,” rallying against diversity and going on the record to represent the movement’s views while declaring himself to be “alt-right friendly.” He also used to promote some of its figures, including “Baked Alaska” (who is white supremacist and serial-self owner Tim Gionet), Nazi sympathizer Milo Yiannopoulos (whose handle was @Nero before he got permanently banned from Twitter), and white supremacist Ricky Vaughn.

One of his tweets supportive of the “alt-right” even gave credence to the idea of “white genocide,” a common white supremacist trope.

In one video, Cernovich trivially used the n-word:

He also complained about “thugs” attacking “me and my kind,” and he admitted that he was “happy” that a white supporter of Black Lives Matter was stabbed to death, saying he wouldn’t be stabbed because “I’m a … man.”

During one of his broadcasts to his followers, Cernovich repeatedly used a homophobic slur.

He has said, “Anywhere Muslims go, they’re blowing things up.” He also said that Muslims in America may want to “kill all women.” In another video, Cernovich warned transgender Americans that if refugees in Germany “find out about you, they’ll rape you and kill you.”

Cernovich called the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) “anti-America” and said that it is “extorting Jews.” He also replied “exactly” when Alex Jones said ADL has “always been the group that feeds on the Jews working with the Nazis.”

Cernovich repeatedly pushed rape denial and misogyny

Cernovich has tried to hide his misogynistic musings, which the self-declared former “total hottie” used to post on his site Danger and Play. That site was a blog “about how to pick up women” and featured posts like “Misogyny Gets You Laid.”

One of his posts featured statements that minimized rape, including, “If you believe in rape culture, I understand a lot about you: you’re a gullible fool who believes feminists.” In a now-archived post, Cernovich denied the existence of date rape:

Additionally, in a post offering advice on “how to choke a woman” he claimed, “Women only want to have consensual sex with men they know could rape them,” and confessed to having “choked women unconscious” on occasion. He also advocated for choking women “when standing around,” saying to do it when she “acts up.” He’s on the record offering similar advice:

Cernovich once presented consent as a burden, saying, “If you as a man read a signal wrong, you’re a rapist.” In one video, Cernovich complained, “If your son, or you, … has sex with your girlfriend while she is sleeping … that’s technically rape.”

He has also said that “there is probably 10 men enslaved to every one woman enslaved.”

Similarly, in a now-deleted article titled “When In Doubt, Whip It Out,” Cernovich wrote about exposing himself to a date who refused his sexual advances, saying she “wasn’t freaked out” by him masturbating in the backseat of her car and suggesting his readers to not “settle for the make out. If possible, at least pull out your dick. If you can get her to touch it, even better.”

A 2016 Mediaite report rounded up a sample of Cernovich’s misogynistic tweets, which included “Have you guys ever tried ‘raping’ a girl without using force? Try it. It’s basically impossible. Date rape does not exist,” as well as “Not being a slut is the only proven way to avoid AIDS. If you love black women, slut shame them.” Mediaite additionally noted Cernovich had tweeted and deleted: “A whore will let her friend ruin your life with a false rape case. So why should I care when women are raped?”

...

==

metoo mirror

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/07/27/In-their-own-words-the-online-far-rights-motive-to-dig-up-liberal-figures-old-tweets-reven/

...Over the past week, a number of far-right trolls, led by the provocateur and propagandist Mike Cernovich, have been on the warpath against prominent liberal figures in what they see as revenge for the scrutiny instances of explicitly racist, misogynist, and bigoted speech receives on social media.

Their principal tactic? Digging up tweets from up to 10 years ago and weaponizing them against their authors in efforts to, at best, discredit outspoken liberal actors, directors and comedians, and at worst, get them fired.

Last week, Cernovich publicized director James Gunn's offensive Twitter jokes about pedophilia and other topics, leading Disney to fire him on Friday from his role as director of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.​From Cernovich’s perspective, it was a staggering victory -- and one he cast as borne of earnest concern for children in Hollywood.

It’s not the first time Cernovich has made spurious accusations of pedophilia -- he was prominently involved in promoting the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democratic politicians were involved in running a child sex slave ring from the basement of a D.C. pizzeria. Pizzagate eventually had chilling real-life consequences -- in December 2016, a man drove to Washington and fired a military-style assault weapon inside the family restaurant. However, unlike Pizzagate, Gunn’s now-deleted tweets were real -- and Cernovich’s resurfacing of them and getting Gunn, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, fired as a consequence represented a successful escalation of tactics.

Other far-right figures like MAGA troll Jack Posobiec eagerly amplified Cernovich’s campaign against Gunn. And after Gunn’s firing, the campaign to resurface offensive tweets by left-leaning public figures only escalated. Comedians including Michael Ian Black, Sarah Silverman and Patton Oswalthave come under fire for previous tweets that contained distasteful jokes trivializing pedophilia. Dan Harmon, co-creator of the hit animated series Rick and Morty, left Twitter after right-wing figures recirculated an offensive 2009 parody he made of the show Dexter. (An investigation by Polygon found that users on the message boards 4chan and Reddit had resurfaced the video before Cernovich began tweeting about it.)

Throughout the campaign, Cernovich and others -- including Ted Cruz -- have maintained a facade of concern for children in what they claim to perceive as Hollywood’s toxic environment.

However, previous statements from far-right trolls, including Cernovich himself, poke holes in the fake-concern narrative, making absolutely clear that the primary motive of this new offensive is victory in an ongoing culture war -- and more specifically, taking revenge against the left.

In 2017, Cernovich stated that his goal was to emulate CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and the KFILE research team, whose members frequently comb through the social media and work histories of government and political figures and have discovered racist and conspiracy theory-mongering comments that affect these individuals’ ability to provide unbiased public service. Cernovich, by contrast, has targeted figures in the entertainment industry.  

Moreover, Cernovich also explicitly stated that accusations of enabling or accepting pedophilia were part of his mission to use the “rules and tactics” of the left against liberal figures.

Other trolls in the MAGA universe have been even more explicit, indicating that the success represented by Gunn’s firing is a signal of a tactical shift, not an authentic moral concern. Posobiec touted the “strategic significance” of the event:

On 4chan, users in a thread titled “Dan Harmon is a pedophile,” which originally surfaced Harmon’s 2009 parody, were even more explicit about their rationale, repeatedly citing the firing of Roseanne Barr as a motive to vengefully “take scalps”:

CRTV’s Gavin McInnes, the misogynist founder of the violent, fraternal men-only organization Proud Boys, was even more transparent in his articulation of the bad faith that undergirds this latest salvo in the online culture battle. “There’s a new trend going on where the right is exposing the left’s pedophilia, and what they’re really doing is playing dirty pool,” he said in the July 24 edition of his CRTV show Get Off My Lawn. “Now, I know that these pedophile jokes that Cernovich caught these liberals saying are jokes. But I don't have to -- I can pretend I don't know they're jokes. Because they started this war." [vid]...

==

mma

One of the many, many horrifying trends of the Trump era has been the mainstreaming of white nationalism. Just days ago a sitting congressman quote-tweeted a neo-Nazi. That same congressman cites a white nationalist publication on his website. A neo-Confederate candidate who is friends with Mike Cernovich and other "alt-right" figures just won Virginia's Republican Senate nomination. And these are by no means isolated cases.

While conservative pundits on CNN and MSNBC keep saying that this is not the party that they know, the reality is that this is Trump's Republican party. There is even a show on primetime that features white nationalism talking points. It's long past time to move past denialism or ignorance.

==

nyer

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/trolls-for-trump

October 31, 2016 Issue

Trolls for Trump

Meet Mike Cernovich, the meme mastermind of the alt-right.

By Andrew Marantz

On Mike Cernovich’s blog, he developed a theory of white-male identity politics.Illustration by Matt Dorfman

In late August, Hillary Clinton announced that she would soon give a speech, in Reno, Nevada, linking Donald J. Trump to what has become known as the alt-right—a loose online affiliation of white nationalists, neo-monarchists, masculinists, conspiracists, belligerent nihilists, and social-media trolls. The alt-right has no consistent ideology; it is a label, like “snob” or “hipster,” that is often disavowed by people who exemplify it. The term typically applies to conservatives and reactionaries who are active on the Internet and too anti-establishment to feel at home in the Republican Party. Bizarrely, this category includes the Republican nominee for President. It also includes extremist commentators, long belittled or ignored by the media, whom mainstream pundits are now starting to take seriously.

The afternoon before Clinton’s speech, Mike Cernovich, a thick-chested white man in his late thirties, sitting on a veranda in Southern California, opened the live-streaming app Periscopeon his iPad and filmed a video called “How to fight back against Sick Hillary and the #ClintonNewsNetwork.” By “Clinton News Network,” he meant CNN and other corporate media outlets. The word “sick” described Clinton morally and physically: Cernovich was among the first to insinuate publicly that Clinton had a grave neurological condition, and that the media was covering it up. By “fight back,” he meant, basically, tweeting. Internet activism is sometimes derided as “slacktivism”—a fair characterization when an online campaign tries to, say, cure aids or end child labor. When the goal is to seed social media with misinformation, though, online organizing can be shockingly effective.

“Tomorrow, everybody’s going to be Googling the alt-right,” Cernovich said. He has an adenoidal tenor and a lisp, but when he is indignant he can be an impassioned orator. “The narrative is being written, and you’d better get off your fucking asses and write your own.” His feed filled with real-time comments. (@beelman_matt: “PC is for PUSSIES”; @ciswhitemale: “Mike is a bosss.”)

Cernovich wore a plaid shirt, partially unbuttoned to display his chest hair. Visible behind him were a swimming pool, trimmed boxwoods, and a mountain glowing in the afternoon sun. (@CanadaUncuck: “nice pool.”) Cernovich often blogs about fitness, and he publishes self-help books for men. He also writes about how to build a personal brand online; his maxims include “Conflict is attention” and “Attention is influence.” Although he doesn’t appear on Fox News or syndicated radio shows, he is an expert at using social media to drive alt-right ideas into the heart of American political discourse.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do tomorrow,” he said. “We have to think of agood hashtag, and we have to have all of our memes lined up.” He suggested talking points for his followers to deploy, such as “If the alt-right is racist, is Israel racist, too?” Cernovich prefers to call himself an “American nationalist,” but he often uses “we” when discussing the alt-right movement. “We can control the narrative on Twitter,” he continued. “Mainstream media we’ve lost.” He said he hoped that Clinton’s Reno speech would elicit “a full-scale media attack on me,” adding, “I want this to become an international trending topic.”

Clinton did not mention Cernovich, but she attacked Alex Jones, the paranoiac Texas radio host, and Breitbart.com, the Pravda of the alt-right. She listed some recent Breitbart headlines, including “Would You Rather Have Feminism or Cancer?,” which were written by Milo Yiannopoulos, the fame-seeking troll. Cernovich calls Yiannopoulos “one of the only guys, other than me, who’s doing social media right.” Before the current election, Cernovich and Yiannopoulos were known primarily as Internet misogynists. Cernovich was drawn to political commentary after recognizing a kindred spirit in Donald Trump.

Yiannopoulos, writing on Breitbart the next day, called Clinton’s speech “a drive-by shooting with a water pistol fired from a mobility scooter.” Alex Jones recorded a video in which he stood in his back yard, wiping sweat from his brow, as he muttered about the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. “People say, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve hit the big time—Hillary Clinton talked about you,’ ” he scoffed. “Give me a break. Hillary Clinton’s average YouTubes, on her own channel, have, like, five thousand views. Our average one has hundreds of thousands.” His video was viewed more times than the official upload of Clinton’s speech.

Cernovich covered the Reno speech on Periscope. “Is she gonna fall?” he said, watching live footage of Clinton approaching the stage. “She’s grabbing the handrail!” He tweeted, “Sick Hillary grabs handrail as walking up steps. #AltRightMeans.” The hashtag was already trending on Twitter, as the alt-right’s supporters and opponents competed to define the movement. Political spin battles are waged online every minute, and it can be difficult to gauge who is winning. Media consumers don’t believe everything they read, and, because of personalization algorithms, no two social-media feeds look the same. The next day, the mainstream consensus was that the two sides had fought to a draw.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

Lies and Truth in the Era of Trump

Cernovich thought that Clinton’s speech “was the stupidest thing she could have done.” He added, “Her social-media advisers are twenty-four-year-old basic bitches who feel triggered by us, and so they asked their boss to yell at us and make us go away. Well, we’re not going away. They just made us stronger.”

Cernovich lives fifty miles south of Los Angeles, in a deep-red congressional district. On the Internet, he represents himself as a “Pulitzer-worthy journalist” who runs Cernovich Media, a “global worldwide brand.” When we first spoke, on the phone, I asked him whether he worked from home or in an office full of employees. Chuckling, he said, “It’s definitely just me, dude.”

I visited him in mid-September. He had recently moved to a cul-de-sac where every house has stucco walls, a ceramic tile roof, and bland xeriscaping. He met me outside, wearing a rumpled gingham shirt and jeans. A day-old Orange County Register lay at his feet. He looked fleshier than he did in his videos, and his eye contact was less steady with me than it is on camera. Next door, a sticker on a garbage bin advertised WorldNetDaily, a Web site known for promoting birtherism. Cernovich hadn’t met the neighbors yet. “They’d probably geek out if I told them my name,” he said. “Then I’d have to say hi every time I see them, and maybe they’d want to be friends—nah, not worth it.” [cartoon id="a19850"]

Cernovich trained as a lawyer. In 2003, he was accused of raping a woman he knew; the charge was later dropped, but a judge ordered him to do community service for misdemeanor battery. (His record has since been expunged.) On his first blog, which he started in 2004, he offered a libertarian critique of prosecutorial overreach, emphasizing free speech and false rape allegations. He launched his current blog, Danger and Play, in 2011, after his first wife filed for divorce.

His second wife, Shauna, who is twenty-nine, and pregnant with their first child, was in the kitchen. She is as warm as her husband is taciturn. “I’m so embarrassed!” she said, apologizing for an imaginary mess. The house was clean and compact; the small, paved back yard had a single lawn chair. The lush veranda in the Periscope videos belonged to Shauna’s parents, who live a few blocks away.

Mike and Shauna met in 2011, at a bar in Santa Monica. “He was pretty aggressive,” Shauna told me. “He grabbed my arm, pulled me into him, and said, ‘You fit nicely.’ ”

“It sounds creepy, but it looked less creepy in context,” Mike said.

“It worked,” Shauna said. “We were making out, like, five minutes later.”

Mike said that, when they started dating, “I didn’t take it seriously. But she just refused to go away, and now—”

“I’m married and pregnant!” Shauna said, smiling.

“And my life is over,” Mike said, half-smiling.

“We’re having a girl!” Shauna said. “I think it’ll be good for him, soften him up a bit.”

“I’ll be nice to her, as long as she’s not a basic bitch,” Mike said.

Cernovich sat at the kitchen table, facing a mirror, and placed his laptop next to a teapot full of flowers. (Shauna is in charge of decorating.) “Right now, a hundred and twenty-eight people are reading Danger and Play,” he said. “What’s fun is when you get a hot story and watch the number tick up into the thousands, like a video game.” Nowadays, the blog is mostly a platform for pro-Trump spin, but at first it was about how to pick up women. Its name comes from Nietzsche. (“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”) Early posts included “Misogyny Gets You Laid” and “When Should You Compliment a Woman?” (Answer: “During or after sex.”)

Early in Shauna’s relationship with Mike, she read Danger and Play, including such posts as “How to Cheat on Your Girlfriend.” She said, “I would come home from work crying—‘How can you write such rude things?’ He’d go, ‘You don’t understand, babe, this is just how guys talk.’ ” (Advice from the blog: “Always call your girl ‘babe,’ ” to avoid mixing up names.) Shauna, who has stopped working, continued, “I was still upset, though, and he eventually deleted some older posts.”

“I rewrote some of the wording,” Mike insisted. “I never disavow things I’ve said.” Throughout our September conversations, he referred to his more misogynist remarks as “locker-room talk.”

His political analysis was nearly as crass as his dating advice. In March, he tweeted, “Hillary’s face looks like melting candle wax. Imagine what her brain looks like.” Next, he tweeted a picture of Clinton winking, which he interpreted as “a mild stroke.” By August, he was declaring that she had both a seizure disorder and Parkinson’s disease.

“There are a million things wrong with Hillary,” Cernovich told me. “She’s a documented liar. She’s massively corrupt. She wants to let in more so-called refugees, which makes her an existential threat to the West.” (He calls the Syrian refugee crisis a “media lie.”) “But I was looking at the conversation online—what was getting through to people and what wasn’t—and none of that was sticking. It’s too complex. I thought that the health stuff would be more visceral, more resonant from a persuasion standpoint, and so I pushed that.”

On September 11th, Clinton fainted after attending a memorial service at Ground Zero. Cernovich wrote a post called “Complete Timeline of Hillary’s Health #HillarysHealth,” which included such data points as “peculiar travel habits” and “lengthy naps.” It got two hundred and forty thousand page views—less than a marquee Huffington Post story, but impressive for a blog with no advertising budget. More important, #HillarysHealth became a national trending topic on Twitter. That day, Chris Cillizza, a centrist pundit at the Washington Post, wrote an article titled “Hillary Clinton’s Health Just Became a Real Issue in This Campaign.” Scott Greer, a deputy editor of the Daily Caller, tweeted, “Cernovich memed #SickHillary into reality. Never doubt the power of memes.”

Without months of priming by Cernovich and others, Clinton’s collapse might have been seen as an isolated event. And the alt-right rumors may have prompted Clinton to be secretive about having pneumonia, making it a bigger story when it was revealed. “I decline the Pulitzer for my work on Hillary’s health,” Cernovich tweeted. “I will not accept a scam award from a scam organization.”

There is a lot of discussion in certain parts of the Internet about “red-pill moments.” In the 1999 film “The Matrix,” the hero faces a choice: the blue pill will allow him to stay within a comfortable delusion; the red pill will cause him to wake up. “Red pill” is good branding—it’s cowardly to live a lie. On many message boards, though, the lie being dismantled is gender equality.

“My first marriage was ruined by feminist indoctrination,” Cernovich told me. He married his first wife in 2003, when they were law students at Pepperdine. Initially, he said, the “power arrangement” was “fifty-fifty.” Then came a realization: “What she actually wanted was for me to be more assertive, to be the man in the relationship. So I would be more assertive, and she’d be happier for a few days. Then she’d go, ‘No, I need to be in charge,’ and we’d butt heads.” They separated in 2011. (Cernovich’s ex-wife declined to be interviewed.)

After law school, his wife became a successful attorney in Silicon Valley. But Cernovich was not admitted to the California bar until nine years after getting his law degree. In the meantime, he says, he got by with “freelance legal research” and “appellate stuff.” Cernovich’s wife earned millions of dollars in stock from an I.P.O.; he told me that he received “seven figures” in the divorce settlement. This seems to have been, and might still be, his primary source of funds. (He insists that book sales provide his main income.)

Cernovich says that during college, at the University of Illinois, he was socialized to be submissive. “I was friends with a lot of girls who had crushes on me, but I was too polite to fuck them,” he said. After his divorce, he reinvented himself as an alpha male. His self-published 2015 book, “Gorilla Mindset,” is a manual for men who want to “unleash the animal” within them. The book is filed under Gender Studies in the Amazon Kindle store. Until recently, it was the top seller in that category, ahead of “We Should All Be Feminists,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. [cartoon id="a20409"]

On his blog, Cernovich developed a theory of white-male identity politics: men were oppressed by feminism, and political correctness prevented the discussion of obvious truths, such as the criminal proclivities of certain ethnic groups. His opponents were beta males, losers, or “cucks”—alt-right slang for “cuckolds.” “To beat a person, you lower his or her social status,” he wrote on Danger and Play. “Logic is pointless.”

Although he disdained electoral politics (“No thinking man buys into this two-party political system”), he was in an ideal position to foresee Trump’s rise. In July, 2015, he tweeted, “I said if a Republican acted like me and ran for office, it’d be a movement. Donald Trump has proven me right. People are tired of pussies.” Politics is a blood sport, but, during the primaries, Jeb Bush and the rest of Trump’s “cuckservative” opponents preferred to be genteel. “What are Trump’s policies? I don’t particularly care,” Cernovich wrote on Danger and Play. And, in another post: “If Trump offends you, it’s because you live in a cucked world where no one speaks their minds.”

While I was in California, Cernovich hosted a meet-up for his readers, on the boardwalk in Hermosa Beach. I arrived early, not quite sure what to look for. A crowd had gathered around a drum circle. “Can you feel the Earth’s rhythm?” a drummer asked. Nearby, a film crew from Women.com was shooting a video about sex positivity. At an outdoor bar, I spotted some beefy white men, in T-shirts and shorts. “Cernovich?” I asked. They nodded.

About sixty people showed up, including a few women and people of color. Cernovich’s admirers peppered him with questions. “What about Hillary’s body count?” a young man asked, referring to rumors that Clinton has ordered the killing of several enemies—among them John F. Kennedy, Jr.—or has murdered them herself. Cernovich looked skeptical, and the young man was disappointed. “Then again, Bill’s brother was a drug dealer, and they have ties to organized crime,” Cernovich said. “So who knows?”

Cernovich told me, “I believe in strong borders, including keeping out Islamic terrorists. If people think that’s inherently racist, fine—but I’m an American nationalist, not a white nationalist.” A few people at the meet-up were white nationalists—not the skinhead type but the more polished, just-asking-the-question variety. Some attendees proudly called themselves “deplorables,” and many praised Cernovich as a corrective to traditional journalism. “Corporate news is fucking fake, dude,” a cybersecurity consultant named Jeff Martinez said. “You can just tell.” An informal poll revealed that no one believed in polls. Trump was going to be President, no matter what the cucked media said.

Most conversations touched on free speech (which everyone was for) and political correctness (which everyone was against). “I’m sick of the censorship, the words you can’t say,” Steven McHale, a marketing analyst, told me. Milo Yiannopoulos had recently been banned from Twitter, and the attendees were outraged. “It’s straight-up thought policing,” someone said. “It’s ‘1984.’ ”

The prevailing logic was that, short of yelling fire in a crowded theatre, anyone should be able to say anything, in any venue. But censure is not censorship. The Constitution guarantees that the government won’t restrict what you can say; it does not guarantee that you can shout obscenities on CNN, or that you can harass co-workers, or that you can make racist arguments without being made to feel like a racist. One of the unifying marks of the alt-right sensibility is the assumption that no speech act is beyond the pale. Instead of being offended by blackface or pictures of dead babies, you are encouraged to see them as funny, even if you don’t understand why. At the meet-up, a pudgy man wore a T-shirt with a picture of Harambe, the gorilla that was killed earlier this year at the Cincinnati Zoo. People pointed at the shirt and snickered, adding, “Dicks out for Harambe.” I asked the man to explain the joke. “It’s a funny thing people say, or post, or whatever,” he said. “It’s just a thing on the Internet.” At times, it can seem like anything—a dead gorilla, a rape threat, a Presidential election—is just a thing on the Internet.

“You guys want a snack?” Shauna asked.

“Not now, babe,” Mike said, his eyes on his computer screen. She put out a bowl of pita chips, which he ignored.

It was 11 a.m., and he had been sitting at his kitchen table for hours. First, he appeared, via Skype, on “The Gavin McInnes Show,” an online alt-right talk show. Then he perused Twitter. In September, Cernovich’s tweets were seen more than a hundred million times. When he bragged about this on Twitter, one of his followers replied, “Guerrilla Mindset: How Mike Cernovich waged war on journalism and won.”

“Some people say they hate Beltway insiders and establishment media types, but it’s actually sour grapes,” Cernovich said. (Ann Coulter came to mind.) “Deep down, they want the cool kids to love them. I actually fucking detest those people.” He grew up in Kewanee, a farming town in Illinois. Not long ago, he said, “I started looking into who these neocon policy wonks are. Every backstory was the same—East Coast, Harvard, trust fund, nepotism. Look, if the experts decide tomorrow that we’re going to war with Russia, who’s gonna fight that war? Jonah Goldberg and Ross Douthat? Fuck no. It’ll be guys I know from Kewanee.”

His parents are devout Christians. His mother didn’t finish high school; his father bounced between factory jobs, eventually working at a junk yard. “Kids I knew either joined the Army or didn’t leave town,” Cernovich said. “The smartest kid in the class above me got into the University of Chicago, and I went, ‘What’d he do wrong?’ Because, in my mind, a city is smaller than a state, so the University of Illinois had to be a better school.” Cernovich’s parents and his three siblings still live in the area, but he rarely visits or calls home. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “If I still believed in Jesus, we could talk about that.”

As we spoke, a fan sent him a message: Rush Limbaugh had just mentioned #ZombieHillary on his radio show. The hashtag, referring to Clinton’s supposed frailty, had trended the previous day on Twitter, after Cernovich encouraged his followers to use it. “I would like to claim credit for it, but I can’t,” Limbaugh had said. “Somebody on Twitter did it.” Cernovich told me, “He’ll never mention me by name, but he’s at least listening to the periphery.” [cartoon id="twohy-2002-04-08"]

People have always expressed extreme views online, but for many years there was no easy way for such opinions to spread. The Internet was a vast landscape dotted with isolated viruses. The rise of social networks was like the advent of air travel: a virus can now conquer the world in a day. Instead of picking up a newspaper or visiting its home page, people scan their social-media accounts, where myriad information sources—the Daily Mail, links posted by Steph Curry, a distant relative’s Facebook rants—compete for their attention.

The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene”; he defined it as any “unit of cultural transmission” that stays alive by “leaping from brain to brain.” In a footnote to the 1989 edition, he wrote, “Computers are increasingly tied together. Many of them are literally wired up together in electronic mail exchange. . . . It is a perfect milieu for self-replicating programs to flourish.” Dawkins was worried about computer viruses. He couldn’t have predicted Guccifer 2.0 or #ZombieHillary.

“We may be at a threshold,” Dawkins told me recently. “In the past, I would’ve been tempted to say, about the Internet, that although everybody has a megaphone, in many cases it’s a quiet one. You can put up a YouTube video, but who’s going to watch it? Now, however ridiculous what you’re saying is, if you make it memetically successful, something really bad can spread through the culture.”

Cernovich had another red-pill moment during a trip to Budapest, where he saw hundreds of Syrian émigrés camped out in a train station, waiting to be resettled elsewhere in Hungary. Based on the media coverage of the crisis, he’d expected to see squalor, amputees, wailing children. Instead, he said, “there were able-bodied men playing soccer. Guys and girls flirting. It hit me—these people aren’t refugees. It’s a hoax.” He shared photographs of the refugees on Facebook, writing, “There is no oppression. The media lied.” The photos were shared nearly five thousand times—his first taste of viral fame.

Cernovich realized that a meme could reach more people than a newspaper story, without having to cross an editor’s desk. With savvy framing, an alternative voice could seem as authoritative as the nightly news. He decided to become one of those voices.

He had already insinuated himself into public conflicts in order to gain followers. (“Conflict is attention.”) And in 2014 he became a champion of GamerGate, a vicious campaign against feminists in the video-game industry. He goaded his opponents on Twitter: “Who cares about breast cancer and rape? Not me.” Cernovich’s affiliation with GamerGate made him, he said, “toxic in the eyes of a lot of people,” but he calculated that the exposure was worth it.

He picked fights with celebrities on Twitter. (Seth Rogen took the bait; Cernovich called him “Cuck Rogen.”) “I’m not a pure troll,” Cernovich told me. “Pure trolls are amoral”—they post swastikas, he suggested, not out of an allegiance to Nazism but because they enjoy riling people. “I use trolling tactics to build my brand.”

Pro-Trump activism channelled several of Cernovich’s interests: he could hurt a feminist’s chances of becoming President, associate himself with the year’s top story, and deploy brawler methods on behalf of someone who is even more ruthless online than he is. In mid-October, Cernovich released another book, “maga Mindset,” about Trump’s “unapologetically masculine” persona.

Ever since the advent of the mass media, professional journalists have been a bulwark against seditious or far-fetched theories. One might attribute this fact to their paternalism, their myopia, or their rectitude. In any case, their work tended to have a homogenizing effect. Newscasters told us that the world was more or less as we expected it to be, and we more or less believed them. This system had its faults: after all, far-fetched theories are sometimes true. In 1922, Walter Lippmann, in his book “Public Opinion,” warned of “the manufacture of consent,” a power that media gatekeepers could use for good or for ill.

That was a twentieth-century problem. The media no longer has the ability to manufacture consent. Walter Cronkite was once the most trusted man in America; in 2013, according to a Reader’s Digest survey, the most trusted person was Tom Hanks. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Walter Cronkite lied about everything,” Cernovich said. “Before Twitter, how would you have known? Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”

These days, Cernovich’s primary target is the “hoaxing media.” He told me, “The mainstream media has lost so much legitimacy at this point that if they reported, ‘We just saw Trump beat the shit out of a guy on the street,’ skeptical people like my readers would go, ‘Really? Is there video? Was the video doctored?’ ” Such casual cynicism, of course, redounds to Trump’s advantage. For his part, Trump may have changed his mind about almost every policy proposal and campaign strategy, but he consistently maintains that journalists are scum.

In 2010, when the right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart started a blog called Big Journalism, the name was ironic. Now Breitbart.com gets more traffic than the Los Angeles Times, and Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s former editor-in-chief, is running Trump’s campaign. Cernovich said, “Going by the statistics, I’m less influential than some people”—Trump, say, or Kim Kardashian—“but way more influential than some punk blogger at Politico or The Weekly Standard who thinks of himself as part of the media élite. Objectively, I am the new media.”

As Shauna Cernovich was leaving the house to visit her parents, she told me, “They don’t fully understand what Michael does. They get that he likes Trump and that he puts stuff on the Internet—they just don’t get how that’s a job.” Her parents are secular Persian Muslims who left Iran before it became a theocracy. “My dad hates when women cover their hair,” she said.

“We sometimes joke that he’s more Islamophobic than I am,” Mike said.

“My dad actually created an anonymous Twitter account so he could troll Muslims,” Shauna said. “At the same time, he hates Trump, because he’s, like, ‘If he’s saying negative things about different groups, then how do we know he’s not going to come after Persians one day?’ Even if you believe certain things, you shouldn’t necessarily say it openly.”

Mike shrugged. “I don’t think any ideas are off limits,” he said. “Actions, yes. Words, no.” [cartoon id="walsh-2012-09-24"]

He stood up and stretched, thrusting his chest forward and his arms back. “Lowers your cortisol,” he explained. He poured himself a coffee, sat down, and read articles about Ahmad Rahami, who was suspected of planting bombs in New Jersey and Manhattan. Developments in the Rahami case were big news in the New York area, but not everywhere on the Internet. “If there’s a story that can hurt Hillary, I want it in the news cycle,” Cernovich said. “When I first started, that meant figuring out how news cycles work.” One way to propel a story into the mainstream is to get it linked by the Drudge Report. “If it’s on Drudge, then it’s on ‘Hannity,’ ” Cernovich said. “If it’s on ‘Hannity,’ then Brian Stelter’s talking about it on CNN.” The Drudge Report favors big newspapers and established right-wing blogs; Danger and Play is not on the list. “If I have a really hot story, I might leak it to someone at Breitbart, or to someone else who can get the Drudge link.” That journalist usually returns the favor by embedding a Cernovich tweet in the story.

Twitter is Cernovich’s favorite medium for promoting memes. The site devotes a prominent place to its list of trending topics—the most discussed phrases and hashtags of the moment, according to a proprietary algorithm. “It starts on Periscope,” he explained. “I’ll show you.” He propped his iPad upright on the kitchen table, so that the camera lens faced the mirror, and started filming.

Within seconds, thousands of viewers had signed on. “We’ve gotta get a hashtag trending,” he said. “We definitely need to remind the world that Hillary Clinton is bringing in the terrorists.” Viewers made suggestions, and Cernovich, monitoring the feed on his laptop, read them aloud. “HillarysMigrants is good,” he said. “HillarysTerrorists is good. Yeah, just keep throwing them out.” He overlooked #hillaryshitmen and #hillarysmigrantcuntlickers, as well as a commenter who wrote, “Nice tea kettle of flowers Cuck.”

After a few minutes, Cernovich chose #HillarysMigrants. He instructed his followers, “Remind people that Angela Merkel, George Soros, Hillary Clinton—they’re all together. Post pictures of them together. Post pictures of the terrorist attacks.” While he was talking, Shauna returned home and sat on a couch in the background of the shot. (“If I stayed out of his videos all the time, I’d never be allowed in the living room,” she told me.) He went on for twenty more minutes, referring to George Soros’s son six times as a “basic bitch.”

He ended the Periscope video and searched for #HillarysMigrants on Twitter. “Ninety-two people have posted to it in the past minute,” he said. Many of the tweets included images, as he’d requested: Clinton and Merkel laughing conspiratorially; a caricature of Clinton as a ventriloquist’s dummy, sitting on Soros’s lap. “It’s hard to tell yet whether this is a killer hashtag or just an O.K. one,” he said. A hashtag will trend, he estimates, if it gets thirty-five hundred tweets within an hour. “That’s a guess—Twitter keeps that stuff secret,” he said.

Around 3:30 p.m., he announced that he was done for the day. “I’ll go to the gym, relax for a bit,” he said. Before closing his laptop, he checked his direct messages on Twitter, and found a tip alleging that, in 2014, a Reddit user had asked for help removing a “VERY VIP” e-mail address “from a bunch of archived e-mail.” The tipster claimed that the Reddit user was Paul Combetta, one of Hillary Clinton’s I.T. staffers. Cernovich clicked the link to the Reddit thread and noticed that it had been deleted. “Son of a bitch!” he said. “This might actually be true.”

He returned to muckraking mode. “We’re going to make a whole new news cycle about her fucking e-mails again!” he said. “This poor fucking woman.” He started a new Periscope video. “What do you guys want to do for a hashtag?” he said. He decided on #HillarysHacker. It was trending before he finished the video. That day, more than forty-two thousand tweets were posted with the hashtag.

I returned to Cernovich’s house the next morning. By then, the Reddit story had been covered by Vice and New York, and a congressman had asked prosecutors in Washington, D.C., to look into it. Cernovich had tweeted dozens of times since I’d left, including at 1:30 a.m. He was wearing the same gingham shirt. “I didn’t go to the gym last night,” he said, sheepishly. “I’ve gained twenty pounds during this fucking election.”

He told me that he’d been reading Andrew Breitbart’s 2011 autobiography, “Righteous Indignation”: “There’s a part where he’s on a plane for five hours, without Wi-Fi, and he has withdrawal symptoms. I relate to that. And, you know, Breitbart had a huge cultural impact, but he died of heart failure at forty-three.”

The following week, Cernovich went to the first Presidential debate, at Hofstra University. He lacked press credentials, so he found a few dozen Jill Stein supporters on the perimeter of the campus, and streamed their protest via Periscope. “Police keep sending us to different areas,” he texted me. He claimed that this was “psyops” designed to dampen the protesters’ morale. In a Periscope video called “No free speech at #Debates2016,” he said, “Mainstream media’s not gonna talk about this.”

“The cops are Soros people!” one commenter wrote.

“Harambe!” another wrote.

I was inside the gates, in a gym where the TV networks had set up broadcast booths. I ran into Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business anchor, who was wearing pancake makeup. I asked him if he’d heard of Cernovich. “Absolutely!” he said. “I follow him on Twitter. Seems very smart.”

We parted, then Dobbs chased me down. “Can I revise that?” he said. “I’m not sure I follow him.” (He does.) “I’ve seen his stuff, and I think it’s interesting,” he added. “Interesting is a good thing, right?”

Cernovich watched the debate from a parking lot, on his phone. Afterward, he gave me a ride to Manhattan. Trump had spent much of the debate sniffling audibly, and I asked Cernovich if he worried about Trump’s health. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they messed with his mike to make it sound like that,” he said.

He predicted that traditional journalists would spin the debate in Clinton’s favor. “The left likes to talk about power structures, right?” he said. “Well, the media still thinks of itself as speaking truth to power. What they don’t realize is that someone like me is perceived as the new Fourth Estate. Maybe they should check their structural privilege.” The “paternalistic” media, he said, was giving way to a more democratic one. “It makes journalists crazy, because they used to be in control,” he said. “They can’t control people anymore. Everyone has a voice now.” ?

Andrew Marantz, a contributing editor, has written for The New Yorker since 2011

==

frum bk

press: hannity and new say no indep media eg CNN

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

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

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

cernovich pizzagate guy got WH leaks (susan rice unmasked)

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

media restriction 1st sign of decline of democ 122

==

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/mike-cernovich-says-social-media-censorship-is-a-warm-up-for-christian-persecution

Mike Cernovich, a self-described “New Right” pundit who gained notoriety for peddling a variety of conspiracy theories such as “Pizzagate,” warned Christians that the effort by social media websites to crack down on conspiracy theories and extremist rhetoric was not actually aimed at people like himself, but rather at people who declare their Christian faith.

In a live streamvideo aired this afternoon, Cernovich brought up reports that Facebook had threatened to suspend a Christian satire site after fact-checking nonprofit Snopes flagged its articleclaiming that CNN purchased an industrial washing machine to “spin” the news. Facebook apologized for the error, but Cernovich used the event to tell listeners that social media companies want to “destroy” Christian ways of life.

“Don’t defend me. I don’t need you to defend me. Here’s what I need you to say: ‘Facebook and Snopes, they hate Christians. If you let them get rid of Cernovich, we are next.’ And that’s the truth. It’s proven now,” Cernovich said. “So rather than let people drag you into the weeds about Cernovich and this and that, just say, ‘They are only going after Cernovich because the real target is Christians like us.’”

Cernovich urged viewers to download and reupload his warning on their own social media accounts because “none of us are going to be here much longer.” He declared, “If you’re a Christian, Facebook—they hate you. There’s no other way to put it.”

“They want you to be afraid of the gospel. If you preach the gospel, or you even profess your love of Christ and then just make jokes, if all you say now is ‘I’m a Christian’ and then you make jokes, you will be targeted by Snopes, you’ll be targeted by CNN, you’ll be targeted by Facebook,” he said.

He went on to warn that the battle against Christians will not end with social media censorship.

“If you think this is going to end when they ban you from social media, if you think they aren’t going to make it so you can’t have a job if you’re a Christian, that you can’t run a business if you’re a Christian—this is just a warm-up,” Cernovich said.

He added, “They want to destroy your entire way of life. They want to put you in a predicament that you’ll never be able to escape.”

...

==

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/campus-conservatives-should-check-their-own-trolling/

On Monday, October 30, alt-right media personality Mike Cernovich spoke at Columbia University at the invitation of the College Republicans.The invitation was an embarrassment. Cernovich has built a career on leveraging the power of social media to turn lies into likes—he came to mainstream prominence through his Twitter promotion of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory alleging Democratic Party involvement in a child sex ring. He has claimed that “date rape does not exist.”

The Columbia University Democrats quickly published an editorial in the campus newspaper denouncing the decision to invite Cernovich. If they had followed the all-too-common campus script, they would then have called on students to shut down or shout down the talk, as has happened on campuses like Middlebury and Berkeley. But instead they urged a much wiser strategy: Don’t feed the trolls. “When students shout down extremists, these bigots are empowered rather than erased,” the editorial advised. “The bigots receive media coverage, and with it, legitimacy that they should never have.”

Instead of trying to prevent Cernovich from speaking, the CU Democrats announced that they would be countering Cernovich’s speech with speech of their own. They scheduled an event featuring speakers who would give an academic perspective on white nationalism at the same time as Cernovich’s talk.

They argued that bringing Cernovich to campus undermined, rather than strengthened, discourse: “If CUCR sought to represent conservative voices on campus, they would bring real Conservatives who can challenge liberal ideas and provide value to our campus. Instead, they’ve chosen to bring racist provocateurs, drowning any possibility of real discussion underneath their bile.”

Speakers like Cernovich really do erode the opportunity for discourse on campus, by polarizing students into opposing camps with speech designed to engage tribal emotion rather than reason. And extreme protest tactics really do make the problem worse—amplifying the trolls while turning off moderates who might otherwise be supportive of the protesters’ message.

It’s no secret that the campus left has done much to erode the quality of discourse at American universities. But the campus right has been happily playing along, often sharing the far-left’s desire to turn campuses into battlefields at the expense of our social fabric. Many campus conservatives have chosen shock value and viral attention over intellectual rigor—nothing else explains the presence of angry buffoons like Cernovich at places like Columbia University.

To be sure, there is an important normative difference between groups seeking to add more speech to the public square and groups seeking to silence speech. As a rule, the former is preferable to the latter, and our laws and university policies should reflect that. Columbia’s certainly do. But the left and right are participating in the same dialectic process, with the same end result: tribal warfare. This means our civic health depends on both camps choosing to reform themselves.

Conservative groups on campus would do well to look to the concept of “virtuous discourse,” which is central to the mission of an innovative cross-partisan network of college students called BridgeUSA. BridgeUSA isn’t about watering down the debate—its founder was responsible for inviting conservative firebrand Ann Coulter to the University of California Berkeley campus earlier this year(she ended up canceling due to the threat of violent protests). But it does demand what they call “virtuous discourse,” which acknowledges that free speech may bring no benefits to campus unless speakers honor certain responsibilities: to truth, to civility, to respect, to decorum. These words have a conservative valence, and a nobler mission—a community dedicated to the pursuit of truth and learning.

The Founding Fathers believed in “ordered liberty”—that freedom could not coexist without virtue. George Washington wrote that the “security of a free Constitution” depends on “teaching the people…to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness.” The Founders predicted that forgetting this lesson would lead to despotism, as men who could not rule themselves would come to be ruled by others.

The importance of self-restraint through virtue lies at the core of both America’s founding and conservative thought. Young conservatives should feel proud to own such a rich intellectual legacy—it was Edmund Burke who wrote that “the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.” In times such as ours, that idea is countercultural, and therefore powerful.

Even at the Columbia event, Cernovich and his fans demonstrated values completely opposed to this conservative ideal. A Cernovich supporter played a prank in which he gave protestors a banner that contained a pro-pedophilia message and photographed them with it—at which point Cernovich and other alt-right figures re-tweeted the photo as authentic. Such wanton lying is precisely the licentiousness that Washington warned us about.

It’s hard to abstain from the attention and spectacle that inviting trolls can bring—and it’s even harder to avoid confusing this attention with the feeling that you’re accomplishing something worthwhile. That’s every college student’s dream, on both the left and the right, but they must navigate that dream in an age of social media dominance that constantly equates attention with worthiness. The Milo Yiannopoulos playbook stokes this dangerous trend, Washington’s ordered liberty and Burke’s restraints challenge it.

Conservatives can live up to this legacy by inviting speakers that mount serious, academic challenges to the liberal orthodoxy that prevails on many campuses. Not only will they uphold the traditions that make universities special, they will be more effective at changing minds and advancing their cause. Far left hysteria over conservative speakers will look ridiculous instead of heroic if they’re protesting scholars instead of un-credentialed Twitter personalities. Fence-sitters will see that the far left is guided by quasi-religious dogmatism instead of legitimate critique. And conservatives will center their best ideas in the court of public opinion.

Nicholas Phillips is a Research Associate at Heterodox Academy and President of the NYU School of LawFederalist Society.

---

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/now-far-right-pundits-are-calling-death-trumps-opponents

While he is notoriously stubborn and self-assured, President Donald Trump is also famous for being susceptible to the power of suggestion.

Trump demonstrates how easily persuadable he is by responding via Twitter to “Fox & Friends" almost every day. His campaign and White House staffers have admitted to this several times, albeit not on the record. But their actions have made clear they believe this: White House chief of staff John Kelly has reportedly prohibited staff members from giving Trump reading materials. More recently, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer asked that presidential aide and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller be kept out of an immigration meeting, lest he shape the president's thinking too much. Even Russian-controlled Twitter accounts have apparently been set to tweet at Trump during times he’s habitually online.

But the relationship between Trump and his admirers goes both ways. It has been observed that the people who have worked closely with the president, either in private or public life, eventually start behaving like him, even when he’s not around. Longtime lawyer Marc Kasowitz certainly demonstrated that when he threatened to stalk a "bitch" emailer. Trump’s personal physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, has also waxed Trumpian at times, describing his patient’s health as “extraordinary” and “astonishingly excellent.”

Given how the president and his close admirers tend to bring out the worst in each other, it’s particularly concerning how the most vehemently pro-Trump media outlets are going far beyond the sycophantic blather of “Fox & Friends” to outright calls for the president to jail or even execute people he doesn’t like -- particularly if they happen to be investigating connections between Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia.

In December, Fox News pundit and Trump ally Jeanine Pirro called on the president to implement a massive purge of officials who are not totally loyal.

“There is a cleansing needed in our FBI and Department of Justice — it needs to be cleansed of individuals who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in cuffs!” Pirro ranted.

The alleged need for large-scale firings and arrests within America’s intelligence agencies is a subject on which Pirro and her fellow Fox News Trump commentators Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have opined for many months now.

But Trump did not need months of persuasion to respond, however. As the New York Times reported on Thursday, the president ordered the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller in June, just a few weeks after he had been appointed. Luckily for Trump, White House counsel Don McGahn and other staffers reportedly declined to carry out the order.

But the president’s Fox fans not have been the only right-wing media figures urging Trump to jail various Democrats and government investigators.

On Tuesday, John Guandolo, a disgraced former FBI agentwho has made a second career as an anti-Muslim and pro-Trump commentator, repeatedly told viewers of the Christian television station theDove that anyone who had allegedly promoted the famous “Steele dossier” as a justification for wiretapping Trump campaign officials was guilty of “sedition and treason” and must be given the death penalty.

“People need to be tried, convicted and executed for treason,” Guandolo said, in remarks that were first reported by the blog Right Wing Watch. “They are conspiring to overthrow the government … they need to be charged, sent to jail, executed, etc., if the republic is to survive.”

Though Guandolo is a relatively obscure pundit, he is apparently respected by a number of federal law enforcement agencies who have repeatedly paid for his anti-Muslim training programs.

Fox News viewers have also been introduced to the idea of capital punishment for Trump's critics. In October, Sebastian Gorka, the former White House adviser who is now a “national security strategist” at Fox News, invoked a conspiracy theory about former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's supposed approved of a deal for a Canadian uranium company that was working with a Russian firm.

“If this had happened in the 1950s, there would be people up on treason charges right now. The Rosenbergs, OK?” Gorka told a rapturous Sean Hannity. “This is equivalent to what the Rosenbergs did, and those people got the chair. Think about it. Giving away nuclear capability to our enemies, that’s what we’re talking about.”According to Gorka, American officials who approved the sale are the equivalent of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American couple executed for selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

As the Russia investigation has continued to heat up, Alex Jones— the conspiracy radio host who shifted from commentary about gay frogs, Ron Paul, and space aliens to spittle-flecked pro-Trump bombast — has begun increasing his own rhetorical vehemence against law enforcement officials.

Even before he became devoted to Trump, Jones had a long history ofproclaiming violent fantasies on the air, such as warning actor Robert DeNiro that he wanted to “tear his nose completely off his face” and threatening to break the jaws of various other people he dislikes.

(While some observers of his program have argued Jones is just acting, during an April episode, he denied that his harangues are purely theatrical. “We’re the most bona fide, hard-core, real McCoy thing there is,” he told listeners.)

As the Mueller investigation has gotten two guilty pleas and numerous indictments against former Trump associates, Jones’ violent outbursts have only increased. He has apparently absorbed every unhinged conspiracy theory about treasonous “Deep State” elites and the ways they are using their supposedly limitless power to overthrow the president.

During the Jan. 19 episode of his program, Jones went on anextended-length rant, saying that Clinton, former president Barack Obama, former FBI director James Comey and a host of others were accusing Trump of acting like a dictator. Jones' suggested remedy: Trump should start doing just that.

“Mr. President, they’re not going to stop, they’ve already started a civil war! They’ve all got to go to prison!” Jones raged in a segment discussing CNN host Anderson Cooper and New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg. “They’re saying you’re a dictator, we all need to be shut down, take our free speech, and then say you’re doing that. They’ve already launched their operations!"

The Infowars founder then alluded to Phil Mudd, a former FBI and CIA official who now is a commentator at CNN who said last August that Trump’s antagonistic remarks about career intelligence officials could result in them wanting to “kill this guy.” It was clearly a metaphor, as host Jake Tapper and Mudd were quick to point out, for the idea that Trump might be inspiring government officials to leak disparaging information about the president.

According to Jones, however, Mudd had instead publicly stated that American intelligence agencies are planning to assassinate Trump. Because of that, Jones suggested, the president needs to begin physically rounding up his political opponents and treating them like violent traitors:

“Phil Mudd is on TV saying he’s going to kill you! All you need to do is go after them now! Turn the dogs loose! They started it! They did it! They’re the foreign power! They’re the enemy! They’re the traitors!”

“Get ’em! Get ’em!” Jones screamed as he pointed at an image of Cooper and Rosenberg on his studio screen.

Later on in the episode, Jones revisited the topic of the Trump-Russia investigation, claiming that Obama “needs to go to prison” because “these people aren’t above the law.”

“These aren’t Americans,” Jones continued. “They’re globalists.”

He then tried to answer listeners and viewers who might believe that Trump imprisoning Clinton and Obama could lead to civil war.

“They’re already trying to cause one,” Jones replied. “Justice be done, may the heavens fall,” he said, alluding to the famous Latin phrase that is also a line in Oliver Stone's conspiracy film “JFK.”

The Infowars chief then compared government officials and liberal political figures to the Japanese and German armies America fought in World War II.

“We have to attack them legally and lawfully. ...We have to defeat them all. They’re not going to stop,” Jones continued. “Like World War II, you don’t just kick Hitler back into Germany, he’s going to reconstitute and attack again. You don’t just kick the Japanese out of the Pacific Islands, you’ve gotta go all the way to Tokyo. They started it!”

As he continued, Jones suggested that because of their “treason,” Trump needs to “go all the way” against his opponents.

“Whatever has to happen is going to happen. We’re going all the way against these people, period. We have to do it. There’s no other choice. They’ve all got to politically hang for their crimes,” he said.

“Incidentally,” Jones said as he looked deep into the camera and drummed his fingers to accentuate the dramatic pause. “You know what the punishment for treason is.”

He continued: “These are the foreign individuals that took our country over. They’re the ones who corrupted everything almost to the point of the country’s death. And they’re still trying to strangle the country today. We must stand against them.”

Before the rise of Trump, Jones was an irrelevant conspiracy radio host whose ravings were listened to by a small number of deranged core fans and hipsters with eccentric senses of humor. All of that changed after Jones latched on to Trump during his campaign.

Trump returned the favor, saying publicly that Jones has an “amazing” reputation during his campaign. As president, he has given Jones and his Infowars colleagues prime access to White House officials. According to Jones, Trump has called him multiple times at home during the past few months. The host has also claimed that he knows several personal phone numbers for Trump, including the president’s private suite at Mar-a-Lago.

Nor Jones is the only person associated with Infowars who has deep connections inside the administration.

Trump’s longtime friend and unofficial political adviser Roger Stone is now the host of an Infowars show of his own. Donald Trump Jr., the president's oldest son, posted on Twitter last April that Infowars correspondent and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich deserved a Pulitzer Prize after an administration source fed him a scoop days before the mainstream press. It was one of several important stories the two have broken ahead of legitimate news outlets. Cernovich has also boasted that Donald Jr. and other Trump family members personally give the president printouts of stories from Infowars and other dubious websites.

Given the many strictures on the commander in chief's authority, it is unlikely that Trump could start imprisoning his political opponents even if he wanted to. But the president is far from the only person exposed to a constant diet of violent rhetoric against Democrats, journalists and law enforcement officers. Many disturbed people who voted for him are as well.

Last week, a Michigan man named Brandon Griesemer was arrested for threatening to kill CNN’s “fake news” anchors.In December of 2016, North Carolina resident Edgar Maddison Welch burst into a pizza restaurant near Washington with a rifle and fired off three rounds, in part because Jones and his staff had spent hours telling their followers the place was the center of a global child-sex ring.

Following Welch’s guilty plea last March, Jones begrudgingly and partially retracted his support for the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. His actions since, however, suggest he has no legitimate intention of cleaning up his act.

People have mocked the idea that Trump could become a dictator. What's clear is that many people he likes are telling him to become one.

Matthew Sheffield

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

Michael Edison Hayden

Posted with permission from Newsweek

no link pix/doc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Second Lieutenant Spenser Rapone is, by all accounts, a contrarian. He was a free thinker at West Point, a communist in the U.S. Army, a soldier who reads Gramsci, and most tragically, a threat to the peace of mind of Senator Marco Rubio.

What second Lt. Rapone is not, is a threat to "overthrow the U.S. government," a "threat to our safety," guilty of "treason," or “100%” certain to commit "mass murder in the near future." This is despite what some may have read about him on right-wing  Twitter and in the reactionary Daily Caller.

Fake journalist Mike Cernovich, a master of the non-sequitur, concludes Rapone’s heresies should convince you that the National Security Council is run by the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Spenser Rapone is proof that cultural Marxism has taken over at West Point, still think that the NSC isn't run by Muslim Brotherhood?

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) September 27, 2017

Now the Army is investigating Lt. Rapone, the veterans in the Democratic Socialists of America are defending him, and the social media hive is starting to buzz.

Truly Scary

Welcome to another culture war in which the fate of America hangs in the balance, at least until the end of the news cycle or the next white man’s massacre, whichever comes first.

Lt. Rapone’s notoriety illuminates one of the lesser (but still annoying) hazards of our troubled times: The power of social media platforms to elevate the trivial to the apocalyptic, to transform curious developments into civilizational dilemmas that require righteous indignation from all right-thinking people.

Tired of chasing Colin Kaepernick out of the ideological pocket, the right-wing thought police are now swarming to chase Lt. Rapone out of the barracks. His crime: free thinking, which is truly scary to many on the right and even some on the left. Out of fear, the thought police seek to win the debate by preventing it from happening.

The political right is far worse than the left on this score, but leftist intolerance is on the rise, too.

Last spring, sociologist Charles Murray, who has authored works of sophisticated racism and works of insightful cultural criticism, was prevented from speaking at Middlebury College by professors and students proud to say they had never read what he had written.

Just last week in Washington, a group of American University students were thwarted when they sought to promote unpopular views on campus. The group Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) was blocked from holding a forum on the politics and jurisprudence of campus sexual assault.

To the local chapter of the American Association of University Women, the unpopular was intolerable. They declared that the YAL speakers were engaging in "hate speech," a claim for which there is little evidence. YAL lost access to a campus venue and had to go elsewhere to hold its discussion of Title IX and other timely issues of interest to young people

Lt. Rapone is having a similar effect on the right. He wore a Che Guevara T-shirt under his uniform. He wrote a paper quoting Gramsci to support his view that the U.S. Army should intervene in Kurdistan.  AAUW actually celebrated on Facebook that they succeeded in making sure that the speaker's unorthodox opinions did not infect the presumably innocent ears of female (and male) undergraduates allegedly certain to suffer some kind of harm (what kind of harm is not very clear) from hearing a point of view they might find obnoxious or tendentious or persuasive. The thought police imagined they had won the debate by preventing it from happening.

But wait, there's worse: He shouted during an office debate with a professor. He failed to wear his uniform in a West Point building where uniforms are mandatory. And, get this, he stared at a fellow officer’s name tag for a long time.Very suspicious.

(The Daily Caller reports that social media accounts “linked” to Lt. Rapone have included harsh and profane comments. I could not independently confirm the linkage. Since the Daily Caller is not a trustworthy source, I will not quote the alleged comments.)

Isn't it obvious Lt. Rapone is a clear and present danger to the safe spaces of Daily Caller staffers? Isn’t it imperative that he be driven out of the U.S. armed forces in the name of all that is right and good? Isn’t this the moment when Senator Rubio can overcome anxieties about his dimunitive stature and do Something Important?

Alas, it is.

Do the Right Thing

West Point officials were apparently aware of Rapone’s private political opinions in 2015 and let him continue to serve, another subject generating yards of online outrage.

I think West Point did the right thing. Lt. Rapone’s superiors saw that an aspiring officer had strong and unpopular opinions. They saw that he passed his classes and fulfilled his duties, so they concluded he was acting within his constitutionally secured rights—the very freedoms the Army is supposed to defend. They sent him to Afghanistan where he served one tour.

Lt. Rapone is currently assigned to the 10th Mountain Division, according to the Army Times.

Maybe his criticism of American society and admiration for rebellious spirits like Che Guevara and Antonio Gramsci will prove incompatible with fighting one of the seven wars the U.S. government is now waging around the world. I hope so.

Or maybe Lt. Rapone is a good soldier who knows what he wants to risk his life for: free speech. That wouldn’t be a bad outcome either. Free speech needs more defenders, especially lately.

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex-jones-computers-are-using-the-race-narrative-and-the-islamists-to-attack-humans

Infowars radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed yesterday that artificial intelligence is “warring humans against each other” with discussions about race and culture, in addition to “bringing in foreign stimuli like the Islamists.”

During yesterday’sbroadcast of “The Alex Jones Show,” right-wing internet personality and Infowars guest host Mike Cernovich joined Jones to discuss recent reports that tech giant Elon Musk fears the future of artificial intelligence (AI).

“You notice the computer is already warring humans against each other with the race narrative, the culture narrative, and then bringing in foreign stimuli like the Islamists, which we have to fight,” Jones said, “because it wants to take us over like the AI and it brings in that artificial stimuli to then just super-charge it.”

Cernovich agreed, adding that “the next evolution, though, is going to be little quantum AI bots and they could just send them in to a part of your brain where you don’t even know.”

“Eventually you’ll walk in and there’ll be microscopic quantum bots that go into your own brain,” Cernovich continued.

...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/07/19/Pro-Trump-internet-personalities-throw-tantrums-after-ADL-identifies-their-hateful-rhetori/217316

Pro-Trump internet trolls claimed that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was a "terrorist organization" and compared the group to Nazis after ADL identified some of the biggest online personalities of the “alt-right” and “alt-lite” movements and called them out for spreading hateful rhetoric.

The ADL recently published a list of “alt-right” and “alt-lite” figures, identifying key players in both the white supremacist “alt-right” and the fringe right-wing media landscape of media trolls and smear merchants it inspired, which the ADL called the “alt-lite.” It included internet troll and Infowars contributor Mike Cernovich; smear merchant Jack Posobiec, who once received a temporary White House press pass; disgraced Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos; The Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Wintrich; and Rebel Media’s Gavin McInnes, using the “alt-lite” banner to describe their prior affiliation and promotion of “alt-right” figures and ideologies. In a Periscope live stream, Cernovich responded to the list’s publication by urging his followers to spread the hashtag “#ADLTerror” on Twitter. Cernovich also called ADL “a terrorist organization” that had “targeted” him and his family for “murder and assassination” by including his name in the list.

Soon after Cernovich launched the hashtag, other alternative media personalities who were also mentioned in the ADL’s list rallied to attack the organization.Posobiec compared ADL’s members to Nazis and claimed the “death list”was being used to target Trump supporters; Wintrich called the ADL a “liberal terroristorganization” whose “only qualifier” to label people a hate group leader was support for Trump; Yiannopoulos accused the ADL of trying to get pro-Trump media figures like himself “hurt or killed by painting targets on our backs”; McInnes threatened to “sue the living shit out of everyone even remotely involved” with the list if he was attacked following its publication.

Allies and supporters of those on the ADL’s list also joined in on the attack. The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft accused the ADL of publishing “a murder hit list” and stated that his website would take “further action” against the organization if it did not remove Wintrich’s name. Rebel Media’s Laura Loomer decried the ADL’s decision to publish a “hit list,” asking why the organization is “encouraging violent leftists to attack members of the right.” And “Ali,” a rising star among pro-Trump media personalities, also promoted the hashtag. Fans of these personalities created memes and videos and spread them on social media to show their support.

WhileBuzzFeedtechnology reporter Charlie Warzel pointed out that the ADL didn't necessarily provide full evidence of the actions that earned these trolls a spot on the list, the ADL was right to include them based on their habits of engaging in hateful rhetoric and online harassment. The organization correctly identified them for using their platforms to spread vitriol and honestly documented their efforts to sanitize their movement’s prior affiliation with “alt-right” circles and differentiate itself from white nationalism.

Warzel also correctly noted that these trolls are "more of a media arm than an ideological group of any kind." These individuals do not spread hate in the traditional way that has been the modus operandi of the “alt-right” figures also included in the ADL’s list.Rather than organizing community events and advocating for any specific policies, these figures have built a potent anti-liberal media apparatus that can be -- and often is -- mobilized to harass and smear any chosen target-of-the-day.

Over the past several months, these right-wing media personalities and pro-Trump internet trolls have fueled and engaged in harassment and doxing campaigns against a variety of people. They misquoted pop star Ariana Grande after a terrorist attack at her concert in Manchester, smearing her as “anti-American.” CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski’s family received dozens of threatening phone calls following an article he wrote about the origin of an anti-CNN meme Trump tweeted. And the internet trolls falsely accused popular online satirist Vic Berger of being a part of an online cohort of pedophiles. They were also key proponents of the “Great Meme War” with CNN, during which social media sites were flooded with high volumes of anti-CNN memes and numerous CNN employees were doxed and harassed.

Though these alternative media figures and internet trolls are now rebranding away from the “alt-right” leaders who once inspired them, they still deserve to be on the ADL list and should remain there until they cease using their platforms to incite harassment and encourage extremist rhetoric.

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==

may have mocked claims about the existence of paid protesters as just another lie from the right. As it turns out, at least on this one issue, they’re actually telling the truth. The problem is, the right neglected to mention those paid protesters are part of the right-wing apparatus.

The story starts last week, when the right wing decided to aim its selective outrage at a free staging of Shakespeare’s play "Julius Caesar" held in New York City’s Central Park. Mike Cernovich, a self-described member of the alt-right who thinks the U.S. should give immigrants IQ tests, put up a YouTube video in which he offered cash to any protesters willing to disrupt the play for pay.

“I’ll give up to 10 people $1,000,” Cernovich says in thefootage. “I need you to get up with either a ‘CNN is ISIS’ or ‘Bill Clinton’s a rapist’ or ‘The media is terrorism’ [sign]. And if you’re able to get up and be escorted out by security, then I will give you $1,000.”

In other words, Cernovich was actively and openly looking to recruit paid protesters. You know how conservatives made up that ridiculous myth about George Soros sending checks to liberals who march in protests? This is the real version of that, only sponsored by Cernovich.

The story actually gets richer, so to speak, as it continues. The night after Cernovich’s offer, two protesters went to see "Julius Caesar" in the park. Semi-notorious right-wing media figure Laura Loomer snagged a ticket for a second-row seat that definitely should have gone to someone who actually wanted to see the play. Alt-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, whose greatest hits include pizzagate and the Seth Rich conspiracy lie, also showed up. The two Trumpites told the New Yorker they hadn’t planned to meet—which may or may not be true—and once they spotted each other, they sat apart so as not to arouse suspicion. “Are you here for the Cernovich contest?” Posobiec reportedly texted Loomer, according to the New Yorker. She responded, “Just stay tuned.”

In the middle of the production, Loomer stormed the stage, briefly halting the action and earning a chorus of boos from an audience that just wanted to see some Shakespeare. There’sfootage of the whole thing, including Loomer being removed from the stage as she shouts “CNN is ISIS"—the exact phrase Cernovich suggested—over and over. As Loomer was escorted out, Posobiec stood up and began yelling “Nazis” and “Goebbels” at the audience, until he was removed. He also recorded his outburst, possibly because Cernovich wants proof before he’ll pay out.

Loomer continued yelling even once she was put outside the venue, and police finally showed up at some point to arrest her. She was then led away, upright and intact, like a human being who does not also happen to be an unarmed black kid.

It’s important to note that Loomer works for right-wing Canadian media outlet Rebel Media, and until late May, so did Posobiec. The blog Canadaland describes it as a Breitbart-esque site filled with contributors who “have called for a new Crusade to expel Muslims from the 'Holy Land,” outlined what they "hate about the Jews," and most recently, said that British Muslims are "enemy combatants," at least some of whom should be placed into camps.”

Loomer was released hours after her arrest. Rebel Media put up a “Free Laura page” on its website, including a link to a fundraising section for her "legal defense fund." Loomer herself also tweeted a request to "support [her] legal defense fund." The link in the message leads to a campaign on WeSearchr, a crowdfunding site that’s like a Go Fund Me for hard-right causes. As of this writing, Loomer’s page has banked more than $12,000. Josh Jordan, who's written for both Forbes and the conservative National Review, pointed out that Loomer's page previously noted she had a fundraising goal of $25,000, complete with screengrab. That target number has been erased, but the total intake keeps climbing. And presumably, while the Rebel Media “Free Laura” page doesn’t display tallies, there’ve been contributions via that site as well.

View image on Twitter

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:{[Josh Jordan :{}:

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@NumbersMuncher](https://twitter.com/NumbersMuncher)}:

Laura Loomer has now banked over $10K for her play publicity stunt that will carry at most a $1,000 fine and she's asking for another $15K.

7:45 PM - 18 Jun 2017

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There are a few things that are curious here, that brought out the social media detectives. The first is that Rebel Media creator Ezra Levant made the Free Laura page at 6pm UTC or 2pm Eastern time, a full four hours before Loomer was actually arrested. It’s safe to assume that Levant doesn’t have the power to see into the future, but that he and the team at Rebel hoped she'd get arrested and planned to use the fabricated injustice to raise funds.

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Gowilla Minethet @anonops_nato

That's interesting. http://Freelaura.com  was created by Ezra Levant at 6pm UTC, 2pm EDT. Laura crashed the play at 6pm EDT.

8:26 PM - 16 Jun 2017

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There’s also the matter of Loomer’s hefty request for donations. She faces charges of disorderly conduct and criminal trespass in the third degree. The latter is a class B misdemeanor, while the former is merely a violation, meaning it’s even less serious. I spoke to Matthew Galluzzo, a New York City criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. He isn’t representing Loomer, so he can’t speak specifically to her case.

“Most people charged with trespass with no criminal record are unlikely to be convicted of a crime or serve jail time,” he noted, “or have to pay a fine in excess of $120.”

In fact, based on the charges she faces, there's no outcome that could account for the funds being requested, unless Loomer has a rap sheet as a serial killer that's been kept hush-hush. So why is Loomer raising so much money? It’s unclear, and no one aside from Loomer and Rebel Media know. However, it is worth noting that Levant recently lost a libel case on appeal, which keeps him on the hook for an $80,000 fine. It’s also true that a company that targeted Breitbart for a boycott has done the same with Rebel Media, which has resulted in at least one major company pulling ads from the site.

If it seemed incongruous that the “new right”—whose members have declared themselves the defenders of free speech and conservationists of Western culture—claimed to be so outraged by the recent staging of a Shakespeare play, this might explain why. And when the right talks about “paid protesters,” just assume they personally know whence they speak. Breitbart was happy to attract traffic from bigots with articles such as “Five Devastating Facts About Black-On-Black Crime” and “Black-On-Black Crime: Blame It On The System And Ignore The Evidence.” But this sort of content is racist on its face, and as Breitbart’s profile rose, being associated with naked bigotry became untenable for the site’s advertisers. Breitbart likely pulled the plug on this sort of content to assuage the advertisers, but at the cost of opening the site up to the critique that it had knelt at the altar of “political correctness.”

Likewise, when media attention settled on Yiannopoulos and McHugh, their histories of bigoted commentary made them radioactive to advertisers. But each had a strong individual fan base and close ties to the “alt-right” network because of that very virulence, which had previously made them valuable assets to Breitbart by building the website’s audience.

As the site has sought to downplay its relationship with the “alt-right” and the fringe, commentators from those movements saw weakness and began attacking Breitbart for turning its back on its fans and supposedly becoming mainstream. In recent months, this far-right alternative media echo chamber has gained an increasingly large audience by presenting its adherents as completely dedicated to President Donald Trump and as savage foes of “political correctness” and “SJWs” -- in other words, by trying to out-Breitbart Breitbart.

This dynamic came to a head on Monday when Breitbart fired McHugh after she responded to the London Bridge terror attack by tweeting that "there would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn't live there” and attacked a critic’s perceived ethnicity. The far-right immediately rallied around McHugh and lashed out at her former employer, with leading fringe figures declaring that the website had given in to “political correctness,” castigating the site for supposedly seeking “to try to pivot to the mainstream,” and declaring that “Breitbart is over.”

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Breitbart fired a journalist to appease fake news media. Here's how to respond! https://www.wesearchr.com/bounties/support-katie-mchugh-fired-from-breitbart-for-telling-the-tr …

10:21 AM - 5 Jun 2017

Support Katie McHugh: Fired From Breitbart For Telling The Truth

Katie needs your help, America.

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None of this is to say that Breitbart has suddenly become a beacon of moderation. Yiannopoulos spent years promoting bigotry with the site’s full approval before he apparently crossed the line. McHugh didn’t suddenly start tweeting racist things over the weekend -- she first drew attention for this behavior in September 2015. Asked about her racist tweets in March 2016, current Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow replied, “We’re considering giving Katie a weekly column.”

And while “black crime” reporting seems to have died away, Breitbart still regularly publishes the same type of anti-Muslim commentary that got McHugh fired, and continues to employ white nationalist reporterswith long records of racism who have yet to experience a media flashpoint.

If the site’s leaders were cleaning house, they would clean house. Instead, they’re taking steps to minimize advertiser blowback when public attention is focused on their staffers’ awful behavior. The day after McHugh was fired, Digiday reported that Breitbart had lost nearly 90 percent of its advertisers over the previous three months, along with seeing a steep decline in traffic.

mma

==

escalator/echo:

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/04/05/susan-rice-unmasking-story-perfect-case-study-new-pro-trump-propaganda-ecosystem/215914

The Susan Rice Unmasking Story Is A Perfect Case Study Of The New Pro-Trump Propaganda Ecosystem

Blog ››› April 5, 2017 9:13 AM EDT ››› ALEX KAPLAN

no link img

For most of the last decade, the flow of misinformation was often easy to track in media, with right-wing media often forcing mainstream outlets to follow the stories and tone they favored. Now, a couple of months into President Donald Trump’s administration, this pattern has changed and new players have entered the ecosystem. Groups that used to be contained to their own bubble have been able to insert themselves into the food chain and been able to spread not just misleading, but patently false information to right-wing outlets and sometimes even in turn to mainstream media. A new dubious allegation regarding Susan Rice, former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, illustrates how this new pattern can spread pro-Trump misinformation and propaganda from fringe sources into mainstream media outlets.

Recently, fake news and the white nationalist “alt-right” movement have become two of the country’s biggest problems in terms of fighting misinformation. Both government officials and websites like Facebook and Google are trying to lessen the harmful impact as websites that share fake news continue to mislead news consumers. And the “alt-right” is growing in prominence thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s choice of Stephen Bannon, the former chairman of “alt-right” website Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Fringe “alt-right” forums, on sites like Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, exercise influence by pushing conspiracy theories and leading harassment campaigns.

These different groups do not operate in a vacuum. Repeatedly, they have come together to spread and amplify their misinformation and claims. Often, a claim will start on a fringe outlet or forum, and other such sites will amplify the misinformation, then fake news purveyors will push it, and then the claim will jump into more traditional right-wing media before sometimes spreading into mainstream media. Trump aides and other people connected to Trump have even promoted some of those stories, crucially helping them break through at times.

And that brings us to Rice.

On April 2, Mike Cernovich, a self-described member of the “alt-right,” claimed in a post on Medium that the “White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking” of Trump officials caught in surveillance of foreign officials “after examining Rice’s document log requests.” The claim then spread among fringe outlets such as The Gateway Pundit -- which said the unmasking “was purely for political purposes” -- and Infowars, and spread via posts on 4chan and Reddit.

As the claim started getting pickup on Twitter, Kellyanne Conway,counselor to the president, promoted Cernovich with a tweet linking to the main page of his Medium blog (the next day, Donald Trump. Jr praised Cernovich for “breaking the #SusanRice story”).

The claim was then echoed by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, who added a layer of credibility to the attempted smear, writing that Rice “requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign.” Meanwhile, multiple fake news purveyors hyped the allegations, dubiously claiming that Rice “could be headed to jail” for “absolute treason.”

Lake conceded in his piece, however, that Rice’s requests “were likely within the law.” Legal and national security experts echoed that conclusion, saying Rice’s actions weren’t “odd or wrong,” did not indicate “anything improper whatsoever,” and were “within the scope of the job of a national security advisor like Rice.” Lake's caveats did not prevent him from going on both Sean Hannity's radio and Fox News show, where the right-wing host described the story as "worse than Watergate."

As the claim spread into the mainstream, some in right-wing media criticized mainstream outlets for not giving the story enough attention or for not presenting it the way they would. Although some mainstream figures have echoed the consensus of experts, others have also suggested that Rice could be guilty of some kind of wrongdoing. Fox News in particular insisted that something must be improper if not illegal about Rice's actions, and in their scramble to claim they may have had the story before Cernovich, likely outed themselves as another outlet that the White House used as a puppet for the Rice leak.

Right-wing criticism of mainstream media’s coverage will likely ramp up, spurring some mainstream outlets to defend their coverage or possibly tweak some of their framing under pressure.

This is the new media ecosystem in the Trump era. No longer are these false claims all originating in traditional right-wing media before mainstream outlets give in to pressure to cover them. Now they can start from these fringe pro-Trump propaganda outlets, with right-wing media picking them up. Meanwhile, members of the “alt-right” continue to gain more prominence and acceptance in traditional conservative and conservative media circles. Indeed, radio host Rush Limbaugh, while hyping the Rice story, bragged that mainstream media outlets are “not the arbiters anymore”; whitewashed the original source of the story, Cernovich, as simply a “pro-Trump blogger,” and said CBS’ 60 Minutes “tried to destroy him”; and criticized mainstream outlets for dismissing the story because it was pushed by right-wing media.

This is not the first example of misinformation following such a trajectory.In March, after a federal judge in Hawaii placed a hold on Trump’s revised Muslim ban, fringe “alt-right” outlets such as Infowars and Gateway Pundit pushed a conspiracy theory that appeared to have started on Reddit alleging that Obama conspired with the judge. The claim then spread among fake news purveyors and was pushed by Donald Trump Jr. before breaking through to more traditional conservative media figures and outlets like Hannity and the Independent Journal Review. Later that month, in order to back up Trump’s false claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, Infowars dubiously claimed it had National Security Agency documents that provided proof. The claim made its way around other “alt-right” outlets and fake news purveyors and wound up being pushed at the top of the Drudge Report.

This is the danger that the new media environment presents. The fringe is no longer being siloed; it has actively been raised into the mainstream by pro-Trump forces both known and unknown, and has been repeatedly validated by both mainstream reporters and especially an administration that has no hesitation about lying to the world. It’s crucial that mainstream media outlets understand this new environment and the kind of claims and conspiracy theories it puts forth. It is one thing to share the mainstream with extremist cranks, propagandists, and liars. It's another thing to succumb and do their pro-Trump misinforming for them.

---

---

http://www.alternet.org/media/heres-what-happened-when-trump-white-house-gave-alt-right-troll-access-press-room

Mike Cernovich is an internet troll, conspiracy theorist, and leading figure in the “alt-right’s” assemblage of modern-day white nationalists and misogynists who has drawn praise and support from President Donald Trump’s closest confidantes. Today, he used a White House press pass to berate reporters at the daily briefing for not sufficiently covering “the violence against Trump supporters.”

:{:{}:

}:

Cernovich received a White House press pass last week, and he attended the briefing Friday and made a hand sign associated with white nationalists from the podium. Other “alt-right” media figures, including Rebel Media’s Lauren Southern and Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft and Lucian Wintrich, have also visited the press room during the Trump administration.

Cernovich returned to the White House for today’s press briefing. After press secretary Sean Spicer concluded taking questions from reporters, Cernovich shouted out, “What about violence against Trump supporters at Berkeley?” Ignored by Spicer, Cernovich began yelling at members of the White House press corps, repeatedly demanding to know why they purportedly refused to cover the story. At one point a member of the press corps asked him if he was a reporter; he responded that he was.

Once reporters stopped responding to his diatribe, Cernovich left the room. Here’s the video of the outburst, via his Periscope feed:

The White House’s practice of admitting a provocateur to hassle members of the press corps is part of the administration's broader effort to undermine journalists by flooding press conferences and briefings with an array of pro-Trump sycophants and[...video]

As close White House ally Newt Gingrich suggested in November, the White House press office has the power to “rethink from the ground up the whole concept of the White House press corps, come up with a totally new grass-roots model, and not allow the traditional media to dominate and define White House press coverage.”

Trump’s “alt-right” fans are more than willing to participate in this effort, in some cases openly acknowledging that they are seeking access to the press room so they can troll journalists.

Matt Gertz is deputy research director at Media Matters for America and head of its gun and public safety initiative.

==

punked

A report by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found that a claim that recent airstrikes in Syria were a “false flag” operation -- an operation that either didn't really occur or that were conducted by a party other than the Syrian government -- which went viral among the "alt-right" actually originated with a Syrian propaganda outlet that supports the current regime and spread to a series of pro-Kremlin conspiracy websites and fake news purveyors before being promoted by “alt-right” figures including Infowars’ Alex Jones andMike Cernovich.

The report showed that key claims, quotes, and images that were initially reported by Al-Masdar, the outlet that supports Syrian President Bashar Assad, were used in reports on pro-Kremlin sites, fake news sites, and on Infowars.

[graphic]

In addition, the report noted that, after the "false flag" claim was promoted by Jones and Cernovich, Twitter accounts that appear to be bots accelerated the use of hashtags about the attack, which led to the hashtag #SyriaHoax going viral. The report concluded, “The Syrian regime’s reaction to the chemical attack is no surprise,” but “what is noteworthy is the way in which the regime’s response … was translated rapidly and directly into coverage on alt-right websites, most obviously Infowars.” From the report:

The chemical attack came at dawn, local time, on April 4. It was widely reported and provoked outrage and condemnation, triggering immediate calls for an investigation. Photographs and videos from the scene showed hideous images of dead children and footage of rescuers, including the White Helmets group, washing down victims.

The same day, website Al-Masdar News, which supports the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, published an article claiming that the story was a “false flag” operation.

[...]

Over the next two days, the al-Masdar piece was picked up by a number of pro-Kremlin and anti-Western sites.

It was reproduced verbatim by at least three conspiracy sites: globalresearch.ca, informationclearinghouse.info and The Lifeboat News. A number of pro-Kremlin sites known for their use of false reporting quoted it at length. These included The Duran and The Russophile (also known as Russia News Now), together with conspiracy site Investment Watch Blog.

A third group of sites wrote their own reports, but very largely followed the Al-Masdar arguments. These included 21st Century Wire and Before It’s News, both of which ran a video repeating the claims and using the same imagery.

[...]

The most influential pickup came on April 5, when US-based conspiracy site Infowars ran its version of the story. Infowars is a highly influential site among the “alt-right” movement in the US; its leading light, Alex Jones, has over 600,000 Twitter followers.

[...]

The Syrian regime’s reaction to the chemical attack is no surprise. It has consistently denied all accusations of atrocities, and accused its critics of false claims, as documented in the Atlantic Council’s report “Breaking Aleppo”.

What is noteworthy is the way in which the regime’s response, launched on a site which has repeatedly amplified Assad’s messaging, was translated rapidly and directly into coverage on alt-right websites, most obviously Infowars.

Conspiracy website Infowars and its proprietor, Alex Jones, have heavily praised Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent months, with Jones previously bragging about praise from “top Putin advisers” and even Putin himself in regards to his pro-Trump coverage. Jones also claims to have “talked to folks very close to the president” about Trump’s Syria policy. Both Jones and Cernovich, a member of the so-called “alt-right,” have helped popularize numerous conspiracy theories, including the “Pizzagate” story that falsely claimed an underground child sex trafficking ring was run out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.

In March, the FBI opened an investigationinto Russian operatives’ use of “bots” to push pro-Trump news from far-right outlets to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the Senate Intelligence Committee opened an investigation into Russia’s use of fake news to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Before It’s News, one of the pro-Trump propaganda outlets mentioned in the report, and a site that Media Matters has identified as a fake news purveyor, has denied any connection between Trump and the Russian government.

---

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/susan-rice-and-pro-trump-propaganda-machine

escalator fake news

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/susan-rice-and-pro-trump-propaganda-machine

...

The Alt-Right Assault on Susan Rice: A Perfect Case Study of the Pro-Trump Propaganda Machine

By Alex Kaplan [1] / Media Matters [2]

April 6, 2017

For most of the last decade, the flow of misinformation was often easy to track in media, with right-wing media often forcing mainstream outlets to follow the stories and tone they favored. Now, a couple of months into President Donald Trump’s administration, this pattern has changed and new players have entered the ecosystem. Groups that used to be contained to their own bubble have been able to insert themselves into the food chain and been able to spread not just misleading, but patently false information to right-wing outlets and sometimes even in turn to mainstream media. A new dubious allegation regarding Susan Rice, former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, illustrates how this new pattern can spread pro-Trump misinformation and propaganda from fringe sources into mainstream media outlets.

Recently, fake news and the white nationalist “alt-right” movement [3] have become two of the country’s biggest problems in terms of fighting misinformation. Both government officials [4] and websites like Facebook [5] and Google [6] are trying to lessen the harmful impact as websites that share fake news continue to mislead [7] news consumers. And the “alt-right” is growing in prominence thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s choice of Stephen Bannon, the former chairman of “alt-right” website [8] Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Fringe “alt-right” forums, on sites like Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, exercise influence by pushing conspiracy theories [9] and leading [10] harassment campaigns [11].

These different groups do not operate in a vacuum. Repeatedly, they have come together to spread and amplify their misinformation and claims. Often, a claim will start on a fringe outlet or forum, and other such sites will amplify the misinformation, then fake news purveyors will push it, and then the claim will jump into more traditional right-wing media before sometimes spreading into mainstream media. Trump aides and other people connected to Trump have even promoted some of those stories, crucially helping them break through at times.

And that brings us to Rice.

On April 2, Mike Cernovich, a self-described [12] member of the “alt-right,” claimed in a post on Medium [13] that the “White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking” of Trump officials caught in surveillance of foreign officials “after examining Rice’s document log requests.” The claim then spread among fringe outlets such as The Gateway Pundit [14] -- which said the unmasking “was purely for political purposes” -- and Infowars [15], and spread via posts on 4chan [16] and Reddit [17].

img

As the claim started getting pickup on Twitter [18], Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, promoted [12]Cernovich with a tweet linking to the main page of his Medium blog (the next day, Donald Trump. Jr praised Cernovich [19] for “breaking the #SusanRice story”).

...

e claim was then echoed by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake [20], who added a layer of credibility to the attempted smear, writing that Rice “requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign.” Meanwhile, multiple fake news purveyors [21] hyped [22]the [23] allegations [24], dubiously claiming that Rice “could be headed to jail” for “absolute treason.”

[imgs]

Lake conceded in his piece, however, that Rice’s requests “were likely within the law.” Legal and national security experts echoed that conclusion [25], saying Rice’s actions weren’t “odd or wrong,” did not indicate “anything improper whatsoever,” and were “within the scope of the job of a national security advisor like Rice.” Lake's caveats did not prevent him from going on both Sean Hannity's radio [26] and Fox News show [27], where the right-wing host described the story as "worse than Watergate."

As the claim spread into the mainstream, some in right-wing media criticized mainstream outlets for not giving the story enough attention [28] or for not presenting it [29] the way they would. Although some [30] mainstream figures have echoed the consensus of experts, others [31] have also suggested [32] that Rice [33] could be guilty of some kind of wrongdoing. Fox News in particular insisted that something must be improper if not illegal about Rice's actions, and in their scramble to claim they may have had the story before Cernovich, likely outed themselves [34]as another outlet that the White House used as a puppet for the Rice leak.

Right-wing criticism of mainstream media’s coverage will likely ramp up, spurring some mainstream outlets to defend their coverage or possibly tweak some of their framing under pressure.

This is the new media ecosystem in the Trump era. No longer are these false claims all originating in traditional right-wing media before mainstream outlets give in to pressure to cover them [35]. Now they can start from these fringe pro-Trump propaganda outlets, with right-wing media picking them up. Meanwhile, members of the “alt-right” continue to gain more prominence [36] and acceptance [37] in traditional conservative and conservative media circles. Indeed, radio host Rush Limbaugh, while hyping [38] the Rice story, bragged that mainstream media outlets are “not the arbiters anymore”; whitewashed the original source of the story, Cernovich, as simply a “pro-Trump blogger,” and said CBS’ 60 Minutes “tried to destroy him”; and criticized mainstream outlets for dismissing the story because it was pushed by right-wing media.

This is not the first example of misinformation following such a trajectory. In March, after a federal judge in Hawaii placed a hold on Trump’s revised Muslim ban, fringe “alt-right” outlets such as Infowars and Gateway Pundit pushed a conspiracy theory [9] that appeared to have started on Reddit alleging that Obama conspired with the judge. The claim then spread among [9] fake news [39] purveyors [40] and was pushed by [9] Donald Trump Jr. before breaking through to more traditional conservative media figures and outlets like Hannity [41] and the Independent Journal Review [42]. Later that month, in order to back up Trump’s false claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, Infowars dubiously claimed[43] it had National Security Agency documents that provided proof. The claim made its way around other “alt-right” outlets and fake news purveyors and wound up being pushed at the top of the Drudge Report [44].

This is the danger that the new media environment presents. The fringe is no longer being siloed; it has actively been raised into the mainstream by pro-Trump forces both known and unknown, and has been repeatedly validated by both mainstream reporters and especially an administration that has no hesitation about lying to the world. It’s crucial that mainstream media outlets understand [45] this new environment and the kind of claims and conspiracy theories it puts forth. It is one thing to share the mainstream with extremist cranks, propagandists, and liars. It's another thing to succumb and do their pro-Trump misinforming for them.

==

==

wiki date?

Mike Cernovich (born November 17, 1977) is an American social media personality and author. Usually described as part of the alt-right,[7] he describes himself as "new right."[8]

Cernovich's website Danger & Play started in 2012 and was originally known mainly for self-improvement content. However, during the 2016 US presidential election campaign, it focused mainly on pro-Donald Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton commentary.[15] During September 2016, when Cernovich alleged that Clinton had health problems making her unfit to serve as president and that those health problems were being suppressed by the mainstream media, Cernovich's tweets were seen more than 100 million times.[9]

Contents

:{Early life:{}:

Cernovich was born on November 17, 1977.[16][17] He grew up in a conservative Christian family in Kewanee, a farming town in Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois and later attended the Pepperdine University School of Law.[18]

Personal life:

Cernovich married his first wife as a law student in 2003. Cernovich has stated that his "first marriage was ruined by feminist indoctrination." His wife became an attorney in Silicon Valley and "earned millions of dollars in stock from an I.P.O."[9] She filed for divorce in 2011, and Cernovich received over $999,999 in the divorce settlement.[9] Cernovich met his second wife shortly thereafter. She comes from a secular Muslim Persian background.[9]

Cernovich states that he was falsely accused of raping a woman in 2003.[19] According to The New Yorker magazine, the charge was later dropped, but a judge ordered him to do community service for misdemeanor battery and his record has since been expunged.[9]

Cernovich lives outside of Los Angeles, California.[9]

:{Writing career:{:}:

In 2012, he launched the website, Danger & Play, a blog focused on politics, men's issues, and self-improvement.[18] The title comes from a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, "The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything."[9]

In 2014, Cernovich was a self-proclaimed "champion" of Gamergate, the campaign against feminists in the video-game industry, goading opponents with tweets such as "Who cares about breast cancer and rape? Not me."[9]

In 2015, Cernovich self-published the self-help book Gorilla Mindset: Timeless Strategies to Unleash the Animal Within You. With the appearance of Donald Trump, he recognized a "kindred spirit" and began to make political commentary.[9]

In 2016, Cernovich wrote the self-help book MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again, based on the Donald Trump presidential campaign.[20] The book was published by Castalia House, a Finnish publishing house started and run by author Vox Day which specializes in science fiction and fantasy.

:{Media and views:{:}:

Cernovich has emphasized the importance of simplicity in social media commentary, noting that when he made his posts "too complex", none of it got "through to people".[9] He gives as an example of "more visceral" and successful posts, #HillarysHealth, which commented on the health of Trump opponent Hillary Clinton during the 2016 United States presidential election—alleging among other things that Clinton had "both a seizure disorder and Parkinson's disease".[9] By September this hashtag had got 240,000 page views and had become a national trending topic on Twitter. During the month of September, Cernovich's tweets were seen more than 100 million times.[9] According to Scott Greer, of The Daily Caller, "Cernovich memed #SickHillary into reality. Never doubt the power of memes".[21]

The New Yorker quotes a statement on Cernovich's website: "To beat a person, you lower his or her social status. Logic is pointless,"[22] in relation to Cernovich's frequent references to adversaries as "cucks" (cuckolds and "cuckservatives").[9] While Cernovich admits to sometimes being an Internet troll, he has stated, "I use trolling tactics to build my brand" and not for his own amusement.[9]

Cernovich advocates IQ-testing for all immigrants and ending federal funding of universities.[8]

Cernovich opposes the two-party system and his support for Trump is not based on public policy. "What are Trump's policies? I don't particularly care". In another post on his website he stated, "If Trump offends you, it's because you live in a cucked world where no one speaks their minds".[9]

Cernovich helped popularize the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory through his blog posts and believes that child sex rings run rampant in Washington D.C. He has accused his opponents of being pedophiles on multiple occasions.[23]

In an October 2016 interview with The New Yorker, Cernovich was quoted:

"The left likes to talk about power structures, right? Well, the media still thinks of itself as speaking truth to power. What they don't realize is that someone like me is perceived as the new Fourth Estate.[24] Maybe they should check their structural privilege." The "paternalistic" media, he said, was giving way to a more democratic one. "It makes journalists crazy, because they used to be in control. They can't control people anymore. Everyone has a voice now."[9]

Following an August 2016 appearance on Fox News Channel's Red Eye, the show's producers felt compelled afterwards to say that they had made a mistake in booking him when later learning of Cernovich's history of online disputes.[19]

Cernovich has accused the Democratic Party of attempting to assassinate him.[25] In 2016, Cernovich criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for speaking at a gender-segregated mosque.[26][27] In August 2016, Lloyd Grove, an editor for The Daily Beast, referred to Cernovich as a "date rape apologist" because of Cernovich's comments on Twitter in August 2012 when Cernovich tweeted, "Have you guys ever tried 'raping' a girl without using force? Try it. It's basically impossible. Date rape does not exist".[19]

:{References:

==

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/trolls-for-trump

TROLLS FOR TRUMP

Meet Mike Cernovich, the meme mastermind of the alt-right.

By Andrew Marantz

In late August, Hillary Clinton announced that she would soon give a speech, in Reno, Nevada, linking Donald J. Trump to what has become known as the alt-right—a loose online affiliation of white nationalists, neo-monarchists, masculinists, conspiracists, belligerent nihilists, and social-media trolls. The alt-right has no consistent ideology; it is a label, like “snob” or “hipster,” that is often disavowed by people who exemplify it. The term typically applies to conservatives and reactionaries who are active on the Internet and too anti-establishment to feel at home in the Republican Party. Bizarrely, this category includes the Republican nominee for President. It also includes extremist commentators, long belittled or ignored by the media, whom mainstream pundits are now starting to take seriously.

The afternoon before Clinton’s speech, Mike Cernovich, a thick-chested white man in his late thirties, sitting on a veranda in Southern California, opened the live-streaming app Periscope on his iPad and filmed a video called “How to fight back against Sick Hillary and the #ClintonNewsNetwork.” By “Clinton News Network,” he meant CNN and other corporate media outlets. The word “sick” described Clinton morally and physically: Cernovich was among the first to insinuate publicly that Clinton had a grave neurological condition, and that the media was covering it up. By “fight back,” he meant, basically, tweeting. Internet activism is sometimes derided as “slacktivism”—a fair characterization when an online campaign tries to, say, cure aids or end child labor. When the goal is to seed social media with misinformation, though, online organizing can be shockingly effective.

“Tomorrow, everybody’s going to be Googling the alt-right,” Cernovich said. He has an adenoidal tenor and a lisp, but when he is indignant he can be an impassioned orator. “The narrative is being written, and you’d better get off your fucking asses and write your own.” His feed filled with real-time comments. (@beelman_matt: “PC is for PUSSIES”; @ciswhitemale: “Mike is a bosss.”)

Cernovich wore a plaid shirt, partially unbuttoned to display his chest hair. Visible behind him were a swimming pool, trimmed boxwoods, and a mountain glowing in the afternoon sun. (@CanadaUncuck: “nice pool.”) Cernovich often blogs about fitness, and he publishes self-help books for men. He also writes about how to build a personal brand online; his maxims include “Conflict is attention” and “Attention is influence.” Although he doesn’t appear on Fox News or syndicated radio shows, he is an expert at using social media to drive alt-right ideas into the heart of American political discourse.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do tomorrow,” he said. “We have to think of a good hashtag, and we have to have all of our memes lined up.” He suggested talking points for his followers to deploy, such as “If the alt-right is racist, is Israel racist, too?” Cernovich prefers to call himself an “American nationalist,” but he often uses “we” when discussing the alt-right movement. “We can control the narrative on Twitter,” he continued. “Mainstream media we’ve lost.” He said he hoped that Clinton’s Reno speech would elicit “a full-scale media attack on me,” adding, “I want this to become an international trending topic.”

Clinton did not mention Cernovich, but she attacked Alex Jones, the paranoiac Texas radio host, and Breitbart.com, the Pravda of the alt-right. She listed some recent Breitbart headlines, including “Would You Rather Have Feminism or Cancer?,” which were written by Milo Yiannopoulos, the fame-seeking troll. Cernovich calls Yiannopoulos “one of the only guys, other than me, who’s doing social media right.” Before the current election, Cernovich and Yiannopoulos were known primarily as Internet misogynists. Cernovich was drawn to political commentary after recognizing a kindred spirit in Donald Trump.

Yiannopoulos, writing on Breitbart the next day, called Clinton’s speech “a drive-by shooting with a water pistol fired from a mobility scooter.” Alex Jones recorded a video in which he stood in his back yard, wiping sweat from his brow, as he muttered about the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. “People say, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve hit the big time—Hillary Clinton talked about you,’ ” he scoffed. “Give me a break. Hillary Clinton’s average YouTubes, on her own channel, have, like, five thousand views. Our average one has hundreds of thousands.” His video was viewed more times than the official upload of Clinton’s speech.

Cernovich covered the Reno speech on Periscope. “Is she gonna fall?” he said, watching live footage of Clinton approaching the stage. “She’s grabbing the handrail!” He tweeted, “Sick Hillary grabs handrail as walking up steps. #AltRightMeans.” The hashtag was already trending on Twitter, as the alt-right’s supporters and opponents competed to define the movement. Political spin battles are waged online every minute, and it can be difficult to gauge who is winning. Media consumers don’t believe everything they read, and, because of personalization algorithms, no two social-media feeds look the same. The next day, the mainstream consensus was that the two sides had fought to a draw.

Cernovich thought that Clinton’s speech “was the stupidest thing she could have done.” He added, “Her social-media advisers are twenty-four-year-old basic bitches who feel triggered by us, and so they asked their boss to yell at us and make us go away. Well, we’re not going away. They just made us stronger.”

Cernovich lives fifty miles south of Los Angeles, in a deep-red congressional district. On the Internet, he represents himself as a “Pulitzer-worthy journalist” who runs Cernovich Media, a “global worldwide brand.” When we first spoke, on the phone, I asked him whether he worked from home or in an office full of employees. Chuckling, he said, “It’s definitely just me, dude.”

I visited him in mid-September. He had recently moved to a cul-de-sac where every house has stucco walls, a ceramic tile roof, and bland xeriscaping. He met me outside, wearing a rumpled gingham shirt and jeans. A day-old Orange CountyRegister lay at his feet. He looked fleshier than he did in his videos, and his eye contact was less steady with me than it is on camera. Next door, a sticker on a garbage bin advertised WorldNetDaily, a Web site known for promoting birtherism. Cernovich hadn’t met the neighbors yet. “They’d probably geek out if I told them my name,” he said. “Then I’d have to say hi every time I see them, and maybe they’d want to be friends—nah, not worth it.”

Cernovich trained as a lawyer. In 2003, he was accused of raping a woman he knew; the charge was later dropped, but a judge ordered him to do community service for misdemeanor battery. (His record has since been expunged.) On his first blog, which he started in 2004, he offered a libertarian critique of prosecutorial overreach, emphasizing free speech and false rape allegations. He launched his current blog, Danger and Play, in 2011, after his first wife filed for divorce.

His second wife, Shauna, who is twenty-nine, and pregnant with their first child, was in the kitchen. She is as warm as her husband is taciturn. “I’m so embarrassed!” she said, apologizing for an imaginary mess. The house was clean and compact; the small, paved back yard had a single lawn chair. The lush veranda in the Periscope videos belonged to Shauna’s parents, who live a few blocks away.

Mike and Shauna met in 2011, at a bar in Santa Monica. “He was pretty aggressive,” Shauna told me. “He grabbed my arm, pulled me into him, and said, ‘You fit nicely.’ ”

“It sounds creepy, but it looked less creepy in context,” Mike said.

“It worked,” Shauna said. “We were making out, like, five minutes later.”

Mike said that, when they started dating, “I didn’t take it seriously. But she just refused to go away, and now—”

“I’m married and pregnant!” Shauna said, smiling.

“And my life is over,” Mike said, half-smiling.

“We’re having a girl!” Shauna said. “I think it’ll be good for him, soften him up a bit.”

“I’ll be nice to her, as long as she’s not a basic bitch,” Mike said.

Cernovich sat at the kitchen table, facing a mirror, and placed his laptop next to a teapot full of flowers. (Shauna is in charge of decorating.) “Right now, a hundred and twenty-eight people are reading Danger and Play,” he said. “What’s fun is when you get a hot story and watch the number tick up into the thousands, like a video game.” Nowadays, the blog is mostly a platform for pro-Trump spin, but at first it was about how to pick up women. Its name comes from Nietzsche. (“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”) Early posts included “Misogyny Gets You Laid” and “When Should You Compliment a Woman?” (Answer: “During or after sex.”)

Early in Shauna’s relationship with Mike, she read Danger and Play, including such posts as “How to Cheat on Your Girlfriend.” She said, “I would come home from work crying—‘How can you write such rude things?’ He’d go, ‘You don’t understand, babe, this is just how guys talk.’ ” (Advice from the blog: “Always call your girl ‘babe,’ ” to avoid mixing up names.) Shauna, who has stopped working, continued, “I was still upset, though, and he eventually deleted some older posts.”

“I rewrote some of the wording,” Mike insisted.“I never disavow things I’ve said.”Throughout our September conversations, he referred to his more misogynist remarks as “locker-room talk.”

His political analysis was nearly as crass as his dating advice. In March, he tweeted, “Hillary’s face looks like melting candle wax. Imagine what her brain looks like.” Next, he tweeted a picture of Clinton winking, which he interpreted as “a mild stroke.” By August, he was declaring that she had both a seizure disorder and Parkinson’s disease.

“There are a million things wrong with Hillary,” Cernovich told me. “She’s a documented liar. She’s massively corrupt. She wants to let in more so-called refugees, which makes her an existential threat to the West.” (He calls the Syrian refugee crisis a “media lie.”) “But I was looking at the conversation online—what was getting through to people and what wasn’t—and none of that was sticking. It’s too complex. I thought that the health stuff would be more visceral, more resonant from a persuasion standpoint, and so I pushed that.”

On September 11th, Clinton fainted after attending a memorial service at Ground Zero. Cernovich wrote a post called “Complete Timeline of Hillary’s Health #HillarysHealth,” which included such data points as “peculiar travel habits” and “lengthy naps.” It got two hundred and forty thousand page views—less than a marquee Huffington Post story, but impressive for a blog with no advertising budget. More important, #HillarysHealth became a national trending topic on Twitter. That day, Chris Cillizza, a centrist pundit at the Washington Post, wrote an article titled “Hillary Clinton’s Health Just Became a Real Issue in This Campaign.” Scott Greer, a deputy editor of the Daily Caller, tweeted, “Cernovich memed #SickHillary into reality. Never doubt the power of memes.”

Without months of priming by Cernovich and others, Clinton’s collapse might have been seen as an isolated event. And the alt-right rumors may have prompted Clinton to be secretive about having pneumonia, making it a bigger story when it was revealed. “I decline the Pulitzer for my work on Hillary’s health,” Cernovich tweeted. “I will not accept a scam award from a scam organization.”

There is a lot of discussion in certain parts of the Internet about “red-pill moments.” In the 1999 film “The Matrix,” the hero faces a choice: the blue pill will allow him to stay within a comfortable delusion; the red pill will cause him to wake up. “Red pill” is good branding—it’s cowardly to live a lie. On many message boards, though, the lie being dismantled is gender equality.

“My first marriage was ruined by feminist indoctrination,” Cernovich told me. He married his first wife in 2003, when they were law students at Pepperdine. Initially, he said, the “power arrangement” was “fifty-fifty.” Then came a realization: “What she actually wanted was for me to be more assertive, to be the man in the relationship. So I would be more assertive, and she’d be happier for a few days. Then she’d go, ‘No, I need to be in charge,’ and we’d butt heads.” They separated in 2011. (Cernovich’s ex-wife declined to be interviewed.)

After law school, his wife became a successful attorney in Silicon Valley. But Cernovich was not admitted to the California bar until nine years after getting his law degree. In the meantime, he says, he got by with “freelance legal research” and “appellate stuff.” Cernovich’s wife earned millions of dollars in stock from an I.P.O.; he told me that he received “seven figures” in the divorce settlement. This seems to have been, and might still be, his primary source of funds. (He insists that book sales provide his main income.)

Cernovich says that during college, at the University of Illinois, he was socialized to be submissive. “I was friends with a lot of girls who had crushes on me, but I was too polite to fuck them,” he said. After his divorce, he reinvented himself as an alpha male. His self-published 2015 book, “Gorilla Mindset,” is a manual for men who want to “unleash the animal” within them. The book is filed under Gender Studies in the Amazon Kindle store. Until recently, it was the top seller in that category, ahead of “We Should All Be Feminists,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

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On his blog, Cernovich developed a theory of white-male identity politics: men were oppressed by feminism, and political correctness prevented the discussion of obvious truths, such as the criminal proclivities of certain ethnic groups. His opponents were beta males, losers, or “cucks”—alt-right slang for “cuckolds.” “To beat a person, you lower his or her social status,” he wrote on Danger and Play. “Logic is pointless.”

Although he disdained electoral politics (“No thinking man buys into this two-party political system”), he was in an ideal position to foresee Trump’s rise. In July, 2015, he tweeted, “I said if a Republican acted like me and ran for office, it’d be a movement. Donald Trump has proven me right. People are tired of pussies.” Politics is a blood sport, but, during the primaries, Jeb Bush and the rest of Trump’s “cuckservative” opponents preferred to be genteel. “What are Trump’s policies? I don’t particularly care,” Cernovich wrote on Danger and Play. And, in another post: “If Trump offends you, it’s because you live in a cucked world where no one speaks their minds.”

While I was in California, Cernovich hosted a meet-up for his readers, on the boardwalk in Hermosa Beach. I arrived early, not quite sure what to look for. A crowd had gathered around a drum circle. “Can you feel the Earth’s rhythm?” a drummer asked. Nearby, a film crew from Women.com was shooting a video about sex positivity. At an outdoor bar, I spotted some beefy white men, in T-shirts and shorts. “Cernovich?” I asked. They nodded.

About sixty people showed up, including a few women and people of color. Cernovich’s admirers peppered him with questions. “What about Hillary’s body count?” a young man asked, referring to rumors that Clinton has ordered the killing of several enemies—among them John F. Kennedy, Jr.—or has murdered them herself. Cernovich looked skeptical, and the young man was disappointed. “Then again, Bill’s brother was a drug dealer, and they have ties to organized crime,” Cernovich said. “So who knows?”

Cernovich told me, “I believe in strong borders, including keeping out Islamic terrorists. If people think that’s inherently racist, fine—but I’m an American nationalist, not a white nationalist.” A few people at the meet-up were white nationalists—not the skinhead type but the more polished, just-asking-the-question variety. Some attendees proudly called themselves “deplorables,” and many praised Cernovich as a corrective to traditional journalism. “Corporate news is fucking fake, dude,” a cybersecurity consultant named Jeff Martinez said. “You can just tell.” An informal poll revealed that no one believed in polls. Trump was going to be President, no matter what the cucked media said.

Most conversations touched on free speech (which everyone was for) and political correctness (which everyone was against). “I’m sick of the censorship, the words you can’t say,” Steven McHale, a marketing analyst, told me. Milo Yiannopoulos had recently been banned from Twitter, and the attendees were outraged. “It’s straight-up thought policing,” someone said. “It’s ‘1984.’ ”

The prevailing logic was that, short of yelling fire in a crowded theatre, anyone should be able to say anything, in any venue. But censure is not censorship. The Constitution guarantees that the government won’t restrict what you can say; it does not guarantee that you can shout obscenities on CNN, or that you can harass co-workers, or that you can make racist arguments without being made to feel like a racist. One of the unifying marks of the alt-right sensibility is the assumption that no speech act is beyond the pale. Instead of being offended by blackface or pictures of dead babies, you are encouraged to see them as funny, even if you don’t understand why. At the meet-up, a pudgy man wore a T-shirt with a picture of Harambe, the gorilla that was killed earlier this year at the Cincinnati Zoo. People pointed at the shirt and snickered, adding, “Dicks out for Harambe.” I asked the man to explain the joke. “It’s a funny thing people say, or post, or whatever,” he said. “It’s just a thing on the Internet.” At times, it can seem like anything—a dead gorilla, a rape threat, a Presidential election—is just a thing on the Internet.

“You guys want a snack?” Shauna asked.

“Not now, babe,” Mike said, his eyes on his computer screen. She put out a bowl of pita chips, which he ignored.

It was 11 a.m., and he had been sitting at his kitchen table for hours. First, he appeared, via Skype, on “The Gavin McInnes Show,” an online alt-right talk show. Then he perused Twitter. In September, Cernovich’s tweets were seen more than a hundred million times. When he bragged about this on Twitter, one of his followers replied, “Guerrilla Mindset: How Mike Cernovich waged war on journalism and won.”

“Some people say they hate Beltway insiders and establishment media types, but it’s actually sour grapes,” Cernovich said. (Ann Coulter came to mind.) “Deep down, they want the cool kids to love them. I actually fucking detest those people.” He grew up in Kewanee, a farming town in Illinois. Not long ago, he said, “I started looking into who these neocon policy wonks are. Every backstory was the same—East Coast, Harvard, trust fund, nepotism. Look, if the experts decide tomorrow that we’re going to war with Russia, who’s gonna fight that war? Jonah Goldberg and Ross Douthat? Fuck no. It’ll be guys I know from Kewanee.”

His parents are devout Christians. His mother didn’t finish high school; his father bounced between factory jobs, eventually working at a junk yard. “Kids I knew either joined the Army or didn’t leave town,” Cernovich said. “The smartest kid in the class above me got into the University of Chicago, and I went, ‘What’d he do wrong?’ Because, in my mind, a city is smaller than a state, so the University of Illinois had to be a better school.” Cernovich’s parents and his three siblings still live in the area, but he rarely visits or calls home. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “If I still believed in Jesus, we could talk about that.”

As we spoke, a fan sent him a message: Rush Limbaugh had just mentioned #ZombieHillary on his radio show. The hashtag, referring to Clinton’s supposed frailty, had trended the previous day on Twitter, after Cernovich encouraged his followers to use it. “I would like to claim credit for it, but I can’t,” Limbaugh had said. “Somebody on Twitter did it.” Cernovich told me, “He’ll never mention me by name, but he’s at least listening to the periphery.”

People have always expressed extreme views online, but for many years there was no easy way for such opinions to spread. The Internet was a vast landscape dotted with isolated viruses. The rise of social networks was like the advent of air travel: a virus can now conquer the world in a day. Instead of picking up a newspaper or visiting its home page, people scan their social-media accounts, where myriad information sources—the Daily Mail, links posted by Steph Curry, a distant relative’s Facebook rants—compete for their attention.

The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene”; he defined it as any “unit of cultural transmission” that stays alive by “leaping from brain to brain.” In a footnote to the 1989 edition, he wrote, “Computers are increasingly tied together. Many of them are literally wired up together in electronic mail exchange. . . . It is a perfect milieu for self-replicating programs to flourish.” Dawkins was worried about computer viruses. He couldn’t have predicted Guccifer 2.0 or #ZombieHillary.

“We may be at a threshold,” Dawkins told me recently. “In the past, I would’ve been tempted to say, about the Internet, that although everybody has a megaphone, in many cases it’s a quiet one. You can put up a YouTube video, but who’s going to watch it? Now, however ridiculous what you’re saying is, if you make it memetically successful, something really bad can spread through the culture.”

Cernovich had another red-pill moment during a trip to Budapest, where he saw hundreds of Syrian émigrés camped out in a train station, waiting to be resettled elsewhere in Hungary. Based on the media coverage of the crisis, he’d expected to see squalor, amputees, wailing children. Instead, he said, “there were able-bodied men playing soccer. Guys and girls flirting. It hit me—these people aren’t refugees. It’s a hoax.” He shared photographs of the refugees on Facebook, writing, “There is no oppression. The media lied.” The photos were shared nearly five thousand times—his first taste of viral fame.

Cernovich realized that a meme could reach more people than a newspaper story, without having to cross an editor’s desk. With savvy framing, an alternative voice could seem as authoritative as the nightly news. He decided to become one of those voices.

He had already insinuated himself into public conflicts in order to gain followers. (“Conflict is attention.”) And in 2014 he became a champion of GamerGate, a vicious campaign against feminists in the video-game industry. He goaded his opponents on Twitter: “Who cares about breast cancer and rape? Not me.” Cernovich’s affiliation with GamerGate made him, he said, “toxic in the eyes of a lot of people,” but he calculated that the exposure was worth it.

He picked fights with celebrities on Twitter. (Seth Rogen took the bait; Cernovich called him “Cuck Rogen.”) “I’m not a pure troll,” Cernovich told me. “Pure trolls are amoral”—they post swastikas, he suggested, not out of an allegiance to Nazism but because they enjoy riling people. “I use trolling tactics to build my brand.”

Pro-Trump activism channelled several of Cernovich’s interests: he could hurt a feminist’s chances of becoming President, associate himself with the year’s top story, and deploy brawler methods on behalf of someone who is even more ruthless online than he is. In mid-October, Cernovich released another book, “maga Mindset,” about Trump’s “unapologetically masculine” persona.

Ever since the advent of the mass media, professional journalists have been a bulwark against seditious or far-fetched theories. One might attribute this fact to their paternalism, their myopia, or their rectitude. In any case, their work tended to have a homogenizing effect. Newscasters told us that the world was more or less as we expected it to be, and we more or less believed them. This system had its faults: after all, far-fetched theories are sometimes true. In 1922, Walter Lippmann, in his book “Public Opinion,” warned of “the manufacture of consent,” a power that media gatekeepers could use for good or for ill.

That was a twentieth-century problem. The media no longer has the ability to manufacture consent. Walter Cronkite was once the most trusted man in America; in 2013, according to a Reader’s Digest survey, the most trusted person was Tom Hanks. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Walter Cronkite lied about everything,” Cernovich said. “Before Twitter, how would you have known? Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”

These days, Cernovich’s primary target is the “hoaxing media.” He told me, “The mainstream media has lost so much legitimacy at this point that if they reported, ‘We just saw Trump beat the shit out of a guy on the street,’ skeptical people like my readers would go, ‘Really? Is there video? Was the video doctored?’ ” Such casual cynicism, of course, redounds to Trump’s advantage. For his part, Trump may have changed his mind about almost every policy proposal and campaign strategy, but he consistently maintains that journalists are scum.

In 2010, when the right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart started a blog called Big Journalism, the name was ironic. Now Breitbart.com gets more traffic than the Los Angeles Times, and Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s former editor-in-chief, is running Trump’s campaign. Cernovich said, “Going by the statistics, I’m less influential than some people”—Trump, say, or Kim Kardashian—“but way more influential than some punk blogger at Politico or The Weekly Standard who thinks of himself as part of the media élite. Objectively, I am the new media.”

As Shauna Cernovich was leaving the house to visit her parents, she told me, “They don’t fully understand what Michael does. They get that he likes Trump and that he puts stuff on the Internet—they just don’t get how that’s a job.” Her parents are secular Persian Muslims who left Iran before it became a theocracy. “My dad hates when women cover their hair,” she said.

“We sometimes joke that he’s more Islamophobic than I am,” Mike said.

“My dad actually created an anonymous Twitter account so he could troll Muslims,” Shauna said. “At the same time, he hates Trump, because he’s, like, ‘If he’s saying negative things about different groups, then how do we know he’s not going to come after Persians one day?’ Even if you believe certain things, you shouldn’t necessarily say it openly.”

Mike shrugged. “I don’t think any ideas are off limits,” he said. “Actions, yes. Words, no.”

He stood up and stretched, thrusting his chest forward and his arms back. “Lowers your cortisol,” he explained. He poured himself a coffee, sat down, and read articles about Ahmad Rahami, who was suspected of planting bombs in New Jersey and Manhattan. Developments in the Rahami case were big news in the New York area, but not everywhere on the Internet. “If there’s a story that can hurt Hillary, I want it in the news cycle,” Cernovich said. “When I first started, that meant figuring out how news cycles work.” One way to propel a story into the mainstream is to get it linked by the Drudge Report. “If it’s on Drudge, then it’s on ‘Hannity,’ ” Cernovich said. “If it’s on ‘Hannity,’ then Brian Stelter’s talking about it on CNN.” The Drudge Report favors big newspapers and established right-wing blogs; Danger and Play is not on the list. “If I have a really hot story, I might leak it to someone at Breitbart, or to someone else who can get the Drudge link.” That journalist usually returns the favor by embedding a Cernovich tweet in the story.

Twitter is Cernovich’s favorite medium for promoting memes. The site devotes a prominent place to its list of trending topics—the most discussed phrases and hashtags of the moment, according to a proprietary algorithm. “It starts on Periscope,” he explained. “I’ll show you.” He propped his iPad upright on the kitchen table, so that the camera lens faced the mirror, and started filming.

Within seconds, thousands of viewers had signed on. “We’ve gotta get a hashtag trending,” he said. “We definitely need to remind the world that Hillary Clinton is bringing in the terrorists.” Viewers made suggestions, and Cernovich, monitoring the feed on his laptop, read them aloud. “HillarysMigrants is good,” he said. “HillarysTerrorists is good. Yeah, just keep throwing them out.” He overlooked #hillaryshitmen and #hillarysmigrantcuntlickers, as well as a commenter who wrote, “Nice tea kettle of flowers Cuck.”

After a few minutes, Cernovich chose #HillarysMigrants. He instructed his followers, “Remind people that Angela Merkel, George Soros, Hillary Clinton—they’re all together. Post pictures of them together. Post pictures of the terrorist attacks.” While he was talking, Shauna returned home and sat on a couch in the background of the shot. (“If I stayed out of his videos all the time, I’d never be allowed in the living room,” she told me.) He went on for twenty more minutes, referring to George Soros’s son six times as a “basic bitch.”

He ended the Periscope video and searched for #HillarysMigrants on Twitter. “Ninety-two people have posted to it in the past minute,” he said. Many of the tweets included images, as he’d requested: Clinton and Merkel laughing conspiratorially; a caricature of Clinton as a ventriloquist’s dummy, sitting on Soros’s lap. “It’s hard to tell yet whether this is a killer hashtag or just an O.K. one,” he said. A hashtag will trend, he estimates, if it gets thirty-five hundred tweets within an hour. “That’s a guess—Twitter keeps that stuff secret,” he said.

Around 3:30 p.m., he announced that he was done for the day. “I’ll go to the gym, relax for a bit,” he said. Before closing his laptop, he checked his direct messages on Twitter, and found a tip alleging that, in 2014, a Reddit user had asked for help removing a “VERY VIP” e-mail address “from a bunch of archived e-mail.” The tipster claimed that the Reddit user was Paul Combetta, one of Hillary Clinton’s I.T. staffers. Cernovich clicked the link to the Reddit thread and noticed that it had been deleted. “Son of a bitch!” he said. “This might actually be true.”

He returned to muckraking mode. “We’re going to make a whole new news cycle about her fucking e-mails again!” he said. “This poor fucking woman.” He started a new Periscope video. “What do you guys want to do for a hashtag?” he said. He decided on #HillarysHacker. It was trending before he finished the video. That day, more than forty-two thousand tweets were posted with the hashtag.

I returned to Cernovich’s house the next morning. By then, the Reddit story had been covered by Vice and New York, and a congressman had asked prosecutors in Washington, D.C., to look into it. Cernovich had tweeted dozens of times since I’d left, including at 1:30 a.m. He was wearing the same gingham shirt. “I didn’t go to the gym last night,” he said, sheepishly. “I’ve gained twenty pounds during this fucking election.”

He told me that he’d been reading Andrew Breitbart’s 2011 autobiography, “Righteous Indignation”: “There’s a part where he’s on a plane for five hours, without Wi-Fi, and he has withdrawal symptoms. I relate to that. And, you know, Breitbart had a huge cultural impact, but he died of heart failure at forty-three.”

The following week, Cernovich went to the first Presidential debate, at Hofstra University. He lacked press credentials, so he found a few dozen Jill Stein supporters on the perimeter of the campus, and streamed their protest via Periscope. “Police keep sending us to different areas,” he texted me. He claimed that this was “psyops” designed to dampen the protesters’ morale. In a Periscope video called “No free speech at #Debates2016,” he said, “Mainstream media’s not gonna talk about this.”

“The cops are Soros people!” one commenter wrote.

“Harambe!” another wrote.

I was inside the gates, in a gym where the TV networks had set up broadcast booths. I ran into Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business anchor, who was wearing pancake makeup. I asked him if he’d heard of Cernovich. “Absolutely!” he said. “I follow him on Twitter. Seems very smart.”

We parted, then Dobbs chased me down. “Can I revise that?” he said. “I’m not sure I follow him.” (He does.) “I’ve seen his stuff, and I think it’s interesting,” he added. “Interesting is a good thing, right?”

Cernovich watched the debate from a parking lot, on his phone. Afterward, he gave me a ride to Manhattan. Trump had spent much of the debate sniffling audibly, and I asked Cernovich if he worried about Trump’s health. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they messed with his mike to make it sound like that,” he said.

He predicted that traditional journalists would spin the debate in Clinton’s favor. “The left likes to talk about power structures, right?” he said. “Well, the media still thinks of itself as speaking truth to power. What they don’t realize is that someone like me is perceived as the new Fourth Estate. Maybe they should check their structural privilege.” The “paternalistic” media, he said, was giving way to a more democratic one. “It makes journalists crazy, because they used to be in control,” he said. “They can’t control people anymore. Everyone has a voice now.” ?

Andrew Marantz is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

==

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-fake-news-find-your-social-media-feeds/

...

James Alefantis: It went from a few people buzzing about something online or inside of chat rooms that we never would have seen before, to suddenly being blasted to millions and millions of people.

The police say there is no sex-trafficking conspiracy. But millions read about it on dozens of websites including one called “Danger and Play,” which wrote, “Clinton’s inner circle includes child traffickers, pedophiles and now members of a sex cult.” “Danger and Play” is written by Michael Cernovich, a Southern California lawyer who describes himself as “right-of-center politically,” but who has become a magnet for readers with a taste for stories with no basis in fact....

Scott Pelley: Do you believe that, or do you say that because it’s important for marketing your website?

Michael Cernovich: Oh, I believe it. I don’t say anything that I don’t believe.

Scott Pelley: That doesn’t seem like a very high bar.

Michael Cernovich: It’s a high bar because I’m an attorney. I know how to weigh and measure evidence.

Michael Cernovich: Here’s the story of my life.

Cernovich streams commentary daily and publishes on social media. He reached Twitter users 83 million times last month.

Michael Cernovich: That was a slow month, too. We hit 150 million sometimes. What I’m doing is, it’s punchy, it’s fun, it’s counterintuitive, it’s counter-narrative, and it’s information that you’re not gonna see everywhere else.

In August, he published this headline.

Scott Pelley: “Hillary Clinton has Parkinson’s Disease, physician confirms.” You don’t think that’s misleading?

Michael Cernovich: No.

Scott Pelley: You believe it’s true today?

Michael Cernovich: Oh, absolutely.

That story was sourced to an anesthesiologist who never met Clinton. It got so much traction it had to be denied by Clinton’s doctor and the National Parkinson Foundation.

Michael Cernovich: She had a seizure and froze up walking into her motorcade that day.

Scott Pelley: Well, she had pneumonia. I mean--

Michael Cernovich: How do you know? Who told you that?

Scott Pelley: Well, the campaign told us that.

Michael Cernovich: Why would you trust the campaign?

Scott Pelley: The point is you didn’t talk to anybody who’d ever examined Hillary Clinton.

Michael Cernovich: I don’t take anything Hillary Clinton is gonna say at all as true. I’m not gonna take her on her word. The media says we’re not gonna take Donald Trump on his word. And that’s why we are in these different universes.

...

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mma

...BuzzFeed: "Scott Pelley Wasn't Prepared" For Cernovich. BuzzFeed News explained that "Scott Pelley wasn't prepared for a troll" during the interview with Cernovich, adding that "Pelley didn't do his homework on Cernovich and the ecosystem he's a part of." From the March 27 piece:

Scott Pelley wasn’t prepared for a troll.

[...]

Pelley and 60 Minutes’ decision to focus on fake news proved that it took the threat of the far-right’s information war seriously. But Pelley didn’t do his homework on Cernovich and the ecosystem he’s a part of. And it showed, despite the fact that CBS got to edit down the video.

“They don't understand new media,” [Cernovich] wrote Sunday evening. “Also they all think I'm a moron. It's perfect microcosm of the election and media's view on Trump.”

I asked him to elaborate.

“They don't understand me and didn't even try.” BuzzFeed, [3/27/17]

Cernovich Is Also A Purveyor Of Bigotry, A Serial Harasser, And A Conspiracy Theorist
Cernovich Is A Self-Proclaimed Member Of The “Alt-Right”

Cernovich Became Involved In The “Alt-Right” After “Realizing Tolerance Only Went One Way And Diversity Is Code For White Genocide.:{” In a since-deleted August 2015 tweet, Cernovich declared his allegiance to the “alt-right” -- a self-declared name for a faction of the white nationalist movement -- writing that he made his choice after “realizing tolerance only went one way and diversity is code for white genocide.” Twitter, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[10/28/15:{]}:

Cernovich Regularly Makes Racist Comments

Cernovich: “White Genocide Is Real” And Will “Sweep Up The SJWs.” In a series of since-deleted tweets, Cernovich declared that “White genocide is real” and will “sweep up the SJWs,” referring to so-called “social justice warriors.” *Media Matters*, [11/18/16]

Cernovich: “Detroit Schools Are A Mess? Who Runs Detroit? Blacks!"

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:{[Mike Cernovich  :{}:

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@Cernovich](https://twitter.com/Cernovich)}:

Detroit schools are a mess? Who runs Detroit? Blacks! #DemDebate

7:00 PM - 6 Mar 2016

[Twitter,3/6/16]

Cernovich: There Are “Zero” Videos Of “EVIL White Nationalists Committing HATE CRIMES,” But There Is “Lots Of Videos Of Black Teens Knocking Out Whites!”

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:{[Mike Cernovich  :{}:

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@Cernovich](https://twitter.com/Cernovich)}:

Where are videos of EVIL white nationalists committing HATE CRIMES. Zero. Zip. Nada. Lots of videos of blacks teens knocking out whites!

11:12 AM - 8 Mar 2016 · Hermosa Beach, CA

[Twitter,3/8/16]

Cernovich: “The ‘Alt-Right’ Hasn’t Killed Anyone, But #BlackLivesMatter Regularly Slaughters The Innocent.”

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:{[Mike Cernovich  :{}:

✔

@Cernovich](https://twitter.com/Cernovich)}:

The "alt-right" hasn't killed anyone, but #BlackLivesMatter regularly slaughters the innocent. Know the real threat. Think! #Dallas

2:42 PM - 8 Jul 2016 · Lake Forest, CA

302302 likes

[Twitter,7/8/16]

Cernovich Is A Misogynist And Rape Denier

Cernovich: “Date Rape Does Not Exist.” In August 2012, Cernovich suggested in a since-deleted tweet that men “try” to rape “a girl without using force,” claiming that “it’s basically impossible,” and adding, “Date rape does not exist.” The Daily Beast, [8/9/16]

Cernovich: “If You Love Black Women, Slut Shame Them” To Keep Them From Getting AIDS. In February 2016, Cernovich wrote in a since-deleted tweet, “Not being a slut is the only proven way to avoid AIDS,” adding, “If you love black women, slut shame them.” The Daily Beast, [8/9/16]

Cernovich: “Misogyny Gets You Laid.” In a since-deleted 2011 post on his website Danger & Play titled “Misogyny Gets You Laid,” Cernovich wrote that “sex with fussy womenchild is boring” and “I am not so in need of sex that tolerating bullshit is worth the payoff.” Danger & Play, [8/24/11]

Cernovich: “If You Believe In College Rape Culture … You’re A Gullible Fool Who Believes Feminists.” In a February 2016 post on his website Danger & Play, Cernovich declared that “if you believe in college rape culture … you’re a gullible fool who believes feminists.” From the February 28, 2016, post (emphasis original):

If you believe in college rape culture, I understand a lot about you:

  • You’re a gullible fool who believes feminists.
  • You trust the mainstream media.
  • You are afraid to question narratives. Danger & Play, [2/28/16]

Cernovich Is A Serial Harasser

Cernovich Attacked Satirist Vic Berger Using Pizzagate Tactics. Cernovich used “pizzagate”-like tactics to attack video editor and satirist Vic Berger, subjecting him to online harassment and threats after he mocked Cernovich. *Media Matters*, [12/19/16]

Cernovich Led A Harassment Campaign Against NY Times Reporter. Cernovich led an online harassment campaign against The New York Times reporter Sopan Deb after he tweeted a joke regarding rapper Bow Wow and First Lady Melania Trump. He urged his followers to email Times Public Editor Liz Spayd about Deb. As a result, Spayd wrote a piece criticizing Deb, not realizing that much of the criticism she saw of his tweet came from Cernovich’s harassment campaign. *Media Matters*, [3/17/17]

Cernovich Was A Leader Behind “GamerGate.” In 2014, Cernovich was a “champion” of “GamerGate,” which The New Yorker characterized as “a vicious campaign against feminists in the video-game industry.” *The New Yorker*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[10/31/16]

Cernovich Is A Noted Conspiracy Theorist

Cernovich Has Repeatedly Pushed The “Pizzagate” Conspiracy Theory. Cernovich has repeatedly claimed that the conspiracy theory known as “pizzagate” is “worldwide” and “real.” Twitter, [11/3/16, 11/20/16, 11/25/16, 11/29/16, 12/2/16, 12/4/16; YouTube,11/24/16]

Cernovich Was “Among The First” To Claim That Hillary Clinton “Had A Grave Neurological Condition.” According to an October 31 New Yorker profile, “Cernovich was among the first to insinuate publicly that Clinton had a grave neurological condition, and that the media was covering it up.” *The New Yorker*, [10/31/16]

Cernovich Claimed That “There Was More Than One Shooter At Pulse In Orlando.” Cernovich claimed that “there was more than one shooter at Pulse in Orlando” during the 2016 shooting. In a blog post, Cernovich wrote, “As you follow the story, look for” certain “evidence.” He added, “If we don’t see all of this, then there was a second shooter.” Danger & Play, [6/12/16]