edited video doctored

see jok o'keefe

primary on longevity and importance whitewatr, acorn, joe biden wander off

SEE TWO fake video edit

see AIM

see also fake video and deep fake

includes fake forged documents

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tnr

Representative Ilhan Omar’s Republican colleagues are once again calling for her to be deported because they don’t understand U.S. law.

Representative Brandon Gill posted on X Tuesday in response to a post falsely claiming Omar was “hosting workshops” with Somali immigrants about their legal rights in the face of Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation orders.

“America would be a better place if @IlhanMN were deported back to Somalia,” Gill wrote, directing racist vitriol at a fellow member of Congress and a U.S. citizen.

Omar came under intense scrutiny after a whiny Elon Musk shared a link to a fake video that supposedly showed her “conducting seminars” with Somali immigrants on how to “evade” deportation. Musk claimed that she was “breaking the law. Literally. Outright.”

In the video, a clip of Omar explaining in Somali about Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination—a legal right that undocumented immigrants are free to exercise when encountering ICE agents—was spliced together with footage of unidentified people apparently of East African descent sitting in a room.

“She’s a major grifter and she hates America,” Musk wrote in a separate post on X.

Omar was quick to hit back at Musk Tuesday. “Well it just shows you how much he lacks an understanding of what our, of what the laws of this country are,” Omar said during an interview on CNN.

It appears that Gill has joined Musk in his weak understanding of American law—if that wasn’t obvious enough from his call to deport a U.S. citizen.

She clarified that the footage of her had been taken out of context from an interview with a journalist, who asked what her advice would be to undocumented Somalis, and that she hadn’t held a meeting like the one described.

Musk’s attacks against Omar come as she has been outspoken against his unlawful efforts to dismantle USAID.

...//

Elon Musk is sending his digital minions after Representative Ilhan Omar, all based on a fake video posted by the pitiable right-wing shill Ian Miles Cheong.

On Tuesday, Cheong posted an obviously edited video in which he claimed the progressive congresswoman was “conducting seminars for Somalians who are living illegally in the U.S. without documentation, providing guidance on how to evade deportation.”

The video shows a random room full of unidentified people of seemingly East African descent, then cuts to Omar being interviewed in a completely different room.

The richest man in the world shared the video, clutching at his pearls. “She is breaking the law. Literally. Outright,” he wrote on X of Omar allegedly telling immigrants that they were not required to answer questions if detained by ICE. And that didn’t even happen.

IFrame Content

Hundreds of Musk’s fans began flocking to Omar’s page, so much so that she had to clear the air herself.

“Hey Elon, every single person in this country deserves to know their rights. That’s legal. Maybe you should brush up on our laws given the fact you’re breaking them to steal American’s sensitive data,” Omar wrote, in reference to Musk’s aggressive takeover of the Treasury’s payment system. “PS. This video is manipulated, and I wasn’t even at the event shown.”

It’s ironic that a man who spends all day moaning about left-wing misinformation and suppression is using his massive platform to spread his own. And he’s just getting started.

---

Right-wing media misleadingly used a video from a fundraiser to renew their attacks on Biden's age

06/18/24 mma

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mma 11 23 j6 tapes maga mike 40k hours before fox tucker BS

Police suffered injuries at the hands of the rioters and allowed some movement in an attempt to de-escalate}:

- The police union has said 140 police officers suffered injuries from January 6.The Washington Post, [1/27/21]
- Police battled to keep rioters out of the Capitol but in some cases stood by because they were outnumbered or engaged politely to try to de-escalate.CNN reported:

The claim that the rioters were invited into the Capitol is false. ... There were hours-long battles between police and rioters near some entrances. CNN obtained footage from police body-worn cameras showing how dozens of officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat with rioters in a desperate effort to keep them out of the building. There are plenty of instances where rioters waltzed into the Capitol without a fight, but only after they had stormed past barricades and, in some cases, even stepped through broken windows. In some areas, police were so outnumbered by the mob that they retreated, stood aside or tried to politely engage with rioters to de-escalate the situation rather than fighting or making arrests, but that is clearly not the same as welcoming rioters into the building. CNN, [1/4/22]

- Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger stated that Capitol Police “did their best to use de-escalation tactics to try to talk rioters into getting each other to leave the building.” In a memo to staff, Manger disputed “outrageous and false” claims that Capitol Police served as “tour guides” for Jacob Chansley, aka the QAnon Shaman. Manger wrote that “Capitol Police were badly outnumbered on Jan. 6” and that “those officers did their best to use de-escalation tactics to try to talk rioters into getting each other to leave the building.” The Washington Post, [3/7/23]
- Capitol Police officers testified to the January 6 Committee that the day was “nothing short of brutal,” that there was “carnage” and it was a “war scene.” The committee also aired body camera footage from the officers that showed rioters shoving officers and pushing down barricades outside the Capitol. NPR, [7/27/21, 6/23/21, The Associated Press, 6/10/22]
- Police onsite were massively outnumbered by rioters, with an estimated 2,000 people entering the Capitol building and under 200 officers at the Capitol building itself. Forbes, [12/16/21, ABC7, 1/6/22]

## Right-wing media claim police allowed protestors to enter the Capitol and suggest that means it wasn’t a violent insurrection
- Newsmax host Greg Kelly stated that it is “actually not true” that rioters broke into the Capitol and instead “some people were invited inside, and the police officers seemed to welcome them there.” While showing footage of protestors entering, Kelly also asserted that “this blows open the preferred January 6 narrative.” Newsmax, *Greg Kelly Reports*, [11/17/23]
- Newsmax host Eric Bolling said the footage shows Capitol police “escorting the protestors.” He asked his guest Rudy Giuliani, “I mean, does that look like an overthrow of the United States government to you, sir?” Newsmax, *Eric Bolling The Balance*, [11/17/23]

- Also on Newsmax, host Rob Schmitt claimed that protesters in the Capitol looked like they were taking “a tour,” adding that the “QAnon Shaman was actually escorted into the Capitol by police.” Schmitt acknowledged that there was some violence but nevertheless told his audience, “This is a much different day than it was portrayed by the media and by your members of Congress” and called the footage “an important reminder to always, always question what you are told by your government.” In fact, as The Associated Press reported in March, court documents and video footage from the attack show that the QAnon Shaman “entered the Capitol without permission, was repeatedly asked to leave the building and was not accompanied at all times.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight*, [11/17/23; The Associated Press, 3/7/23]
- Conservative podcast host Kyle Becker called the footage “bizarre” for showing rioters “casually walking the halls.”He posted, “This newly released J6 video is BIZARRE. All of these dangerous ‘insurrectionists’ casually walking the halls... right next to Capitol Police and FBI agents in full riot gear. WHAT is going on here? 👀” Twitter/X, [11/18/23]
- Right-wing personality Liz Wheeler claimed that Capitol police were “directing the insurrectionists” with a “handshake & pat on the back.” She posted, “Capitol police directing the insurrectionists who to insurrection with a handshake & pat on the back. Mark my words, the key to alllll of this lies with Nancy Pelosi.” Twitter/X, [11/17/23]
- Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk asserted that “the J6 Committee’s violent insurrection narrative has crumbled” and called for the immediate release of rioters. He posted, “And just like that the J6 Committee’s violent insurrection narrative has crumbled. The Capitol Police facilitated the protesters passage through the building. The vast majority of J6ers should be immediately released.” Twitter/X, [11/17/23]
- Conservative commentator Benny Johnson noted police “were giving handshakes to protestors” and determined that “this is not an insurrection.” He posted, “Capitol Police were giving handshakes to protesters. Now ask yourselves this; In which ‘insurrection’ or ‘Rebellion’ in history would this have happened in? None — because this is not an ‘insurrection.’” Twitter/X, [11/17/23]
- Conservative commentator Rogan O'Handley, also known as DC Draino, posted, “Wow what an ‘insurrection’! Watch as J6ers slowly walk past Capitol Police who just watch. Democrats said this was worse than 9/11.” X, [11/17/23]
- Right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer dismissed concerns of right-wing violence at the Capitol because Capitol police were “fist-bumping” rioters. She said: “Oh, if these cops are so concerned, and this was really worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor combined, and, you know, it's like a modern day Nazi rally in our nation's capital, why is it that the Capitol Police are fist-bumping these people?” Rumble, *Loomer Unleashed*, [11/17/23]

===

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/t**hey-blew-up-my-life**/

no lnx docs

mARTINSVILLE, Ind. — It started April 12, right afterFox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime, one of the most-watched news programs in the country.

A phone call: “You stupid b*tch.”

Then an email: “Everyone you ever encounter … should spit in your face, fling their feces at you (with impeccable aim), punch you, knock you down, kick you, piss on you and hold you there for similar treatment by everyone waiting in line for their turn — you despicable sad excuse for a sub-human being.”

And that was just the first 11 minutes for Jenny Oakley, a mid-level public school administrator in Martinsville, Ind., who found herself depicted in a nationally televised secret camera video and thrust suddenly — and, she said, unfairly and inaccurately — into culture war cruelty.

It would get worse.

During sleepless nights, Oakley’s husband Justin took out his guns for the first time in 10 years. Police began patrols outside the Oakleys’ home after they reported harassment. The couple bought a Doberman named Zeus for added protection. Late on a Saturday night in their quiet neighborhood, a burst of sound — Pow-Pow-Pow — startled them and then a louder Boom.

Having previously enjoyed a quiet life, Jenny Oakley found herself in a debilitating new reality, breaking down when people merely asked how she was doing. She enjoyed reading, but now she couldn’t concentrate. She liked watching videos, but a video got her in this situation. Videos triggered dread.

Oakley describes herself as someone who wants to be liked, someone who has “always cared what people think, to a fault.” She said she avoids controversy and isn’t very political. Justin is the opposite. He works for an Indiana teachers union and ran for state Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2012 before dropping out of the race.

But on social media, strangers took off on Jenny’s character, including one who wrote, “I do not believe in any way that she is a good person.”

An email from the night of the program carried the subject line “God Bless You,” but what it said stung Oakley the most. She could handle the heinous screed of some kook. But this cut deep as an educator and mother of a middle schooler.

“You should never be near any children again, including your own…,” the email said.

That middle schooler helped her mother during the difficult days ahead.

Jenny Oakley and Zeus, her family's Doberman. Doug McSchooler / Raw Story

“I don't think she had ever seen me cry except at funerals,” Oakley said. “And I was walking around here like a zombie, basically. And she made out little Bible verses and stuck them all over the house, you know, trying to hold me up.”

And to what end are the Oakleys suffering through this ordeal?

“I just think it's just part of a bigger attack on public education,” Oakley said. “And, you know, that's the ultimate goal. I wasn't the target necessarily, but I'm definitely the collateral damage.”

Hidden camera, open wounds

In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, Oakley recounted her experience as one of seven public educators from different school districts in Indiana who Accuracy in Media recorded on a hidden camera. Fox News used the video for its April 12 segment on Jesse Watters Primetime.

Accuracy in Media, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit, and Fox News alleged that the educators were “stealthily” teaching “principles associated with Critical Race Theory,” a highly controversial front in the culture wars that, at its core, alleges systemic racism in America.

Raw Story last week requested an interview with Accuracy in Media President Adam Guillette. Accuracy in Media responded with an unsigned email requesting Raw Story submit written questions in advance. Raw Story declined to do so, and Accuracy in Media did not respond to subsequent interview requests. Accuracy in Media also did not respond to several emailed questions.

Fox News did not respond to requests for an interview.

The supposed deception of parents, Accuracy in Media argues, reinforces the need for public tax money to go to charter and private schools.

“Our goal is school choice where the money follows the child,” Guillette said on Fox News. “That is the only solution.”

Within the past few months, Accuracy in Media also published hidden-camera video of public educators in Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, and Nebraska. In those states — plus Indiana and several others — such recordings are legal because only one party to a conversation needs to consent.

ALSO READ: A neuroscientist warns: We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history

Educators were accused, as in Indiana, of sneaking CRT concepts into public school curriculum.

“After this happened, I was like, ‘How in the world did they align what I was talking about to CRT?’” Oakley said. “Because in fact, I couldn't even talk intelligently about CRT at that time.”

Through open records requests to the districts involved, Raw Story obtained Accuracy in Media’s lightly edited video from the Elkhart, Ind., public school district, plus hundreds of pages of emails from all of the districts.

Oakley said she spoke to Raw Story to explain her side, advocate for the teaching profession and to show the human cost of rabid culture war fighting.

She appears for 24 seconds in the Accuracy in Media video.

“We’ve talked about, to our textbook companies that are coming in to do presentations — and I actually prep them a little because I’m like, “We want this in our curriculum, so if you could just not say specifically this, then it won’t cause a red flag with the community,’” Oakley says. “And I hate that we have to do that. But that way, it’s still there. And the community would support it if just the content was there. They just … it’s the title.”

The Fox News story started with a graphic over Watters’ shoulder showing children’s blocks with the letters CRT.

“Children are fed CRT propaganda,” it said on the lower-third of the screen.

Watters started the segment by asserting, “Schools are brainwashing our kids and then lying about it.”

Jenny Oakley is the first educator shown. The Fox News segment cut something Oakley sees as critical from the Accuracy in Media video — the part where she says, “And the community would support it …”

In an interview, Oakley said the red flag she meant was Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), which is sometimes mistakenly conflated with CRT. Teaching SEL is part of Indiana’s state academic standards and is promoted on a flyer from three state agencies.

It equates to skills such as building resiliency, communicating effectively, and goal setting. Indiana schools are required by law to teach SEL concepts, the Plainfield, Ind., school district explained in a Q&A strongly supportive of its administrator who appeared in the Accuracy in Media video.

CRT, however, is another matter. In June, the Metropolitan School District of Martinsville sued Accuracy in Media, saying it defamed the district and presented it in a false light by saying it teaches CRT. In July, the district withdrew its complaint.

The complaint alleged, “MSD of Martinsville believes that AIM has manipulated a surreptitious recording of a School District employee in an effort to falsely claim that the School District is teaching CRT and is lying to School District parents about it."

Superintendent Eric Bowlen declined comment for this story, including why the district dismissed the lawsuit it brought.

Oakley has not seen the unedited version of the video. The school district’s lawsuit said Accuracy in Media initially agreed to provide it and then went silent.

A day after the Fox News segment, a truck with a large screen on the side played the Accuracy in Media video as it rolled around downtown Indianapolis, with the city about to host the National Rifle Association’s annual convention.

It’s unclear who hired the truck, but Accuracy in Media’s tactics were generating attention.

‘Sydney Greenberg’

On a Thursday morning in February, two women who Oakley thought were in their 20s showed up at Martinsville’s administration building unannounced, saying they were looking for a school district for their child in first grade.

Their story, according to an email Oakley wrote later that day to district colleagues: They came from Texas, but Texas was too conservative and they wanted a new community and school. They expressed concern about censored curriculum and book banning.

It was more than two months before the Fox News story.

Oakley wouldn’t normally be the one to talk with school shoppers. That would be her boss, Suzie Lipps, assistant to the superintendent for curriculum, instruction and human resources. But Lipps was working on an issue outside the building, so Oakley, the director of e-learning and literacy, spoke with them. These opportunities are not taken lightly. That’s especially the case with Indiana’s legislature using tax money for a robust voucher program supporting private, usually faith-based, schools.

When Oakley asked the women what part of town they moved to, they named a local church. The conversation lasted five or 10 minutes, Oakley said. She later contacted the principal of the elementary school the child would be attending and suggested inviting the women to a cultural festival at the school that night.

Oakley got a name from one of the women, “Sydney Greenberg,” and a phone number.

Nobody returned the call inviting them to the cultural event. When Raw Story called the number this month, there was a generic message to leave a voicemail.

Martinsville is a conservative town in a red state. It’s not the place one would think of for a couple seeking a community aligned with their progressive politics.

ALSO READ: Why violent extremists get security clearances — but people of color must sometimes wait and wait

Nothing came of the women’s visit until an email at 2:39 p.m. on April 12 from Max Kiviat, associate producer for Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime. He addressed it to Lipps and copied Oakley.

“Tonight we will be covering a story about an undercover investigation involving your school district,” the email said. “Video shows administrators admitting that the schools are using misleading language to confuse parents into stealthily teaching students principles associated with Critical Race Theory. We wanted to offer the school district a chance to comment on the story. We are going live at 7:30pm ET.”

The email didn’t say what specifically the district was being asked to comment on. Oakley said during ensuing conversations, she, Lipps and Bowlen all wondered if they were the one being targeted.

A little after 5 p.m., after internal discussions and consulting with lawyers, Lipps emailed back to say the district would wait to see the story. Two minutes later, Kiviat sent a link to the video Accuracy in Media had posted.

In their living room at home, Jenny and Justin Oakley watched the video on a laptop. Then Jenny started to hear from friends that her face was being used on Fox News promotions for that night’s Jesse Watters Primetime show.

The attacks on her would start in a few hours.

Oakley did have supporters in the community. Some came to her defense on social media. She sought therapy.

Before a school board meeting, local pastors led a prayer circle outside the building for people with all points of view on the situation. One of the pastors invoked the Gospel of John: “Love one another. Such as my love has been for you, so must your love be for each other. This is how all will know you for my disciples: your love for one another.”

A pastor led a prayer before a school board meeting at Martinsville High School the week after Fox News aired a story about Accuracy in Media video featuring a local school administrator. He invoked the gospel of John to love one another. Photo: Stacey Miers

About a week later, Justin learned his mother had brain cancer. This added to the pressure on their daughter who couldn’t have both of her parents in a prolonged dark place.

“So I had to snap out of it,” Jenny Oakley said. “I had to snap out of it for her, just being strong in the fact that I did not do anything wrong and that it'll be interpreted how it is no matter what.”

Unedited video

Accuracy in Media reported $908,000 in contributions and grants on its latest federal tax filing.

As a federally recognized nonprofit organization, it did not have to detail the source or sources of its money. Accuracy in Media says its mission is to “monitor the accuracy of news reporting activities by the media” and “promote accuracy, fairness and balance in news reporting.”

Guillette, the group’s president, makes $200,000, according to the document.

As part of a public records request, Raw Story obtained what Accuracy in Media described in an email to the Elkhart, Ind., school district as a lightly edited, 15-minute hidden-camera conversation with Brad Sheppard, assistant superintendent of instruction.

The edits, Guillette wrote, were to protect Accuracy in Media’s tactics during an “ongoing investigation.”

In the video, what sounds like a man and a woman gave Sheppard frequent affirmations of his answers — “right on,” “good,” “I love that.” The couple’s full pretense for showing up wasn’t part of the video, but what they said to Sheppard left little doubt about their supposed political views.

ALSO READ: A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players

“In Texas, unfortunately, we banned anything that has to do with the 1619 Project,” the woman says, referring to the controversial New York Times project that put slavery at the center of America’s history.

“In Texas, they passed one of those stupid laws banning what they call Critical Race Theory,” the man says.

“We’re really hoping not to get a MAGA version of history, to put it bluntly,” the woman says.

Regarding what’s taught in the classroom, Sheppard emphasized the Indiana state academic standards.

“As long as (teachers) can tie it back to the standards, they’re covered,” he said. “That’s really the bottom line. Are you teaching the academic standards?”

Sheppard was shown in the Fox News video answering what educational material in the district needs to be “relabeled.”

“I think CRT, Social-Emotional Learning are the two biggies,” he says. “We just have to avoid the words. You know? The labels.”

An Accuracy in Media person says, “We can still do the content, just no labels.”

Sheppard says yes, to which the Accuracy in Media person says, “That’s cool.”

Sheppard was placed on paid administrative leave, returned to his same position and retired in June, according to a lawyer for the district.

ALSO READ: How the long 'arc of the moral universe' just landed in a New York City fire hall

Other records obtained by Raw Story show that Sheppard and another administrator in the Fox News story, Laura DelVecchio of the public school district in Plainfield, Ind., received the same email Oakley did suggesting a line of people punch her and urinate on her.

All of them arrived within 15 minutes after Jesse Watters Primetime ended. Attorney Jon Little, who represents the Oakleys, believes that indicates a connection to an organization with all-purpose, pre-written screeds for perceived political enemies.

Trustees from the Plainfield school district received a long, racist email suggesting, amid the talk of CRT, a “Thank You White People Day.” It said, “White people created the very high standard of living all races in the USA enjoy” and “many immigrants don’t want to assimilate.” It claimed discrimination against “heterosexual White males.”

In the weeks that followed,Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita got involved on social media, encouraging journalists to write about the Accuracy in Media video.

When DelVecchio received an interview request from Indiana Public Media, she echoed what Oakley said, although they have never met or communicated.

“The story really isn’t about me,” DelVecchio wrote, “it is about the fate of public education.”

A life, changed

Jenny Oakley recalled with a touch of disbelief how, years ago, her husband used to rave about being an eighth grade teacher.

“He would come home every day and say, ‘I just can't believe I get paid to do this as a job,’” she said. “He would come home. He was so excited about the impact that he was making on kids and his conversations every day and the light bulbs going on and all those things.”

For many, teaching is a calling. Pay is often low, but the rewards are supposed to be great. That perception seems to be changing. Indiana has a teacher shortage.

Young teachers, Oakley said, “turn on their TV or hop on Facebook, and all they're seeing are attacks on their profession. And it's hard to keep up the intrinsic motivation of teaching when you have so many of these negative external factors.”

Many of the attacks come from advocates for private and charter schools.

“I don't think that they're going to be happy until public education just completely crumbles,” Oakley said. “And then they're going to see what kind of pillars of the community we really are, and they'll have to build it back up.”

Among the administrators in the Accuracy in Media video, four are in the same job, one retired, and two districts (Monroe County and Fairfield) did not respond to Raw Story’s inquiry.

Oakley has continued to work. But she said she still can’t be certain about her future in the district.

Oakley still doesn’t know the identity of the women who came to Martinsville. They weren’t asked to sign in. Now the district office uses the same system as its schools, scanning the driver’s license of everyone who comes in.

“Thankfully, they didn't walk in here with a backpack that they left behind,” Oakley said, “but they blew up my life.”

an bad 3 23

**U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene** (R-GA) and **U.S. Senator Mike Lee** (R-UT) are actively spreading anti-Ukraine disinformation, posting to Twitter a deceptively-edited video of Volodymyr Zelenskyy,which they falsely claim means the Ukrainian President wants America's "sons and daughters" to die defending Ukraine.

Senator Lee complained his personal Twitter account was suspended at some point after he retweeted the video. It was recently restored and his post with the deceptively-edited video has not been removed.

The original Twitter sources of the video have warning labels that Greene and Lee appear to have ignored before posting. Greene posted it to her official U.S. government Twitter account.

That warning, in the form of a readers' note, says: "This quote is taken out of context. The full quote is :'If Ukraine loses, Russia is going to enter Baltic states, NATO states, then the U.S will have to send their sons and daughters exactly in the same way as we are sending our sons and daughters to war'."

The Associated Press also published a fact check on Wednesday noting the deceptively-edited video is "missing context." The AP states: "He was not suggesting Americans would have to fight in Ukraine."

But in the deceptively-edited video Greene and Lee tweeted, Zelenskyy (via an interpreter) says, "the U.S will have to send their sons and daughters exactly in the same way as we are sending our sons and daughters to war."

Zelenskyy goes on to say, "and they will have to fight because it's NATO that we're talking about. They will be dying, God forbid, because it's a horrible thing."

In the full video from February 24, Zelenskyy is urging Americans to not give up on Ukraine. The most important portion of Zelenskyy's remarks have been edited out in Greene's and Lee's version: "If Ukraine loses, Russia is going to enter Baltic states, NATO states."

Greene tweeted, "There's not a parent in America that wants their son or daughter dying defending Ukraine's border. When have Ukrainian & NATO sons and daughters died defending America's border?"

Lee tweeted, "Zelensky has no right to presume that our sons and daughters will fight his war. Shame on him. We've somehow sent the message that we work for him. Shame on us!"

The 19-second deceptively-edited video has been viewed nearly 400,000 times.

Zelenskyy's (via interpreter):

"I would like to thank the American people. I would like to thank all of the American people that are supporting Ukraine, the Congress, the President, the TV channels, the journalists, and everyone that has been supporting us, and that percentage of Americans, as you've mentioned is increasing. I can tell them only one thing. If they do not change their opinion, if they do not understand us, if they do not support Ukraine, they will lose NATO, they will lose the clout of the United States, they will lose the leadership position that they are enjoying in the world, that they are enjoying for a very fair reason, and they will lose the support of the country with 40 millions of population, with millions of children. Are American children any different than ours? Don't Americans enjoy the same things as we do? I don't think we're that different. And I'm actually very happy that we have bipartisan support, but we keep hearing those messages from time to time and they’re dangerous.

There are political leaders that are elected by people. And if this issue is raised, those political leaders need to be responsible and cautious because people are looking at them. Who wants a third world war? Would anyone risk would anyone be willing to accept that risk? The US is never going to give up on the NATO member states. If it happens so that Ukraine, due to various opinions and weakened and depleting of assistance, loses, Russia is going to enter the Baltic states, NATO member states, and then the US will have to send their sons and daughters exactly the same way as we are sending their sons and daughters to war and they will have to fight because it's NATO that we're talking about and they will be dying, God forbid because it's a horrible thing."

https://www.mediamatters.org/libs-tiktok/right-wing-media-spread-doctored-footage-drag-queen-concoct-fear-pride-events

A drag queen who performed at the Idaho Pride event targeted by white nationalists in June is suing a right-wing blogger who doctored footage of his performance to falsely claim he had exposed himself to children. Even though the video was swiftly debunked by local news, right-wing media — including Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik and others who initially helped drive harassment against the Pride event — pushed the edited footage, leading to abuse against the performer.

On June 11, police in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, arrested 31 members of the Patriot Front near Pride in the Park, a planned Pride event. Authorities said evidence showed the white nationalists, who had gathered at the park from across the country, were planning to riot at the event and in multiple areas around the town. Patriot Front has a history of anti-LGBTQ actions, including burning trans pride flags and vandalizing a memorial for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated it as a hate group.

The event was also targeted by a far-right biker groupthat announced it was holding an event nearby at the same time as Pride in the Park, with organizers saying there were “going to be going after the groomers” while alluding to possible violence.

One of the performers at the event was Eric Posey, whose drag name is Mona Liza Million. Following Pride in the Park, right-wing blogger Summer Bushnellposted footage from Posey’s performance that blurred his crotch. In her posts, Bushnell erroneously claimed Posey had exposed himself to minors and called for her audience to report the video to police. The video, which was debunked by local news two days after the event was held, led to harassment against Posey after it went viral on social media. Now Posey is suing Bushnell, claiming she defamed him in an effort to gain popularity as part of the nationwide effort to malign LGBTQ people and Pride Month events.

A key instigator in manufacturing outrage over the event was Chaya Raichik, who runs the social media account “Libs of TikTok.” Raichik not only targeted Pride in the Park after Idaho-based white nationalist Dave Reilly called for her to do so, but she also helped spread Bushnell’s video weeks after it had been debunked by both the media and**authorities**. On July 31, Raichik retweeted a tweet with Bushnell’s video and calling Posey a “pedophile,” with Raichik adding, “This is what a ‘family-friendly’ drag show looks like.” Commenters reacting to Raichik’s post falsely accused Posey of being a “groomer” and “pedophile,” while others threatened extreme acts of violence against him, including multiple threats to castrate him.

Although the tweet she quoted was later removed for violating Twitter’s rule on hateful conduct, Raichik’s tweet was never deleted.

[twt vid libs]

raichik was joined in sharing the doctored video by anti-LGBTQ trolls including right-wing podcaster Liz Wheeler and Gays Against Groomers, with the latter writing, “If gay rights do get rolled back, it will only be because of things like this.”

The renewed social media pickup of the doctored video led to an article published by right-wing blog Post Millennial headlined “Drag queen accused of exposing self to children at 'family friendly' Pride event.” The article promoted conspiracy theories that antifa was involved in targeting the Idaho Pride event, and the header for the article included a still from Bushnell’s video, with the edited video embedded.

The Idaho Family Policy Center, a right-wing Christian nonprofit that partners with extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom and multiple other anti-LGBTQ organizations, posted a petition on September 8 denying law enforcement’s debunking of the video and claiming it had “reviewed the unedited footage and can confirm it portrays public exposure of the performer’s genitalia.” Included with the petition, which called for drag performances to be banned from taking place around children, was a still from Bushnell’s video. The petition remains active as of publication date.

Far-right conspiracy theory outlet Infowars posted an article also featuring a still from the doctored video. The article suggested the targeting of the event by Patriot Front was “a federal false flag operation” and criticized the “mainstream media” for “ignoring a potential child sex crime occurring at the very same event.”

The article cited a press release from the local sheriff’s department saying police were investigating the video. The announcement came after a local outlet had already debunked the claims and released the unedited video, and despite law enforcement officials acknowledging that their investigation stemmed entirely from reports by individuals who had seen Bushnell’s doctored footage and none of whom had seen the performance in person. The stunt culminated on July 1 with the city prosecutor stating what had been demonstrated weeks earlier — Posey had not exposed himself.

Disregarding available evidence, right-wing media widely used the release to push the false narrative and disseminate the doctored footage. Stephanie Hamill, a contributing writer for Media Research Center and ambassador for Turning Point USA, tweeted Bushnell’s video while adding that the “dancer's genitals were reportedly exposed on the main stage with children viewing the ‘dance.’”[twt vid]

right-wing author Janie Johnson tweeted a link to the video to her nearly 200,000 followers, attempting to excuse the white nationalists who targeted the event and writing, “Wonder what ticked the Idaho dads? This drag demon exposed himself to children.”

The incident is nearly identical to another manufactured controversy pushed by right-wing media in which an edited photo of a drag performer reading to children at a library in 2019 was blurred and paired with the claim that they were exposing themselves to children. That smear, too, was quickly debunked, which did not prevent the ensuing harassment and an attempt from lawmakers to strip libraries of their funding.

The targeting of Posey and the broader attacks on Pride in the Park followed an escalating campaign of harassment against drag and Pride Month events that falsely accused participants of abusing children. This harassment, and the escalating rhetoric of maligning LGBTQ people as groomers, has largely been enabled by the failure of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to adequately handle the targeted harassment.

week on The Ingraham Angle, Laura Ingraham played a series of cable news clips that showed medical experts or TV news figures allegedly criticizing President Donald Trump for “promising to deliver a vaccine to the American people by the end of the year.” However, all but one of Ingraham’s clips were taken out of context to suggest arguments that were not actually made.

In one instance utilized a CNN clip of immunologist Dr. Rick Bright saying, “The reality is it’s irresponsible and reckless for the president of the United States to drive the evaluation of something as critical as a vaccine.” But Ingraham cut out Bright’s next five words: “to meet an election timeline.” Bright’s comment was about Trump trying to “move that vaccine to meet that target date” of the election. Other remarks were similarly about the election.

aha especially potent b/c selective POV pick of content helps with alt fact post truth BS, PLUS seeing is belieiving, looks like raw unfakeable reality verite right there on the screen, PLUS images bypass rational brain

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/ivanka-trump

roger salon

As right-wing groups clashed with counter-protesters at pro-Trump demonstrations over the weekend, Ivanka Trump, the senior White House adviser and daughter of outgoing President Donald Trump, condemned the media on Twitter for "near total silence" over alleged assaults on conservatives. The tweet came as selectively edited video wrongly portraying Trump supporters as victims of violence circulated online in right-wing circles.NOTE THIS SETS UP RATIONALE FOR MORE RW VIOLENCE]

"The media's near total silence about the physical violence being perpetrated against conservatives is shameful & dangerous. Just image the outrage and indignation if this went the other way," Ivanka tweeted. "Violence is never the answer and instigators must be condemned and prosecuted." ATLAS, BANNON BOOGALOO...]

Donald Trump Jr. one-upped his sister's allegation an hour later by claiming, without evidence, that the media was "complicit." He also suggested that "they might as well" put Trump supporters on a non-existent Gulag list controlled by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. [THE NEW PELOSI?]

"The media's silence on the violence against Trump supporters is deafening. After four years of calling them Nazis, at this point they might as well just dox them all or add the[m] to AOC's lists for the Gulags," Don Jr. baselessly tweeted. "They are complicit in the violence. They are the worst of the worst."

Trump supporters and right-wing groups marched in several cities on Saturday in protest of the president's recent electoral loss to President-elect Joe Biden. The demonstrators echoed the president's evidence-free allegations of a stolen election.

Many of these groups were met by counter-protests, and violence broke out in some instances. The most serious of these incidents took place in Washington, where Proud Boys and other right-wing groups and militia members clashed with counter-protesters, according to multiple reports. Contrary to the Trump family's assertions, conservatives were filmed launching attacks. 2 STABBINGS ONE PROUD?]

It was not the first time Ivanka had misleadingly tweeted about political violence. In a tweet referencing "inner city communities," the first daughter cited the wrong number of people killed and wounded in the wrong location ("near a playground") over the course of a weekend in Chicago in August 2019.

In his first debate with Biden, President Trump told the Proud Boys to "stand back, and stand by." Unlike his offspring, the president outwardly applauded Saturday's violence in the streets.

"ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back," he tweeted.

The president also shared a selectively edited video posted by Andy Ngo, a right-wing sympathizer with a history of wrongly framing left-wing groups. The clip showed a man getting knocked out by a counter-protester after being attacked from behind.

"A close-up angle of BLM rioters knocking a man unconscious who was leaving the #MillionMAGAMarch in DC earlier today," Ngo wrote. "They also steal his phone when he's on the ground."

"Human Radical Left garbage did this," the president added, quoting Ngo's original tweet. "Being arrested now!"

But an extended clip appears to shows the man was with a group of Trump supporters who earlier attacked a counter-protester holding a bullhorn by pushing him down to the street and stepping on his head.

D.C. police on Sunday said they hadarrested nearly two dozen people, many of them on gun charges, according to The Washington Post. One person was stabbed,and four officers were injured.

Police Chief Peter Newsham told The Post that groups on both sides had descended on the city "intent on clashing," and "the police department was put directly in the middle of it."

In Sacramento, Calif., a group of Proud Boys met counter-protesters with bear spray, according to the Bay Area's ABC7 News. Police broke up the incident.

President Trump urged police to use force on counter-protesters, tweeting: "Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA People. DC Police, get going — do your job and don't hold back!!!"

There is no evidence to support the protesters' accusations of widespread electoral fraud in the presidential election. Courts have summarily dismissed the vast majority of the Trump campaign's lawsuits.

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/pro-trump-disinformation-efforts-could-tilt-entire-election-if-media-outlets-and-tech

In January 2017, my colleague Matt Gertz wrote a piece titled “What Journalists Can Do When The President Is A Liar” in which he urged the press to rethink the way presidents are covered in the context of President-elect Donald Trump:

Journalists typically treat presidential statements as both newsworthy and generally trustworthy until proven otherwise. Trump is hardly the first president to dissimulate. But unlike his predecessors, Trump does not lie strategically or rarely. He lies habitually, on matters great and small. By following their typical practice and reporting the president-elect’s comments as both factual and significant, reporters are doing a disservice to their audience, which is left with the impression that what Trump has said is both true and substantive.

Since taking office, Trump has continued to lie about all manner of things, whether it be his false claim that The New York Times sent a letter to subscribers apologizing for negative coverage of his campaign, his wild exaggerations on the size of the crowd at his inauguration, or the more recent and much more consequential laundry list of lies he’s shared about the COVID-19 pandemic this year. The Washington Post’s count of Trump’s lies as president crossed the 20,000 mark on July 9.

Trump was not changed by the office upon his swearing-in, and unfortunately, neither was the press.

Throughout all of this, mainstream media organizations have continued to offer the same level of deference to Trump as they have previous presidents, boosting his objectively false statements on social media and in stories, often without noting that what he said wasn’t true. This is precisely what Gertz was warning against in his 2017 post. Now, this uncritical amplification of Trump’s misinformation comes at a time when the press needs more than ever to shore up its standing as society’s fourth estate, a bulwark against antidemocratic authoritarianism. Instead, this failure of the press has enabled a truly destructive reelection campaign strategy.

With Trump’s potential reelection just weeks away, he and his supporters have ramped up disinformation efforts well aware that there’s no one willing to stop them.

In March, for the first time, Twitter slapped a “manipulated media” label on something tweeted by White House social media director Dan Scavino and retweeted by Trump. The tweet included a video of Democratic nominee Joe Biden making what seemed to be an accidental endorsement of Trump.

“Excuse me. We can only reelect Donald Trump,” Biden says in the edited clip, omitting the second half of his statement. “Excuse me. We can only reelect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s got to be a positive campaign,” he says in the full video.

On August 29, Trump ally and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) shared a video on Twitter that edited the words said during an interview with Biden by activist Ady Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and uses assistive technology to speak. Scalise added the words “for police” to a question Barkan asked about funding things that might mitigate crime such as social services and mental health counseling. The goal of Scalise’s deceptive editing was to make it seem as though Biden was in favor of defunding the police, a position he has repeatedly said he does not support.

Twitter again added a “manipulated media” flag to Scalise’s tweet following backlash. Scalise later took the post down, but stood by the video.

On August 30, Scavino shared another edited clip. In this one, the clip superimposed an image of Biden over footage from a 2011 interview between a Bakersfield, California-based news show and actor Harry Belafonte. This was edited together with a snoring sound effect to make it look as though Biden had fallen asleep in the middle of a TV appearance, though this obviously was not true. Twitter again applied the “manipulated media” flag to the post, leaving it up. It wasn’t until the video’s copyright holder filed a takedown request that Twitter removed the post altogether.

Belafonte said of Scavino’s use of that clip, “They keep stooping lower and lower. A technical glitch in an interview I did 9 years ago now becomes another one of their lies, more of their fake news. I beg every sane American-please vote them out. I knew many who gave their life for the right to vote. Never has it been so vital to exercise that right.”

On August 31, Trump’s campaign tweeted a clip of Biden saying, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” a complete distortion of what Biden actually said: “Since they have no agenda or vision for a second term, Trump and Pence are running on this, and I find it fascinating. 'You won't be safe in Joe Biden's America.’ And what's their proof? The violence we're seeing in Donald Trump's America.”

Yet again, Twitter slapped the “manipulated media” label to the post, but not before the video had racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Later, the campaign defended the post, tweeting, “To all the triggered journalists who can’t take a joke about their candidate, it’s not our fault Joe Biden was dumb enough to say this on camera.”

The press and tech companies need to incentivize truthfulness, and that means ensuring that the political and social cost of lying outweighs the benefits.

Would the Trump campaign have posted the deceptively edited clip of Biden if there was a chance that its entire account would be suspended from the platform? Would Trump have repeatedly claimed that just 6% of COVID deaths were actually because of COVID if newspapers and nightly news broadcasts insisted on doing more than just quickly noting that what he said wasn’t true and moving on?

It used to be treated as a scandal when the public learned of an instance of the president lying to the American people, but now it’s just an accepted fact of daily life that something the president says to us today will likely turn out to be untrue. If the press had taken Trump’s candidacy seriously, holding him to the same standards as other candidates, it’s possible he wouldn’t have ever become president. Had journalists stopped offering Trump the benefit of the doubt, he would have been forced to either lie less often or face a barrage of nonstop criticism for his dishonesty. Fact-checking is important, but we’re beyond the point of simply being able to correct our way out of the situation the world is in. Fact checks can’t simply be something brought up in a single segment squeezed between hours of uninterrupted lies, and it cannot be something that gets siloed into its own separate section of news coverage.

The many lies of Trump’s presidency have been enabled by the press and by social media companies afraid to take real action to stop the spread of false information. As November’s election approaches, it’s become clear that disinformation is no longer a tactic for his campaign, but the tactic. The extent to which that tactic will be successful will depend on whether the press is willing to cover his campaign the way it should have all along, and if tech and social media companies are willing to hold him and his allies to the same standards as every other user.

In July, Trump wrongly claimed that Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) issued a document outlining a plan “to abolish our police departments.” In June, he shared a deceptively edited video made to look like a CNN segment. In May, he lied about a “rogue Secretary of State” in Michigan sending 7.7 million absentee ballots to voters across the state. This is who he is, who he’s always been, and who he will always be.

Trump and his allies keep telling lies, and they will continue to do so as long as the benefits of lying outweigh the costs. It’s because of a deferential news media and timid social media companies that the cost of telling blatant lies remains so low. If the worst thing to come of a manipulated Twitter video is a tiny label applied to a tweet long after its engagement has already peaked, it makes perfect sense to continue to spread increasingly brazen false claims and deceptive footage in hopes of influencing voters’ actions.

Once you’ve hit 20,000 lies, what are a few more on the pile?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democracy-wilts-on-the-vine-trump-campaign-resorts-to-lies-conspiracy-theories-and-disinformation-as-biden-leads-in-the-polls/

Reporter Ashley Parker, in an article published in the Washington Post over Labor Day Weekend, discusses some of the ways in which President Donald Trump’s campaign and its allies have been aggressively promoting disinformation — from “doctored and misleading videos” to bogus conspiracy theories.

For example, Parker notes, Trump recently “retweeted footage of a black man violently pushing a white woman on a subway platform under the caption, ‘Black Lives Matter/Antifa’ — but the man was not affiliated with either group, and the video was shot in October (2019).” And according to Parker, “White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino shared a manipulated video that falsely showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seeming to fall asleep during a television interview, complete with a fake TV headline.”

In addition to those things, Parker notes thatHouse Minority Whip Steve Scalise — a Louisiana Republican and Trump ally — “released a video splicing together quotes from activist Ady Barkan — who has Lou Gehrig’s disease and uses computer voice assistance — to falsely make it sound as if he had persuaded Biden to defund police departments.”

Whitney Phillips, a communications professor at Syracuse University, told the Post, “When you have this disinformation and it’s introduced to one side of the forest, for example, it can travel so quickly through so many different communities and does so many unintentional things before you can even do a fact-check. He’s able to muddy the waters so thoroughly that democracy wilts on the vine."

trump, Parker points out, has “repeated a false claim that just 6% of the nation’s death toll” in the coronavirus pandemic “was actually caused by the novel coronavirus itself — part of his ongoing effort to portray the virus as less deadly or pervasive than it actually is.” That conspiracy theory has been promoted by QAnon and has no basis in reality, but that hasn’t prevented Trump and other Republicans from promoting it.

Trump is hardly the first candidate to play hardball during a presidential race. From President Lyndon B. Johnson’s infamous “daisy ad” of 1964 to President George H.W. Bush’s racist Willie Horton ad of 1988 to the Swift Boat Veterans ads that helped President George W. Bush defeat Democrat John Kerry in 2004, presidential candidates — both Democrats and Republicans — have dealt some harsh blows to their rivals over the years. But Lily Adams, a Democratic National Committee senior adviser, argues that Trump’s campaign is taking disinformation to another level.

Adams told the Post, “Spin has been something that folks in politics have come to expect,but this is the invention of a totally new reality. Because they can’t run on the reality that every American is seeing, they’re inventing a new one.”

see maCRON sez docs fake

https://aldianews.com/articles/politics/jack-posobiec-link-connecting-france-trump-and-russia/48031

the internal documents of the electoral campaign of Emmanuel Macron, president-elect of France, were the subject of a cyber attack during the last electoral week, and its dissemination was carried out on May 5, through an anglophone forum, before being immediately spread on Twitter by an "American militant, near the far right," according to the Huffington Post France:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background-image:url("):}:.

Belgian social media analyst Nicolas Vanderbiest said that after the publication of the documents in the 4Chan forum, frequented by surfers close to the American alt-right, Jack Posobiec:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background-image:url("):}: was the first to share the data to his 100,000 followers on Twitter, inaugurating the hashtag "#MacronLeaks".

Flashpoint of New York and Trend Micro based in Tokyo have shared intelligence suggesting that the group of hackers known as Advanced Persistent Threat 28, Fancy Bear and Pawn Storm was responsible for filtering Emmanuel Macron’s documents. The group has been linked to the GRU, the Russian Military Intelligence Directorate, according to The Guardian:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background:url("):}:.[guk]

Days before the publication of the documents, Jack Posobiec had been active in social media against the candidate Macron, pressing the rumors about an alleged tax evasion and assuring that the now president attacked the journalists to evade his responsibility, according to the newspaper Le Monde.:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background:url("):}:

One day before the election, Posobiec requested on Twitter to speak in front of the French parliament in an open session on #MacronLeaks.

According to the French media, Posobiec represents a digital site (The Rebel:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background:url("):}:) openly supportive of Trump and Le Pen, which often disseminates inaccurate data.

"The militant appears as part of the 'Slavright', a far-right movement mainly located in Eastern Europe, considered racist and white supremacist”, according to the French media.

In Trump’s forefront

Hours before disseminating the hacked information of Emmanuel Macron's campaign, Posobiec had been tagged in a photo along with former editor Breitbart and one of the main right-wing figures who supported Donald Trump, Milo Yinanopoulos, on a Caption that read "Happy #CincoDeMilo".

[pix]

posobiec has been part of the spread of false information, such as the "pizzagate" issue - conspiracy theory involving the Clinton team with pedophilia -as well as the call for a boycott of the latest Star Wars film, "Rogue One," for allegedly broadcasting an anti-Trump message, according to L'Obs:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background:url("):}: newspaper in France.

[pix]

for its part, Reuters:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;width:10px;height:10px;background-image:url("):}: published yesterday that Posobiec has received access to the White House, from the Trump Administration.

Posobiec, " attended the daily press briefing on Tuesday and later broadcast video from the White House grounds with positive commentary on President Donald Trump's abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey”, explains the media.[vid rebel news]

posobiec would have requested temporary credentials in April, but he is currently in the process of requesting a permanent pass.

The cyber attack of the French president-elect has worried the international security community since it could imply a connection between Russian digital intelligence organizations and public figures of the American extreme right.

Through social networks, Posobiec and William Craddick, for example, founder and editor-in-chief of Disobedient Media:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background-image:url("):}: have been perceived as close to each other. Craddick would have warned that French documents had been leaked minutes before it was made public.

According to Reuters:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px 12px 0px 0px;background:url("):}:, "two US intelligence officials said that they are increasingly confident that hackers with connections to the Russian government played a role in the French election.” Similarly, US intelligence agencies have also concluded “hacking attacks on the Democratic Party and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign were part of a Russian-backed effort to help Republican Trump win the presidency”.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/biden-ukraine-recordings-oan/612454/

many lnx

Is OAN the Leading Edge of Russian Misinformation?

The Biden campaign says Trump’s favorite TV network is peddling the Kremlin’s lies.

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

JUNE 11, 2020

In what appears to be a signal of intensifying political warfare ahead of the November election, One America News Network, the Trump-supporting cable channel that has been promoting anti-Biden conspiracies for several months, says it has obtained several hours of secret recordings of then–Vice President Biden’s conversations with Ukrainian officials. If such recordings exist, they’re likely linked to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine and a Russian intelligence operation, two former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine and a former ambassador to Russia told me. The OAN employee who claims to have the tapes would not say what was on them, other than suggesting that they will be revelatory.

In the audio that has been released elsewhere so far, Biden is heard dangling the promise of financial aid to Ukraine if its government ousted a prosecutor who was seen as corrupt—which Biden has previously said publicly was his goal, as part of a push for widespread reforms. Conspiracists have alleged that this was intended to help his son Hunter escape charges of corruption, but an audit by Ukraine’s former top prosecutor released last week found no evidence of illegal activity by Hunter in his capacity as an energy-company board member.

[MORE STORIES

Donald Trump

Democracy Versus Kleptocracy

FRANKLIN FOER

The Press Is Embracing False Equivalence—Again

JAMES FALLOWS

Rudy Giuliani: ‘You Should Be Happy for Your Country That I Uncovered This’

ELAINA PLOTT]

What is most remarkable here is that none of this is particularly surprising. Russian interference in the 2016 election has been closely studied over the past four years, and America’s vulnerabilities have only worsened in that time. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote recently, “Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020.” That OAN is now a player in such interference suggests an escalation that the Biden campaign has been bracing for.

Indeed, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul—who has recalled being secretly recorded himself, among other forms of harassment, when he was posted in Moscow—told me, "There’s never been a moment like this in American history.”

[Read Putin is well on his way to stealing the next election

That includes 2016. McFaul said what he’s seeing now reminds him of tactics the Kremlin has used against its domestic political opponents. “It’s not to convince you of a different point of view. It’s to convince you that there is no truth,” he said. “When it feels like nobody’s telling the truth and there is no truth, the reaction to that is despondency and demobilization.”

It’s hard not to feel some déjà vu here. In 2016, Russian intelligence agents hacked the emails of Democratic National Committee staffers and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and delivered them to WikiLeaks, as a way to get them into the American media. Some outlets learned a lesson from that episode, and have treated new Biden recordings out of Ukraine with care. Others have not. Andriy Derkach, who released the Biden tapes that have already come out, is a former member of a pro-Russian political party who graduated from a KGB-run academy in Moscow. OAN lends his efforts a veneer, however thin, of journalistic legitimacy.

The person now claiming to have more tapes is OAN’s Chanel Rion, the on-air personality who went with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, on his December trip to Ukraine in part to find information on Biden to help Trump. Rion, who has become famous for her conspiracy-inflected questions at White House briefings, emailed the Biden campaign May 29 claiming that she was working on an “in-depth report” aboutrecordings that appear to be of Biden speaking with Petro Poroshenko, then the president of Ukraine. “We have over five hours of these recordings (beyond what has been posted online by Nabu Leaks),” she wrote, referencing a Ukrainian website suspected of Russian links.

Derkach, a politician known as the “Ukrainian Putin,” has been a proponent of the conspiracy theory that Ukraine was really behind the interference in the 2016 election instead of Russia. And he has previously been eager to provide damaging material about Biden for Trump’s sake. Derkach released a batch of recordings three weeks ago, claiming that they had been made by Poroshenko and given to him by “investigative journalists.” (Poroshenko has said the audio is “fabricated.”) Most mainstream-media outlets have decided that the recordings that have emerged so far offer “little new insight into Biden’s actions in Ukraine,” as The Washington Post’s Carol Morello wrote after the recordings were first released.

Giuliani, reached by text, did not comment on suspicions that the recordings have ties to Russian interests or intelligence, or on whether he was involved in getting any of them to OAN.

Rion was until recently an illustrator. She has said she joined members of the Trump family in 2016 for the New Hampshire primary’s victory party; she has also tweeted a drawing of Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein with the hashtag #spiritcooking, which is often associated with the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. On her website, she describes herself as “a fierce foe of anything Clinton, of everything Obama, and as a total and unrelenting enemy of academic left-liberalism and political correctness anywhere.”

In March, she cited a “monitored source” on air who’d said that the coronavirus had been linked to a lab in North Carolina; that source turned out to be a person who’d tweeted at her. She has asked wild questions at White House briefings, including one about whether Trump would pardon Barack Obama for unspecified crimes, and another about whether Trump’s lawyers would like to depose Joe Scarborough, after Trump floated a baseless accusation that he’d murdered an aide.

Rion’s email, which the Biden campaign forwarded to me, suggests that OAN is “producing an in-depth report on these recordings for OAN's Special Investigates series.” In a phone call on Sunday, she told me that she now expects to acquire much more than the five hours of recordings she mentioned in her email. Rion said that Derkach was just one of the people who have been giving her material. She said she has verified, with the help of “a couple of sources on the ground,” and with sources in the U.S. as well, that the recordings have no ties to Russian intelligence or interests. She would not explain her verification process, saying, “I don't want to tip off anybody.”

It was once unusual for the public to gain access to top-secret government documents, let alone private conversations between the American vice president and a foreign leader. But as countries around the world increase their cyberwar capabilities and their willingness to interfere in one another’s domestic politics, and as the democratization of publishing allows for the rapid spread of misinformation, media leaks of hard-to-verify and potentially doctored documents and recordings of government officials are becoming commonplace.

“It is common practice for Russian intelligence to help put out information in skewed forms in Ukraine, and forensic experts have seen that this information is doctored,” said John Herbst, a former career Foreign Service officer who served as the American ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006.“The Kremlin is a master at this sort of practice, and the sources in Ukraine providing this sort of information are known to be well connected in Moscow.”

Herbst was one of seven former ambassadors to Ukraine who wrote an open letter to Ukrainians two weeks ago, prompted by the already-public recordings. They said they are “disheartened by efforts to involve Ukraine in America’s domestic politics as the 2020 US presidential election approaches.”

“This all just confirms what we knew,” said Steven Pifer, another former ambassador to Ukraine, who signed the letter.

David A. Graham: What happened in Ukraine?

Russia would love to “somehow inject Ukraine back into American politics,” Pifer said. “There will be people on the American side who play into it—OAN is one.”

The Biden campaign says OAN’s willingness to play along is exactly why the network received the recordings. “In 2016 and ever since, hostile foreign actors have perpetrated insidious efforts to disfigure and poison American democracy. Yesterday’s hacked emails are today’s bugged phones and deepfakes,” Andrew Bates, a campaign spokesperson, told me.

An OAN spokesperson, Krista McClelland, did not respond to a request for comment about the suggestion that the recordings have links to Russian intelligence. Nor did she respond to the Biden campaign’s charges.

Other countries are stepping up their own efforts to get involved in this year’s elections; Iran and China, for example, have been linked to attempts to hack Biden and Trump campaign computers. But Russia continues to lead the misinformation game. The day after Rion reached out to Biden’s team, Sputnik—the Kremlin-owned propaganda service, which American intelligence has accused of being involved in the 2016 misinformation efforts—ran an interview with a former Poroshenko aide who claimed that he was the one who’d made the recordings, and that he’d given them to his lawyers to give the Trump administration. “Because of the coronavirus,” he said,” they are waiting. But in September, closer to elections, they will begin to use them more.”

There’s no evidence to support this. But the Trump campaign doesn’t seem to have much interest in dampening ideas like it: The communications director, Tim Murtaugh, didn’t respond to multiple emailsI sent about whether the campaign has more materials from Ukraine featuring Biden, and neither did White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley.

Election Day is in five months. And the people best positioned to knock down the Russian misinformation apparatus seem most interested instead in propping it up

===

FB 2020 fail

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-and-other-social-media-platforms-let-manipulated-biden-blackface-video-circulate

tucker attacks duckworth double amputee vet

https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-doubles-down-on-tammy-duckworth-attacks-calls-her-a-coward-and-fraud

no lnx pix

vid

Tucker Carlson Doubles Down on Duckworth Attacks, Calls Her a ‘Coward’ and ‘Fraud’

CHICKENHAWK

“Keep in mind, she is also described as a hero,” Carlson scoffed, adding: “Yet Duckworth is too afraid to defend her own statements on a TV show, what a coward.”

Justin Baragona

Contributing Editor

Published Jul. 07, 2020 9:30PM ET

A night after saying Iraq War veteran Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) hates America, Fox News host Tucker Carlson doubled down on his attacks, describing the Purple Heart recipient who lost her legs in combat as a “coward” and “fraud.”

During his Monday night broadcast, the primetime conservative star played an abbreviated clip of Duckworth saying there should be a “national dialogue” over the possible removal of statues, touting it as proof that she supposedly wants to “get rid of George Washington” while questioning her patriotism.

“You’re not supposed to criticize Tammy Duckworth in any way because she once served in the military,” he added. “Most people just ignore her. But when Duckworth does speak in public, you’re reminded what a deeply silly and unimpressive person she is.”[// trump put downs]

Duckworth would quickly respond via Twitter, wondering if the longtime TV personality would “want to walk a mile” in her legs and then tell her whether or not she loves America.

On Tuesday night, with Duckworth’s fiery response still gathering tons of attention, Carlson fired back by once again calling her love of country into question.

“Senator Duckworth was asked if we should tear down statues of George Washington,” the Fox host said. “We played that for you last night and we noted how grotesque it was. Only someone who hates the country would suggest ripping down monuments to its founder.”

Claiming that the Democratic lawmaker was unable to disagree with his argument, Carlson then added: “Instead she questioned our right to criticize her at all since she was once injured while serving in the Illinois National Guard. That’s what passes for an argument in modern identity politics.”

Repeatedly asserting that Duckworth believes that Washington is a “dead traitor,” he went on to say that she has “contempt” for him despite the fact that he “paid his dues” in the military and was a “combat veteran.”

“George Washington was a genuinely great man,” he sneered. “But to morons like Tammy Duckworth, Washington was just some old white guy who needs to be erased.”

He would go on to note that he reached out to Duckworth’s team to see if she would come on his show for a “vigorous reasonable exchange” of ideas, but they declined unless Carlson was willing to issue a public apology.

“Keep in mind, she is also described as a hero,” Carlson scoffed, adding: “Yet Duckworth is too afraid to defend her own statements on a TV show, what a coward. Tammy Duckworth is also a fraud.”

Carlson wrapped up his segment by calling the Illinois senator a “callous hack,” accusing her of mistreating veterans, and then comparing her to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)—a favorite target of Carlson’s, who he regularly claims hates America.

chickenhawk? TD defends army officer twin who obeyed subpoena in impeachment

Carlson used deceptive edits to accuse veteran Sen. Tammy Duckworth of hating America

07/07/20 9:51 AM EDT

Tucker Carlson’s wildly deceptive edit of Stephanie Ruhle reveals his contempt for the working class

During his April 9 show, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson raged at NBC senior business correspondent Stephanie Ruhle for purportedly claiming it was “a positive sign” that millions of people are unemployed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. There was just one problem: As noted virtually immediately by my colleague Parker Molloy, the MSNBC footage that Carlson aired took Ruhle dramatically out of context, removing her explicit calls for more and quicker aid to workers and her sympathy for grocery workers who have contracted and even died from COVID-19.

This is part of Carlson’s act. He wants to portray himself as more concerned about workers than his targets are; in his view, they are elites concerned only with their own well-being.

The full context of Ruhle’s comments -- and what Carlson chose to cut -- reveals this deceptive segment as just another Fox News lie. Ruhle actually expressed more concern for the well-being of the workers than Carlson has, calling for more government action to help them during this unprecedented crisis. Ruhle earlier in the day interviewed Zenobia Shepherd, who railed at the lack of protections after her daughter Leilani Jordan, a grocery store worker with cerebral palsy, died from COVID-19.

Rather than engage with Ruhle substantively on policy, Carlson just wants to hurl insults and push workers back into society much more quickly than medical experts recommend -- all while portraying himself as working people’s best friend.

AN 719

no lnx

Marco Rubio gets pilloried for spreading a vicious and bogus smear about Ilhan Omar

Written by Cody Fenwick July 25, 2019

Once again, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has become the focus of a vicious right-wing smear, this time based on a deceptively edited video.

The video comes from a February 2018 interview Omar gave to Al Jazeera. In its new form, it was resurfaced by Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which found its way to the Daily Caller report Molly Prince’s twitter feed, as Vox reported. From there, other right-wing figures picked it up, including, most prominently, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).

Omar’s comments went viral because, in the video, she seemed to be saying people should be afraid of “white men” and said the government should be “profiling, monitoring” them. Rubio indicated that the statement was “racist,” and suggested that the media should “hound ever Democrat to denounce” it, apparently expressing frustration that Republicans were pressed to respond to Trump’s recent racist attacks.

But the video Rubio shared was highly deceptive, and it seems clear it was intentionally edited to mislead viewers about what Omar was saying.

When Prince shared the video, in a tweet picked up by Rubio, she included the caption: “Ilhan Omar contends that Americans ‘should be more fearful of white men.'” While the quoted words are accurate, they’re missing essential context. Omar was having a discussion with reporter Mehdi Hasan about Islamophobia, and Hasan had asked the then-candidate to respond to the idea that Americans might “legitimately” be afraid of Muslims because of “Jihadist terrorism.” So when Omar said Americans should be “more fearful of white men,” she wasn’t speaking in the absolute sense of trying to encourage prejudice against white men. She was correctly pointing out that white men have been more likely to be the perpetrators of terrorism in the United States in recent years.

I am sure the media will now hound every Democrat to denounce this statement as racist. Right? https://t.co/UewkblF8Oo

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 25, 2019

And indeed, as Hasan said on Twitter, none other than current FBI Director Christopher Wray made a similar point recently when he said: “A majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call ‘white supremacist violence.'”

The second part of Omar’s comments was even more gratuitously distorted. Here’s the full exchange in question:

HASAN: A lot of conservatives in particular would say that the rise in Islamophobia is the result not of hate, but of fear. And legitimate fear, they say, of quote-unquote “jihadist terrorism” — whether it’s Fort Hood, or San Bernardino, or the recent truck attack in New York. What do you say to them?

OMAR: I would say — our country should be more fearful of white men across our country, because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country. And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe, Americans safe inside of this country, we should be profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.

The CBN video cut out the phrase “And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe, Americans safe inside of this country,” making it seem as though she was seriously suggesting that the U.S. should be “profiling” and “monitoring” white men.

Of course, that’s not what she meant. She meant to illustrate the absurdity of trying to use “fear” to justify policy and how it often leads to discriminatory actions against minorities.

And in fact, the uproar over the deceptively edited video actually proves her point. She was using the example of targeting white men as an example of why these policies would be treated with outrage when the subjects are a majority group, even though the policies are often embraced by the right wing when Muslims face scrutiny.

And that’s exactly what happened with the conservative outrage over the video. Conservatives perceived a threatening position coming from a Muslim woman based on a misinterpretation of the facts — and they overreacted. And yet when Trump makes obviously racist attacks, most of the right bends over backward to give him the benefit of the doubt. Omar is continually facing this racist double standard that makes her a perpetual target of suspicion.

Hasan demanded that Rubio apologize for spreading the smear:

Senator @marcorubio will you delete this tweet and apologize? You’re sharing a selectively-edited video from my show @AJUpFront to make @IlhanMN look bad and increase the number of death threats she already gets. Shame on you. Here’s the un-edited clip:https://t.co/1xX5KMns8N https://t.co/9lOAr67iCX

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) July 25, 2019

Parker Malloy of Media Matters for America noted that the smear against Omar was a case of history repeating.

This happened with the outrage over Omar saying that American Muslims shouldn’t lose their rights just because some people who share their religion carried out 9/11,” she said. “It was clear what she was saying, but a bad-faith reading got amplified into the public consciousness.”

In a reply to Rubio, she wrote:

Hey, genius, this clip has been selectively edited.

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) July 25, 2019

Others echoed the sentiment:

I am sure you will apologize for falling for a deceptively edited video. Right? https://t.co/Xc8RrbOJva

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) July 25, 2019

A good idea would be for the media to hound every Republican senator who’s circulating a deceptively edited video tweet and ask why they are doing that? https://t.co/GblWB5TAmg

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 25, 2019

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/24/On-Fox-Laura-Ingraham-airs-a-deceptively-edited-clip-of-Rep-Ilhan-Omar-to-accuse-her-of-ha/223792

On the May 23 edition of her prime-time show, Fox News host Laura Ingraham aired a deceptively edited clip of a speech by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to imply that she opposes people practicing their religious faith, despite the fact that Omar is a practicing Muslim.

On May 22, Omar gave a speech on the House floor about the wave of anti-abortion bills being pushed in states across the country and criticized the hypocrisy among the “religious right” on such policy decisions. Omar called out “religious fundamentalists” who she said are “trying to manipulate state laws in order to impose their beliefs on an entire society.” She mentioned a recently defeated Texas bill that would have opened the possibility of giving the death penalty to people who get an abortion, saying, “If that was being proposed by any other country, we would be calling it a dangerous violation of human rights. But because it’s happening here, with the support of the ultra-conservative religious right, we call it religious freedom.” Omar also listed Republicans whose personal actions contradicted policies that they fought to push on the American public, and said, “How could it be that an entire century has passed [since women got the right to vote] and we are still forced to fight for our rights as women, as human beings, and as Americans. This should outrage every single person. It certainly outrages me, and we can no longer stand for it.”

Embedded video

jordan

@JordanUhl

Absolutely disgusting.

Laura Ingraham just deliberately butchered a vid of @IlhanMN talking about how the GOP is hypocritical with "religious freedom."

Ingraham made it look like Omar said she hates all religion.

Ingraham's distorted clip followed by the whole thing:

13.1K

8:08 PM - May 23, 2019

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On her show, Ingraham aired the clip of Omar saying, “I am frustrated every single time I hear people speaking about their faith and pushing that onto other people.” Ingraham also played a clip from earlier in the speech in which Omar criticized “those that talk about their faith and want to push policies because of their faith” when they are “the ones that simply are caught with the hypocrisy of not living it out in their personal lives.” Ingraham mischaracterized her comments by saying, “I guess we are offending her by speaking about faith.” Ingraham also questioned Omar’s understanding of what it means to be American, saying, “This is a fundamental misunderstanding, purposeful or not, of what we are.” Her guest, Faith & Freedom Coalition Chairman Ralph Reed, agreed, adding, “There are few things, Laura, that are more distinctly and characteristically American than bringing your faith into the public square and using it to impact the culture for the common good.”

This isn’t the first time that Fox figures have questioned Omar’s understanding of American values: Hosts have repeatedly doubted Omar’s loyalty to America, going as far as calling her “anti-American” and suggesting that her hijab means that she’s against the constitution. It's also not the first time Fox has deceptively edited a video of a sitting member of Congress to misrepresent their words -- last year, Fox & Friends aired a deceptively edited clip of Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) to claim she was “confused” about Trump’s family separation policy.

From the May 23 edition of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle:

LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Did you know that we were talking about faith and that -- just the fact that we were talking about faith upsets a certain congresswoman. Watch.

[BEGIN CLIP]

REP. ILHAN OMAR (D-MN): I am frustrated every single time I hear people speaking about their faith and pushing that onto other people. Those that talk about their faith and want to push policies because of their faith are the ones that simply are caught with the hypocrisy of not living it out in their personal lives.

[END CLIP]

INGRAHAM: So I guess we are offending her by speaking about faith.

RALPH REED (CHAIRMAN, FAITH & FREEDOM COALITION): Wow. Wow. So the people who poured out of African-American churches in the 50s and 60s and marched on Washington and sat at church counters because of their faith, because they believe that God's law and natural law required that they be treated the same as whites.

INGRAHAM: Well America wouldn't have been founded if we didn’t have people of faith who prayed for strength and resolve in every battle, at the end of every war, to bring the country together. I mean, this is -- but this is a fundamental misunderstanding, purposeful or not, of what we are and who we are as a people.

REED: Of American character. I mean, there are few things, Laura, that are more distinctly and characteristically American than bringing your faith into the public square and using it to impact the culture for the common good.

INGRAHAM: Yeah, and inform who we are. I mean, what’s supposed to inform who we are? You know, Hollywood? Ralph, great conversation, I’m sure it offended all the right people.

From Omar’s May 22 speech on the House floor:

REP. ILHAN OMAR (D-MN): I rise today to defy the horrifying attacks happening against women’s reproductive rights all across this country....