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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/experts-explain-the-**4-main-psychological-factors-that-drive-trumps-rabid-fan-base/**

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a looming question in today’s political climate is:  Why do Donald Trump’s devotees continue to support him despite the carnage of his well-documented failures?  Although we are in the middle of a deadly pandemic that is surging and not contained, Trump seems to maintain a base support of 35% to 40%.  What are the psychological factors that influence or underpin his supporters’ attraction to him? And might this provide some perspective on how to change these supporters’ minds?

Multiple psychological factors seem to influence and explain his supporters.  We have divided these factors into four major categories: Rebelliousness and Chaos; Shared Irrationality; Fear; and Safety and Order.

Rebelliousness and Chaos [DISRUPTOR? BROWNSHIRTS HOODLUMS?]

Some Trump supporters have a strong desire for rebelliousness and chaos, and view Trump as the perfect vehicle for achieving their personal goals.  These supporters tend to become “anti-establishment and anti-government,” even when it is against their best interest. Many are unhappy with their station in life and believe chaos in the political system will bring them important gains.  They seek immediate and sweeping changes and believe a rebellious attitude and rebellious behavior are what is necessary.  They would rather have chaos, even dangerously or regressively so, than the status quo.

These supporters believe in Trump’s professed anger and rebelliousness, while often ignoring the content of the issues at hand. Trump’s talk of“draining the swamp” [SHORTHAND FOR DESTROY DC POWER PPL? NEWT CALLED DISEASE?] and of eschewing “political correctness” is attractive to them. They react emotionally and irrationally in embracing Trump’s decisions to create chaos, such as by sending federal troops into American cities to provoke hostile conflict with protestors.  They enjoy and thrive upon Trump disavowing norms, rules, and laws. Rebelliousness and chaos can be a major psychological influence, but it can have serious negative consequences such as undermining the chance for real change.

Shared Irrationality

The Dunning-Kruger effect.  Some people are under-informed and misinformed and are completely unaware of their lack of information. They tend to overestimate their level of knowledge and hold onto that position.  They develop “illusory superiority” from their inability to recognize their true lack of knowledge.  In other words, some people think they know more than they do and hold firmly to their opinions. These people are resistant to change their political thinking because they believe they are the knowledgeable ones. Trump and some of his supporters have this psychological phenomenon in common; they are unable to remedy their own limitations of knowledge and their inaccurate thinking.[QANON?]

Magical thinking.This is the belief that one’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, or words can bring about effects in the world. Or, similarly, that one’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, or words can cause something to happen. Magical thinking presumes a causal link between one’s internal, personal experience and the external physical world. This often emerges from an inability to distinguish fully between emotions and logical thoughts. Relying totally on emotion or “gut reactions” results in magical thinking. Trump engages in magical thinking almost constantly. This is especially dangerous regarding the pandemic:  “It will disappear very quickly,” “We have it under control,” “We may have some embers or some ashes…”  Many supporters engage in magical thinking and are encouraged and validated by Trump, leading them to align strongly with him.

Obsession with celebrity.  Some people are obsessed with celebrities and reality television.  Trump entertains them and amuses them.  Some supporters are always waiting to see what outrageous thing he says or does next.  These supporters are happy as long as they are being entertained by him. They act as if life is a “game” or a “show” that is somehow disconnected from the difficult realities of everyday life, but it is not.

Shared omnipotence.  This is a fantasy based in childhood experiences during our earliest years–due to our complete dependency upon parenting persons–that if one can find the “right” leader, then everyone can live harmoniously together forever. While this dynamic is often seen in romantic relationships, especially during the early infatuation period, this exact same dynamic can be seen in political relationships as well.  In this case, some people believe that Trump is the “right” leader who can take them to a place of harmony and never-ending happiness and success. This is an infantile fantasy that is unrealistic and unachievable because it is not rooted in the real world of adult life.  Even so, a childhood fantasy can be intense and not easily given up.

Fear

Brain reactivity to threats.  Research shows that some people have an exaggerated fear response to threats.  When presented with specific perceived threats–immigrants, democrats, protestors, socialism–conservatives’ brains light up in activity and experience a need to seek safety. Trump actively encourages his supporters to experience exaggerated fear responses, such that their brains remain energized.

Fear mongering.  Terror management theory explains why fear mongering works.  When people are reminded of their mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they reflexively defend those who share their world view and their natural and ethnic identity.  Tribal identification is an outgrowth of fear mongering. Racism and bigotry are related to fear. Trump appeals to racist and bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrants “rapists and murderers.”  This fear mongering by Trump is aimed at supporters who are vulnerable to racist and bigoted thinking because it fits with their world view. Another major fear among Trump supporters is falling behind financially and losing the economic capacity to control their lives and protect themselves.  A third major fear among Trump supporters is of socialism and believing that capitalism is being threatened and even destroyed. Trump is very adept at focusing on these specific fears among his supporters, using key words and names to trigger and stoke their emotional concerns NEWT]. Trump supporters believe that he is capable of protecting them from their fears. And when they feel protected, they overlook his offensive and outlandish behavior.

Conspiracy theories.  Certain people are attracted to conspiracy theories because of their vulnerable personalities and even by mental illness.  Life is complex and perplexing and at times dangerous. It is not simple or safe. Research shows that feelings of anxiety make people think more conspiratorially. A conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem much more straightforward and controllable. Fantasies that remove fear and doubt can be especially attractive, even if they are unrealistic and irrational. People who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events, to attribute intentionality where it is unlikely to exist, and to have lower levels of critical thinking. Trump has voiced many conspiracy theories: Spygate, Obamagate, Deep state, Trump Tower wiretapping, and others.

Security and Order

Social dominance orientation. People who score high on social dominance orientation prefer an established societal hierarchy. They are attracted to Trump because he promotes and normalizes the belief that high-status people and groups should be dominant over low-status people and groups. Trump’s clear distinction between groups on top of society (Whites) and those “losers” on the bottom (immigrants, Blacks, and Latinos) is a classic social dominance view. Individuals who are high on social dominance orientation are typically domineering, tough-minded, disagreeable, and relatively uncaring seekers of power. As such, these individuals have an attraction to authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism.  Several traits characterize authoritarianism: deference to authority, aggression toward outgroups, a hierarchical view of the world, and the belief that the world is dangerous and threatening. Some people believe in having an authoritarian leader because they feel protected and safe by a strong, powerful presence. Trump’s authoritarian leanings are highly attractive to these supporters. Interestingly, research studies have shown the joint power of authoritarianism and social dominance orientation to predict far-right-wing voting in the United States and Europe.

How To Change Supporters’ Minds...

https://onezero.medium.com/our-ability-to-process-information-is-reaching-a-critical-limit-3c761fee3259

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Our Ability to Process Information Is Reaching a Critical Limit

The result feels like a mental DDoS attack

Eric Ravenscraft

Jun 28 · 5 min read

BuzzFeed once called 2016 “Actually The Worst Year.” It didn’t hold the record for long. In six short months, 2020 has already delivered Australian wildfires, election controversies, the coronavirus pandemic, a massive increase to the surveillance state, the murder of yet more Black people at the hands of police, violent resistance to national protests in support of Black Lives Matter, and the list goes on.

It’s a lot. And our ability to process it all may be reaching a critical limit.

A growing body of research highlights the strain on our ability to read, understand, process, and take action on the flood of news with which we’re confronted. Some of the biggest events in 2020 have demanded more of our time, more direct action, and have been more emotionally taxing than we’re used to. The result feels like a mental DDoS attack that drags down our mental health, allows misinformation to thrive, and even makes the job of delivering news more difficult.

As information becomes more accessible, news cycles often struggle to keep one topic in focus for long. A political scandal on Monday that would have rocked the nation for weeks in decades past might be out of the news cycle by Tuesday now. This can sometimes be by design, as politicians learn that one of the best ways to combat breaking news is with more breaking news. It’s a strategy that former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon referred to as “flooding the zone with shit.”

As a result, news readers become overwhelmed. According to a 2019 report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 35% of respondents in the U.K., and 41% in the U.S., actively avoided the news. While news consumption briefly jumped after the pandemic hit, the Institute found a “significant increase” in news avoidance between April and May, with 59% of respondents saying they avoid the news at least “sometimes.”

In these surveys, the primary reason for avoiding the news is relatable: It stresses readers out. Research by professor of psychology Graham Davey at the University of Sussex has shown that constant exposure to the news can have a powerful negative effect on the viewer’s mood. “Our research has shown that negatively valenced news conveys that negativity to the consumer and makes them feel more anxious, stressed, or even depressed, and this negativity then feeds into their own personal worries and concerns which makes people worry for longer and often worry catastrophically,” Davey told OneZero.

How to Stop ‘Doom Scrolling’ and Love Your Phone Again

Not all screen time is created equal

onezero.medium.com]

Too much stressful news can have a negative impact on your mental health. Sites like Twitter — which can be stressful on a good day — become overwhelming with a constant flood of new things to be upset or dismayed about. “Negative news that conveys trauma in some way can have even greater effects on mental health by triggering symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder,” Davey explains. “Especially if the stories convey violence and trauma in a vivid and visual way.”

In the early days of the pandemic, it was harder to avoid the news: all of it was immediately relevant to your life. But learning necessary information from the news can accelerate news exhaustion.

“I’m sure that at a personal level many people had become very stressed by the continuing negative news about coronavirus,” Davey said. “Especially in the early days of lockdown when it was unclear when things would begin to improve. I suspect many people deliberately stopped watching TV news or reading newspapers because of this, and being in lockdown made it much easier to avoid news generally.”

Even among those who continue to read the news, there are only so many hours in the day to process it all. It takes time to find, read, process, and share stories — time that’s usually snuck in on work breaks, while using the bathroom, or before bed. The more stories there are to read, the harder it is to process any of them.

Give someone enough time to process what they’re reading, and they’re more likely to believe the truth… But time is an increasingly rare commodity.

While it’s possible to read more than one news article in a day, research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology shows that the less time a person has to spend comprehending a story, the less likely they are to be skeptical of a false story. Further study by researchers at Macquarie University and MIT suggested this effect was more likely to account for people believing fake news than political bias.

In other words, give someone enough time to process what they’re reading, and they’re more likely to believe the truth, even if it goes against their political beliefs. But time is an increasingly rare commodity, and it affects more than just consumers of news. As Steven Sloman, PhD, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, explained to NPR in 2018, “We just don’t have time to separate the facts from the falsities. Even fact-checkers don’t have time.”

Layoffs and traffic demands have stressed newsrooms for years, but the Covid crisis only exacerbated the problem. Fewer reporters are available to cover more stories for an audience that’s increasingly exhausted by the news they can’t ignore. Eventually, something has to give.

Like most problems caused by the pandemic, instead of one big dramatic breaking point, there are a lot of smaller stress fractures. Important stories — like expanded surveillance programs — that might have been major news cycles under usual circumstances can go overlooked. Conspiracy theories spread a bit faster than usual. People get more stressed than usual.

Over the short term, some of these stressors relieve themselves. During the initial phases of the pandemic, distributing information about how to limit the spread of the virus was crucial, but the flood of necessary updates abates over time. While protests continue, most curfews get lifted, allowing a sense of equilibrium. Even if the story goes on, an individual’s ability to tag out for a short time increases. Beyond that, however, adapting to a flood of news might require a social change in news consumption habits.

OneZero

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[Right-wing political operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl pitch reporters their latest far-fetched scandal on a balcony outside the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 27, 2020. (Photo: Jared Holt)]

Like bees to honey, the pro-Trump fringe descended on this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference outside of the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., in hopes of stealing a sliver of the spotlight for themselves.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and a cohort of his Infowars employees roamed the conference’s exhibition hall and the escalators ​on their way to radio row, attracting a crowd of star-struck attendees with their cell phones hoisted above their heads to get video of Jones. Right Wing Watch asked Jones for his thoughts on the new coronavirus​ ​now spreading around the world, a subject that Vice President Mike Pence had directly addressed on the CPAC main stage hours earlier.

“We know it’s a manmade bioweapon, produced by the U.S. government, sold to China in 2015. That was in theJournal of Science.That’s why we got a bit concerned about it. It’s a chimera cross-viral species system,” Jones said, going on to argue that the U.S. should restrict travel from China.

Right Wing Watch was unable to track down a Journal of Science article that made that assertion, which was recentlyfloated by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, as well. According to The New York Times, former White House strategist Steve Bannon is also a purveyor of the theory, which is widely disavowed by scientists.

[Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones rides an escalator to radio row at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 27, 2020. (Photo: Jared Holt)]

Jones told journalists at CPAC that he felt at home with CPAC attendees, “But the Republican establishment, I don’t feel at home with them. But we’re here to let them know that we’re taking the Republican party over.”

:{On a terrace overlooking the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center lobby, Republican political personalitiesJacob Wohland Jack Burkman hosted a press conference, as they did last year. In the audience, far-right political entertainer Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys hate group, accosted reporters. McInnes was later}:{. One attendee told Right Wing Watch they reported McInnes to security after McInnes threatened to assault them. A request for information from CPAC about McInnes’ ejection was not immediately returned.}:

Laura Loomer, anti-Muslim activistwho is pursuing a bid for Congress in Florida, was spotted around CPAC touting her ​campaign. Last year, Loomer had her media credentials revoked and was removed from CPAC after harassing journalists in the media filing center​; this year ​she donned standard attendee credentials.

But white nationalist organization leader Patrick Casey never made it past the conference center’s front door, according to a post in his Telegram chat channel. On days that the vice president or president speaks at CPAC, guards at the doors of the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center require conference credentials or hotel room keys to enter the building​. Casey falsely claimed to his followers that the policy was new for this year. 

Tags: Alex JonesGavin McInnesJack BurkmanJacob WohlLaura LoomerPatrick CaseyCPAC 2020Identity Evropa InfoWar

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-pushing-debunked-claims-about-coronavirus-are-linked-his-billionaire

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Steve Bannon is pushing debunked claims about the coronavirus that are linked to his billionaire benefactor

WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ

PUBLISHED 02/06/20 11:04 AM EST

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has pushed a debunked theory about the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China on his daily radio broadcast War Room: Pandemic. The claim echoes fake news pushed by G News, a website that has reportedly paid him at least $1 million for consulting and offered him a position as senior editor.

War Room: Pandemic launched on January 25 as a spin-off to War Room:

Impeachment, Bannon’s rapid response operation defending President Donald Trump during his Senate impeachment trial. Since the new show began, Bannon has repeatedly pushed the false narrative that the coronavirus was leaked from a covert biological weapons program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which includes a secure research facility where scientists study highly contagious and infectious diseases.

The unfounded narrative that the coronavirus was engineered and leaked from the lab has been wholly rejected by experts, with The Washington Post labeling it a “fringe theory,” PolitiFact calling the claim made in the G News article “false,” and Foreign Policy describing it as “an outbreak of nonsense.” Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright told the Post that “based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus.”

But evidence is no object when Bannon is on a mission to propagandize. On the podcast, Bannon has repeatedly cited stories by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times that suggest, based on speculations from a single source, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is researching biowarfare, and that the coronavirus was engineered and leaked from there. Bannon kicked off the show’s inaugural episode by interviewing Gertz to promote his flimsy reporting.

BuzzFeed recently reported on Bannon's ties to G News, a digital media outlet launched by Chinese billionaire-in-exile Guo Wenguithat has also published two false stories about how the coronavirus was first introduced to residents of Wuhan. One G News story falsely alleged that the Chinese government would imminently confess that the virus was genetically engineered and leaked from a lab near the densely populated city. The other included a document purporting to validate a conspiracy theory that the Chinese military spread the disease on purpose.

Bannon’s contracts with the project were first reported in October by Axios, which showed that he had signed on to serve as a consultant for one year starting in August 2018 and was to be compensated at least $1 million. Axios also reported on a second, unsigned contract that specified Bannon would serve as a senior editor for G News starting in August 2019. According to BuzzFeed, “Guo and Bannon frequently appear together in videos on G News that attack the Chinese government.” (According to The New York Times, Guo described his connection to Bannon in a 2018 interview: “We both naturally despise the Chinese Communist Party. That’s why we’ve become partners.”) Episodes of War Room: Pandemic are also cross-posted to the G News website.

Video file

CitationFrom the January 25, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Bill Gertz from the Washington Times, Bill Gertz had an amazing piece in the Washington Times about the biological labs that happen to be in Wuhan.

The episode also featured J. Kyle Bass, a China critic and hedge fund investor with connections to G News owner Guo, on the same day that Bass tweeted out a CBC article from July 2019, falsely claiming that “a husband and wife Chinese spy team” smuggled viral samples out of a Candian research facility to Wuhan. “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who tweeted the CBC link that day with the same unsubstantiated claim, was also a guest on the episode.

Later in the show, Gertz and Bannon delved further into the thinly sourced theory. Despite admitting that “we have no evidence that this current coronavirus leaked from that institute,” Gertz speculated that “it’s certainly possible that this outbreak of this animal virus could have come from one of their biological weapons labs.” The U.S. Department of State has raised concerns regarding China’s compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, but has not affirmatively identified the existence of such a program.

Video file

CitationFrom the January 25, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Bill, can you briefly summarize the article that you did yesterday? Talk about these biological labs that are in Wuhan and what aspect do you think they may have in this crisis?

BILL GERTZ: Sure, yeah, good to be on the show, Steve. This is a significant development in the sense that what I’ve identified is the sole declared facility in China capable of handling deadly viruses. In other words, this is the place where they do all of their civilian research. And I spoke with a former Israeli military intelligence officer who studied the Chinese biological warfare program and he says that this institute is clearly linked to this covert Chinese biological warfare program. Now, we have no evidence that this current coronavirus leaked from that institute, but in China and the way secrecy works and the lack of controls, it’s certainly possible that this outbreak of this animal virus could have come from one of their biological weapons labs.

There’s also a second facility in Wuhan that’s also linked to the biological weapons program.Again, that’s a secret program that last year the State Department in it’s annual report on arms compliance stated fairly bluntly that they believe that China is engaged in a covert offensive biological weapons program.

Gertz returned to the show on January 27, claiming, “Obviously, the question of their covert biological weapons program should come into play here.” Bannon replied, “Your point is that there are no coincidences” related to the coronavirus, and the lab facility raises “certain suspicions.”

Video file

CitationFrom the January 27, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

BILL GERTZ: Obviously, the question of their covert biological weapons program should come into play here because, you know, there is only one declared hospital, research center, laboratory in Wuhan -- in all of China -- and it’s in Wuhan, capable of dealing with this level 4 of infectious diseases. And then you have then --

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Your point is there are no coincidences, if the level 4 [facility] that was built by the French for them in 2007 is in Wuhan, then that leads to certain suspicions.

GERTZ: Absolutely. This has, you know, the Chinese have to respond to this.

Bannon’s guest Dr. Steven Hatfill, an expert who previously worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, told the host repeatedly that the theory about coronavirus leaked out of an infectious disease research facility was incorrect, adding, “You know, I'm sitting in an SL4 laboratory right now, and there is no way you could get anything out of here. There’s no way a bad guy could get in.” From the January 29 edition of War Room: Pandemic:

Video file

CitationFrom the January 29, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Today, The Washington Post is out there, mocking and ridiculing The Washington Times, Bill Gertz, one of our colleagues reporting about the Wuhan level 4 laboratory, saying it’s a fringe theory, that anything could have come out of that laboratory, et cetera. We’re not trying to make an assertion that they were building a biological weapon. But given the fact that there’s now no direct link at least as shown today between patient zero and the market, it maybe some that’s later. How do you think this thing started?

DR. STEVEN HATFILL: I think it was natural. You know, I'm sitting in an SL4 laboratory right now, and there is no way you could get anything out of here. There’s no way a bad guy can get in. The people around me are of the highest professional caliber, both mentally, technically, emotionally, and every other consideration. I'm sorry but I kind of downplay the fact that this came out of a BW laboratories.

BANNON: Well, I think that’s fantastic. I think people need to hear that. I think that’s great. And why do you come to this conclusion?

After this exchange, Bannon ignored Hatfill’s expertise and returned to his irresponsible speculation, declaring that “there are no coincidences.”

Video file

CitationFrom the January 29, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Now, people will tell you that’s also where biological warfare are done, those types of places. That’s why there’s so much focus -- Bill Gertz’s articles in the Washington Times focus very much on this level four lab that is in Wuhan, right. And I’m not a believer, as you know, I’m not a conspiracy guy, I always tell you it’s out there in plain daylight. The party at Davos, the way they roll is right up in your grill and there are no coincidences.

On February 1, Bannon again asked Hatfill about the theory, and again Hatfill rejected it:

Video file

CitationFrom the February 1, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Also Zero Hedge, who I'm a huge fan of, Zero Hedge has had this analysis of what the Chinese lab and the two Chinese -- the Canadian lab in I think Winnipeg, that there are now issues -- one of the Chinese scientists took some of the viruses back to Wuhan. I'm not a conspiracy theory guy, not a deep state guy, never have been because I say it’s all up there in your face, the party at Davos, the way the whole thing rolls is in your grill you just have to see it. But there are no coincidences.

...

These are the elite institutions in the world the french built one from the ground up for the Chinese, it just randomly happened to be in Wuhan, right? And relatively in geospatial terms relatively close to the market, a mile or two. There’s been tons of things, they’re using HIV serum to cure people there. This report comes out and it’s been tweeted out all over. Bill Gertz, Washington Times, done some good reporting. The Post calls it a fringe kook theory Miles Guo put something up, said he had a report from inside the CCP and Politifact saying he’s lying so it’s all over the map.

But in your assessment, at what you see in [INAUDIBLE], I asked you to look overnight at this,  where do you think we stand as people know the information today? Is this something that’s naturally occurred? Do you think there’s a possibility in what you read so far that it gives you even a scintilla that this could be some sort of weaponization thing gone wrong that somehow got out of the lab.

DR. STEVEN HATFILL: From what I’ve looked at I think the authors of these papers are overreaching a bit. Now that said this is an odd virus its genome. It’s got a very, very, long, very different from the other SARS virus.

Now, the unsubstantiated theory is being repeated by U.S. government officials in a position of power to take action. According to a report from Business Insider, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) pointed out the proximity of the outbreak to “China’s only bio-safety level four ‘superlaboratory’ that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/lindsey-graham-says-barr-has-process-for-biden-probe-russian-investigators-going-to-jail/

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https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/why-portland-is-wrong-about-water-fluoridation/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/heres-how-trump-weaponizes-crackpot-ideas-to-maintain-a-firm-grip-on-his-maga-base

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/outlandish-conspiracy-theories-didnt-start-with-trumps-presidency-republicans-have-been-promoting-fringe-crackpots-for-decades-political-historian/

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Outlandish conspiracy theories didn’t start with Trump’s presidency. Republicans have been promoting ‘fringe crackpots’ for decades: political historian

Written by Alex Henderson January 2, 2020

Supporters of President Donald Trump have promoted a variety of right-wing conspiracy theories, from the Crowdstrike theory (which claims that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election) to the racist “birther” nonsense (which claimed that President Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, not the United States). But author Matthew Dallek, in a January 2 article for the Washington Post, stresses that Republicans were promoting outlandish conspiracy theories long before Trump decided to run for president in 2015.

“The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks,” Dallek explains.

Back in the 1950s, Dallek recalls, two of the leading right-wing conspiracy theorists were Sen. McCarthy of Wisconsin and Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. There was very bad blood between Welch and journalist William F. Buckley, founder of the conservative National Review: Buckley had no use for Welch’s ridiculous claim that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” But Dallek emphasizes that while Birchers were not welcome at the National Review, they found their niche in the Republican Party.

Dallek explains, “Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch…. But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the Society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the Society.”

Had Gen-X radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones been alive in the 1950s and 1960s, he would have loved some of the theories that the John Birch Society promoted. For example, Dallek notes, Birchers believed that “fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.” Another Bircher conspiracy theory (which Dallek doesn’t mention in his article) was that the bad blood between the Soviet Union and the Maoist government in Communist China was a fabrication — and that the two hoped to join forces and invade the United States.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was the most conservative Democratic president in generations. Regardless, many Republicans absolutely hated him. And Dallek points out that Clinton-related conspiracy theories came from everyone from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. (founder of the far-right Morality Majority). Scaife, who later became active in the Tea Party, claimed that Clinton was part of a drug smuggling ring.

“During the Clinton years,” Dallek explains, “the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself.”

Dallek wraps up his article by emphasizing that Trump is merely a symptom of the Republican Party’s willingness to embrace far-out conspiracy theories, not the cause.

“Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: the batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them,” Dallek observes. “Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/outlandish-conspiracy-theories-didnt-start-with-trumps-presidency-republicans-have-been-promoting-fringe-crackpots-for-decades-political-historian/

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Outlandish conspiracy theories didn’t start with Trump’s presidency. Republicans have been promoting ‘fringe crackpots’ for decades: political historian

Written by Alex Henderson January 2, 2020

Supporters of President Donald Trump have promoted a variety of right-wing conspiracy theories, from the Crowdstrike theory (which claims that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election) to the racist “birther” nonsense (which claimed that President Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, not the United States). But author Matthew Dallek, in a January 2 article for the Washington Post, stresses that Republicans were promoting outlandish conspiracy theories long before Trump decided to run for president in 2015.

“The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks,” Dallek explains.

Back in the 1950s, Dallek recalls, two of the leading right-wing conspiracy theorists were Sen. McCarthy of Wisconsin and Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. There was very bad blood between Welch and journalist William F. Buckley, founder of the conservative National Review: Buckley had no use for Welch’s ridiculous claim that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” But Dallek emphasizes that while Birchers were not welcome at the National Review, they found their niche in the Republican Party.

Dallek explains, “Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch…. But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the Society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the Society.”

Had Gen-X radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones been alive in the 1950s and 1960s, he would have loved some of the theories that the John Birch Society promoted. For example, Dallek notes, Birchers believed that “fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.” Another Bircher conspiracy theory (which Dallek doesn’t mention in his article) was that the bad blood between the Soviet Union and the Maoist government in Communist China was a fabrication — and that the two hoped to join forces and invade the United States.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was the most conservative Democratic president in generations. Regardless, many Republicans absolutely hated him. And Dallek points out that Clinton-related conspiracy theories came from everyone from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. (founder of the far-right Morality Majority).Scaife, who later became active in the Tea Party, claimed that Clinton was part of a drug smuggling ring.

“During the Clinton years,” Dallek explains, “the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself.”

Dallek wraps up his article by emphasizing that Trump is merely a symptom of the Republican Party’s willingness to embrace far-out conspiracy theories, not the cause.

“Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: the batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them,” Dallek observes. “Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.”

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no lnx ref

Swamp fever

Don’t blame Trump for the rise of right-wing conspiracy theories. The GOP helped cultivate them — until they took over.

The Washington Post)

By Matthew Dallek

JANUARY 2, 2020

To explain the impeachment inquiry, the GOP has promulgated a flurry of baseless conspiracy theories about the forces arrayed against President Trump. It has been surreal to hear some of the nation’s most influential elected officials spouting ideas basically concocted from thin air. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican, Devin Nunes (Calif.), denounces “Ukrainian election meddling in 2016 .?.?. aimed against the Trump campaign.” The Judiciary Committee’s Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) claims that if Congress could only talk to a certain three Democratic officials, then “every fact of this investigation” would be unearthed. Conservatives online hold that former White House aide Fiona Hill was a mole planted by George Soros.

[Outlook • Perspective

Matthew Dallek is a professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, and is author of "Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security."  Follow @MattDallek]

Of course, no one purveys these theories with as much verve as Trump. The president has suggested that the nation’s first African American president was born abroad (he wasn’t), that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had a part in JFK’s assassination (he didn’t), that Ukraine rather than Russia was responsible for election interference (it wasn’t), that the Mueller investigation empaneled by his own administration was a Democratic plot against him, that the Clintons orchestrated the prison killing of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (who committed suicide, according to an autopsy) and that the Obama administration spied on his campaign, a claim debunked by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s recent report on the FBI’s Russia investigation.

It certainly seems, more than ever, that “the truth itself is on trial,” as Peter Baker recently wrote in the New York Times. Some conservatives say Trump, and Trumpism, represent a new frontier of conspiratorial politics — that the theories are unique to Trump’s sensibilities and peculiar to his paranoid White House. “Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” former president George W. Bush said in a 2017 speech. The “main problem” behind the proliferation of political conspiracy theories “is a president who is also a self-invented fabulist,” argued Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson.

But in truth, the stew of “alternative facts” has been simmering for more than half a century on the right fringe. The GOP had endless opportunities across the decades to banish these theories — about scheming bureaucrats, Jews, the Federal Reserve, the United Nations — and its leaders often saw them as absurd. But they were also useful, helping to rally support from an aggrieved government-hating base, so the party’s mandarins allowed them to fester and grow until they spread from the toxic fringe to the mainstream, which they have finally overtaken. It’s no wonder someone who embraced those ideas would become successful; Trump validates notions that his voters have long believed, ideas that the party refused to condemn and failed to repudiate.

Trump, then, isn’t what caused these conspiracy theories. He’s what happens when nobody stands in their way.

The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks. Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who called Dwight Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,” in an iconic moment of movement history.

But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the society. Birchers took active part in Republican election campaigns and ran right-wing bookstores packed with conspiratorial treatises such as John Stormer’s “None Dare Call It Treason” (about Soviet “infiltration of American government”) and Fred Schwarz’s “You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists).” They served as members of local school boards and state legislatures. Other Republicans rarely spoke up to debunk the Birch view that fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.

At times, the wild-eyed conspiracism came from the top. Vice President Spiro Agnew delivered speeches identifying a cabal of Washington- and New York-based power brokers who supposedly controlled the news media, whipping up what journalists at the time considered a frenzy of anti-Semitism on the far right. (In 1976, a few years after he’d been indicted on bribery and other charges, Agnew published a novel pushing the anti-Semitic trope that the media’s “Zionist lobby” was controlling America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.)

At other times, understanding that they had to court the conspiracy-minded activists of “the base,” the party’s leaders went out of their way to confer legitimacy on extremists. Take the GOP’s relationship with Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson, who won four states in the 1988 Republican presidential primary contest. In 1991, Robertson published “The New World Order,” holding that scheming government pooh-bahs were working to set up “world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.” He even suggested that President George H.W. Bush was complicit in establishing this new world order. Still, Republicans wanted votes and donations from Robertson’s acolytes, so Newt Gingrich, Oliver North, William Bennett, Jack Kemp, Jesse Helms and Dinesh D’Souza all happily spoke at his “Road to Victory” conferences. Sen. Bob Dole, a pillar of the Republican establishment and at the time a presidential candidate, told Robertson’s followers in 1995 that “I am proud to stand up here and say that I’ve been awarded a 100 percent voting record in ’93 and 100 percent in 1994 and 100 percent in 1995” from the Christian Coalition.

During the Clinton years, the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself. Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife sent investigators to Arkansas to dig up dirt on the president’s past, and when they failed, they settled for salacious fabrications that Bill Clinton was part of a drug-smuggling ring. Scaife became what The Post called “a guiding force” behind Speaker Gingrich’s Contract With America and a later generation of tea party activists. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a leader of the religious right (his son is a big Trump supporter), started selling a $43 videotape that among other charges said Clinton was responsible for the deaths of “countless people.”

Of course, Republican leaders didn’t always or uniformly tolerate gonzo conspiracy theories. Presidential nominee John McCain, for instance, contradicted one of his supporters at a 2008 campaign event, telling her that Barack Obama was not, in fact, “an Arab.” Onetime senator and 1996 presidential hopeful Arlen Specter (Pa.) also stuck up for the truth when he assailed two leading GOP conspiracy theorists, Robertson and Pat Buchanan, as leaders of the “intolerant right.”

Yet over the past seven decades, such voices — pro-fact, pro-science and pro-reason — lost the internal debate over how to treat the tinfoil-hat folks. And such moments of truth-telling by Republicans at all levels have been fleeting and rare.

While the GOP was actively courting allies who propagated conspiracy theories, the Democratic Party took much the opposite tack — mostly rejecting the left-wing theories that surfaced from time to time. Although some research has found a recent uptick in Democratic support for conspiracy theories (a jump caused by a lack of political power), elected Democrats have typically fenced their party off from wild-eyed claims promulgated on the left. They never embraced the theory that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” carried out by the Bush administration, for example. During the 2004 presidential primary race, even the most lefty antiwar candidates — Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, Carol Moseley Braun — largely eschewed conspiracy theories that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had gone to war for oil or to enrich their friends in the construction business. The left has its share of anti-vaxxers who believe that vaccines cause autism, yet Democratic officials have battled these lies (some of which Trump himself has promoted).

One reason is that Democrats have been reluctant to use anti-government theories to tear down the things they would prefer to burnish, such as government and international institutions that they believe work for social justice and economic progress. Republicans’ conspiracy theories about powerful secret actors are consistent with their small-government views; it is a shorter leap for conservatives to portray Washington as a swamp where individualism, justice and decency go to die.

Thanks to years of GOP tolerance for surreal thinking on the right, conspiracy theories have moved from the fringe to the center. A 2018 poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that 63 percent of registered voters subscribe to at least one such theory. Some social science research suggests that people who feel alienated from politics are more prone to thinking conspiratorially. Trump capitalized on that climate of suspicion.

It’s easy to see the line from older conspiracy theories to the fact-free claims by Trump supporters today. White House adviser Stephen Miller has drawn anti-immigration rhetoric from white-nationalist publications like the 1973 French novel “The Camp of the Saints,” which envisions hordes of immigrants obliterating Western civilization. Breitbart News has featured anti-immigrant, anti-gay and anti-black theories that could have been found in an earlier generation of far-right publications, including American Opinion and American Mercury.

Perhaps the biggest change of the Trump era is the approach of Republican leaders. In the past, they indulged these theories but never really espoused them. Today, elective officeholders embrace them openly, in the face of explicit counterevidence from the government they purport to run. National security officials have repeatedly warned in recent weeks that Ukraine did not meddle in the 2016 election and that those who repeat the claim are advancing pro-Russian propaganda. Yet most Republican members of Congress now seem to believe this theory. Trump’s racism (calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”; telling four congresswomen of color who are all U.S. citizens to “go back” to their “crime infested” home countries) and anti-Semitism (he thinks Jews are loyal primarily to Israel and motivated mostly by money) align well with old allegations that Jewish bankers and assorted globalists have enriched themselves while inflicting economic havoc on “the people,” as his closing 2016 television ad suggested.

Polarization has also made mainstream American culture hospitable to ideas once relegated to the margins. Voters have grown more tolerant of political leaders’ failings as long as they adhere to the correct ideological positions, opening a space for someone like Trump to win the presidency and then govern with the support of a minority of the electorate. And grass-roots opinion has shifted in favor of conspiracy theories, a pattern that both follows the cues of political leaders and incentivizes those leaders’ abasements. For instance, Twitter equips Trump to instantaneously air any theory, no matter how nutty, to raucous and affirming plaudits.Fox News also capitalizes on this shift to amplify Trumpian claims (“Russia didn’t hack our democracy,” Fox host Tucker Carlson recently parroted). It’s no wonder that, as Gallup found in February, 30 percent of Republicans see Russia in a favorable light. One recent Post survey of attitudes toward 2016 election conspiracy theories found that 26 percent of Americans believed that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, invented a story of Russian election meddling in order to hide Ukraine’s efforts to help Hillary Clinton.

Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: The batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them. Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-a-right-wing-disinformation-network-keeps-republicans-steeped-in-lies/

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How a right-wing disinformation network keeps Republicans steeped in lies

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly December 30, 2019

While Democrats continue to wring their hands over the 2020 presidential primary, Donald Trump and his enablers decided a long time ago that the eventual nominee would be Joe Biden. That explains the pressure the president put on Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens, a move that led to his impeachment.

But just as we saw with the attempts to smear Hillary Clinton in 2016, the disinformation campaign about the Bidens will continue unabated in an effort to drive up negative impressions of the former vice president. Nicholas Grosman has documented the origins of one of those campaigns that is underway.

Hunter Biden is currently involved in a paternity suit in Arkansas. The New York Post recently ran an article titled, “Private-eye firm claims Hunter Biden is linked to multiple criminal probes.” Here’s the lead paragraph.

Hunter Biden is the subject of multiple criminal investigations related to “fraud, money laundering and a counterfeiting scheme,” it’s claimed in court documents filed Monday in his Arkansas paternity case.

The documents they are referring to were filed by a Florida-based private-eye firm, D&A Investigations, and were almost immediately dismissed by the judge because they had nothing to do with the paternity case. Nowhere in the documents did D&A name the agencies behind the purported criminal probes of Biden.

Grossman did what the reporters at the New York Post apparently couldn’t be bothered to do: he googled D&A Investigations and found their web site. The home page lists “active investigations.”

D&A opened an independent investigation (Transparency) in August 2016 into Hillary R. Clinton (HRC), Jeffrey Epstein & the Democrat National Committee (DNC) claims of: Russia broke into the DNC.

At the time, William J. Clinton (WJC), HRC, John Podesta, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Kerry were in collusion with Rogue Officials in the British Isles, Hong Kong, Iran, Russia, the Ukraine, United States, et al, to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.

In other words, the firm is dedicated to spreading conspiracy theories—particularly those that originate as Russian propaganda.

Hunter Biden’s attorney, Brent Langdon, responded to the filings by saying that D&A was engaged in “a scheme by a non-party simply to make scandalous allegations in the pending suit to gain some quick media attention.” As confirmation, the charges were never substantiated and were almost immediately dismissed, and yet they’ve caught fire on right wing media.

Two days after the article in the Post, the story showed up on Fox News under the title, “Hunter Biden is subject of criminal probes, says PI firm hinting at more incriminating details.” Other than repeating what had already been reported and using the opportunity to rehash the claims about Burisma, they added that D&A told them “to expect an additional filing soon, and hinted that more incriminating details concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings would soon come to light.”

The story was then picked up by OAN and made its way to RealClearPolitics. At this point, the title simply reads: “Court Filing Shows Hunter Biden Earned $156 Million From Ukraine Corruption.” We can assume that social media feeds are now inundated with these false claims.

It is worth noting that this attempt to spread disinformation is so blatant that reputable news organizations are simply ignoring it. But as Grossman writes, “to figure out what to do about disinformation, first we need understand how it works.” This case gives us an example of how that happens. Either news organizations like the New York Post, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics are complicit with a firm like D&A Investigations or they aren’t interested in verifying information when it reinforces their biases. As a result, they spread disinformation and lies.

That is how Trump is able to maintain his 40+ percent support in the polls. Republicans have a propaganda network that keeps them steeped in lies. Back in 2016, mainstream media gave credence to those lies about Hillary Clinton in the name of balance.Beyond offering a mea culpa for their complicity, reporters should do their part to expose the propaganda network for what it is. This story would be a good place to start.

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mma 1219

Media Matters' Alex Kaplan passed this along:"Trump on Friday went on a spree amplifying nearly 20 times accounts supporting the insane and dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory, which involves an anonymous user on a far-right message board claiming to have inside information on a secret plot by Trump against the “deep state” and pedophiles, has been tiedto multiple acts of violence and warned about in an FBI memo as a potential domestic terror threat. It comes as Trump has already amplified dozens of accounts supporting the conspiracy theory over the past two years."

Also: A noted white nationalist fabricated a claim about guns and Virginia’s Democratic governor that has spread in the past week throughout social media and on far-right message boards. The hoax has drawn tens of thousands of engagements and views, and some have issued calls to violence in response.

Finally: A pro-Trump subreddit is full of calls for violence in response to proposed Virginia gun safety laws.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/gops-propaganda-circus-lies-yelling-and-conspiracy-theory/

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GOP’s propaganda circus: Lies, yelling and conspiracy theory

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 13, 2019

Speaker Nancy Pelosi first announced that the House would formally take up an impeachment investigation on Sept. 24. Sometime on Friday, the House Judiciary Committee will almost certainly vote to send two Articles of Impeachment to the full House. If a whistleblower hadn’t stepped up and set this ball in motion, we would still be seeing President Trump at his rallies screaming about the Ukrainian government’s interference in the election and the corruption of Joe Biden — and the mainstream media would be chasing the story like it was a private email server. Team Trump was only days away from getting away with it.

From the moment he stepped on to that  escalator in June of 2015, Donald Trump’s unethical, illegal and immoral behavior has been leading toward this day. Assuming that the full House votes to impeach and sends the case to the Senate, his name will always have the scarlet asterisk next to it as the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, a fact which reportedly upsets him greatly. In a just world, he would be the first president to be impeached, convicted and removed from office. That’s not the world in which we live, unfortunately.

The hearings this week were long and tedious, but they served an important purpose nonetheless. The two sides had different goals. The Democrats laid out the case with which most of us following this event are familiar and managed to be serious and respectful while doing it. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., kept the proceedings from careening out of control and there was even some persuasive rhetoric and memorable oratory.

Republicans had a different goal. They presented a number of defenses, much of them consisting of emotive hand-wringing, faux exasperation and yelling. As former Breitbart editor and Republican House aide Kurt Bardella wrote for NBC, this is a long-standing strategy:

Revisit the 11-hour grilling that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was subjected to by Republicans during the Benghazi hearing and you’ll see the now familiar sight of Republicans yelling and badgering their witness. As Rep. Adam Smith, R-Wash., observed that day, the Republicans’ strategy was to try and “wear you down.”

This was obviously their goal during Thursday’s marathon hearing, and it worked. It was long and tiring, mostly because Republicans kept offering amendments, many of them barely making sense, after which the whole committee had to debate them and then vote on whether to adopt them. All were voted down along party lines, votes, the final vote coming after 14 hours of debate. Clearly the Republicans had planned all along toprolong the  process so they could say that the Democrats had voted to impeach in the dead of night when nobody would see it. Nadler called their bluff announcing that the committee’s final vote would be postponed until Friday morning. The Republicans melted down into full-blown hysteria, but by that time no one was listening.

Bardella writes that Republicans’ “script is built on misdirection and moving the goalposts as their paltry strategy shifts to incorporate various conspiracy theories and outlandish claims,” observing that they consciously treat every member’s time as if he were appearing on a Fox News segment.

I think that’s literally what they are doing. They are using the formal setting and the national attention to introduce people to the alternative reality that only people who watch Fox News usually see.

Take, for instance, the big signs Republican committee members have printed up and set on easels behind them. They feature things like pictures of Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on a milk carton with the words “Where’s Adam?” obviously pushing their absurd demand that Schiff be compelled to testify as a witness. (Nobody showed up in an official Trump campaign “Where’s Hunter” T-shirt, thank goodness.) Another was titled “Coastal Impeachment Squad” featuring a picture of the Democratic leadership spelling out that they are from New York, California and Massachusetts, clearly implying they are not Real Americans. At one point, they displayed the message “0 DAYS SINCE ADAM SCHIFF FOLLOWED HOUSE RULES” but removed it when thousands of people pointed out on Twitter that zero days since something occurred, in fact, means that thing occurred today.

Knowing that the Senate will not convict Trump under any circumstances offers Republicans an opportunity to use these nationally televised hearings to spread their conspiracy theories, memes and smears to a much wider audience. They are taking full advantage.

GOP members deployed their patented “process” argument constantly, of course. That was led by Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who former GOP campaign adviser Rick Wilson aptly described on MSNBC as a “screeching histrionic drama queen.” Others repeatedly insisted that the Democrats should go through the courts rather than charge the president with obstruction of Congress. Nadler finally put that one to bed by pointing out that “no privileges have been asserted. There’s nothing for a court to review.”

Perhaps one of the most startling speeches came from Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, who took the position that Trump did nothing wrong to a new level, asking, “Is it ever OK to invite a foreign government to become involved in an election, involving a political opponent? The answer is ‘yes.’ It better be — we do it all of the time.” He later tried to explain that “involve” doesn’t mean “interfere.” It was not convincing in the least. But acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was almost certainly relieved to see someone other than him make such an incriminating comment before the whole country.

The two congressmen who really carried the ball for the president over and over again were Matt Gaetz of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas. Here are just a couple of examples of how each of them aggressively played to the cameras with Fox News talking points:

Breitbart News

@BreitbartNews

Rep. @MattGaetz (R-FL) doesn't hold back on Hunter Biden.

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.@RepLouieGohmert : ‘We’re Here Because of Fraud, Not by the President,’ But Within the DOJhttp://www.cnsnews.com/article/washington/melanie-arter/gohmert-were-here-because-fraud-not-president-within-doj …

– Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said that it is because of fraud within the Department of Justice (DOJ), not fraud by President Donald Trump,...

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“They [Democrats] talk about “abuse of power” but they were willing to obscure evidence in a basement hearing over and over. They are willing to block witnesses from coming in here and testifying before Congress ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b3HkuOvB2o&feature=youtu.be …

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Those are just a few examples of the smears and lies those two shared on national TV on Thursday. They were bravura performances, which the president liked very much. He broke his previous record for tweets in a day, many of them retweets of the worst commentary from the Republicans on that committee.

Whether anyone who lives outside the Fox News universe would be impressed is hard to know. As I’ve written before, it doesn’t really matter. The point is to give oxygen to their disinformation and propaganda by any means necessary so it may live on. Republicans have achieved that goal. And I’m pretty sure the impeachment trial won’t be the last we hear of any of it.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/12-million-americans-believe-lizard-people-run-our-country/316706/

no lnx

NATIONAL

12 Million Americans Believe Lizard People Run Our Country

About 90 million Americans believe aliens exist. Some 66 million of us think aliens landed at Roswell in 1948. These are the things you learn when there's a lull in political news and pollsters get to ask whatever questions they want.

PHILIP BUMP

APRIL 2, 2013

About 90 million Americans believe aliens exist. Some 66 million of us think aliens landed at Roswell in 1948. These are the things you learn when there's a lull in political news and pollsters get to ask whatever questions they want.

Update, October 31: We've figured out who the government reptilians are, using science.

Public Policy Polling has raised weird polls to an art form. During last year's presidential campaign, the firm earned a bit of a reputation for its unorthodox questions; for example, "If God exists, do you approve of its handling of natural disasters?"

Today PPP released the results of a national survey looking at common conspiracy theories. Broken down by topic and cross-referenced by political preference, the results will not inspire a lot of patriotism. If you need to defend your fellow countrymen, be sure to note that the margin of error is 2.8 percent.

We took the findings and arranged them from most- to least-believed. And, just to inspire additional shame, figured out how many actual Americans that meant must believe in things like the danger of fluoride in water. (28 million, if you're wondering.)

View the full question asked for each conspiracy.

Conspiracy Percent believing Number of Americans believing

JFK was killed by conspiracy 51 percent 160,096,160

Bush intentionally misled on Iraq WMDs 44 percent 138,122,178

Global warming is a hoax 37 percent 116,148,195

Aliens exist 29 percent 91,035,072

New World Order 28 percent 87,895,931

Hussein was involved in 9/11 28 percent 87,895,931

A UFO crashed at Roswell 21 percent 65,921,948

Vaccines are linked to autism 20 percent 62,782,808

The government controls minds with TV 15 percent 47,087,106

Medical industry invents diseases 15 percent 47,087,106

CIA developed crack 14 percent 43,947,966

Bigfoot exists 14 percent 43,947,966

Obama is the Antichrist 13 percent 40,808,825

The government allowed 9/11 11 percent 34,530,544

Fluoride is dangerous 9 percent 28,252,264

The moon landing was faked 7 percent 21,973,983

Bin Laden is alive 6 percent 18,834,842

Airplane contrails are sinister chemicals 5 percent 15,695,702

McCartney died in 1966 5 percent 15,695,702

Lizard people control politics 4 percent 12,556,562

Just to further inspire conversation, PPP broke down belief in each theory by whom the respondent supported in the 2012 election. This yielded some genuinely interesting results.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/report-points-to-trump-1-as-the-ringleader-of-a-global-conspiracy/

"huge" rudy

no lnx

Report points to Trump, ‘-1,’ as the ringleader of a global conspiracy

Written by John Stoehr, The Editorial Board December 4, 2019

The House Intelligence Committee released its report Tuesday. In it were phone call records showing frequent contact between Rudy Giuliani and the White House. The records suggest in the most granular detail yet that the president of the United States is the leader of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

But the call records do more than that. They offer a teachable moment. They provide an illustration, in miniature, of what a conspiracy looks like, and why it’s morally and legally wrong for the head of the world’s oldest democracy to engage in such conduct.

The House Intelligence report does not say Giuliani called Trump. Instead, it says the president’s personal attorney called a number designated as “-1.” Adam Schiff, the panel’s chairman, said his committee is investigating whether “-1” is Trump’s phone. The timing of calls and other strong circumstantial evidence, however, point to him.

Joe Biden announced his candidacy on April 25. Leading up to that date, Giuliani, Lev Parnas and John Solomon were in frequent contact, according to the call logs. Parnas was one of Giuliani’s henchmen. He’s now under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. Solomon was a reporter for The Hill, a Washington newspaper.

As mentioned in previous editions of the Editorial Board, Parnas, under Giuliani’s direction, connected Solomon to Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko used to be Ukraine’s top prosecutor. He was hugely corrupt, because he was intimately linked to Vladimir Putin. In interviews with Solomon, Lutsenko alleged that Joe Biden, when he was the vice president, tried to shield his son, Hunter Biden, from criminal investigation in Ukraine (a lie) and that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered with the 2016 presidential election (also a lie.) Lev Parnas was deeply involved in Solomon’s “journalism.” He was present at his interviews with Yuriy Lutsenko, according to reporting in Pro Publica.

This we knew. What didn’t know was the timing.

On the same day Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign, John Solomon wrote a falsehood-laden column “alleging that Ukraine had planted Russia collusion allegations against the Trump campaign,” according to the Post. “The column also described Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and questioned whether Biden had acted to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing an investigation, as the fired prosecutor has alleged.”

Coincidence? Unlikely.

The very same day, April 25, Giuliani received a call from “-1” (i.e., Trump). Giuliani then called Sean Hannity at Fox. A while later, Trump appeared on Hannity’s show to comment on Solomon’s report in The Hill. “That sounds like big, big stuff,” he said.

It could have been a coincidence, but again, unlikely. As I noted last week, Parnas’ attorney said he met regularly with the “BLT Team,” a name taken from the restaurant where the group convened several times a week on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The BLT team included Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, and US Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief aide.

Coincidence isn’t the right word to describe a president’s dirty lawyer getting a dirty prosecutor to tell a dirty reporter the president’s Democratic rival is dirty, and then getting a dirty TV host to ask the president to comment on the dirty reporter’s dirt.

The right word to describe all that is conspiracy.

Which can be criminal. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chief, is now serving time in federal prison for defrauding the United States. Legally, conspiracy doesn’t require an underlying crime. Prosecutors were only required to show Manafort conspired to “impair or obstruct the lawful function of any part of the government.”

I don’t know if the president’s conduct meets a statutory standard. I do think it meets a political one. Trump, as “-1,” is the ringleader of a global conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to consent to his leadership. There is no such thing as legitimate consent when presidents collude with enemies foreign and domestic to obstruct the free and fair process by which all Americans exercise self-governance.

This is a giant of a scandal. It dwarfs Watergate. It boggles the mind of ordinary Americans to contemplate the wide array of seedy underworld characters involved in a vast global conspiracy. (Another side of this involves another dirty former Ukrainian prosecutor who did a favor for a Ukrainian mobster fighting extradition to the US. Dmitry Firtash, the mobster, got Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor, to say Biden was dirty. That wonGiuliani’s attention. His friends diGenova and Toensing went to the US Department of Justice to plead with the US attorney general to go easy on Firtash.)

As I said, giant.

But these call logs bring the vastness of the conspiracy down to a human scale. Donald Trump talked to Giuliani, who talked to Parnas, who talked to Lutsenko, who talked to Solomon, who talked to Giuliani, who talked to Hannity, who talked to Donald Trump.

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// soros conspir theory

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/29/brazils-president-claims-dicaprio-paid-for-amazon-fires

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/here-are-5-ways-trump-and-his-supporters-are-using-the-same-strategies-as-science-deniers/

no lnx

Here are 5 ways Trump and his supporters are using the same strategies as science deniers

Written by Lee McIntyre, The Conversation November 27, 2019

While watching the House impeachment hearings, I realized my two decades of research into why people ignore, reject or deny science had a political parallel.

From anti-evolutionists to anti-vaccine advocates, known as “anti-vaxxers,” climate change deniers to Flat Earthers, science deniers all follow a common pattern of faulty reasoning that allows them to reject what they don’t want to believe – and accept what they favor – based on a misunderstanding of how science deals with evidence.

As I’ve been watching the hearings, I’ve noticed that a number of characteristics of this type of reasoning are now being embraced by President Donald Trump and his congressional supporters.

Characteristic acts

There are five common tactics used by science deniers.

In 1998, brothers Mark and Chris Hoofnagle (a lawyer and a physiologist) wrote an early blog post about science denialism. That was followed by further work by econometrician Pascal Diethelm and public health scholar Martin McKee and cognitive scientists John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. All identified the following factors as characteristic acts of science deniers:

Believing in conspiracy theories;

Relying on cherry-picked evidence;

Relying on fake experts (and dismissal of actual experts);

Committing logical errors;

Setting impossible standards for what science should be able to deliver.

These elements are present when those who deny the Earth is round or who believe vaccines cause autism insist that there is a governmental cover-up of the real evidence on their topics. They can be seen when Ted Cruz tries to discredit climate change with talk about the anomalous world weather pattern in 1998 due to El Niño. And they’re evident when intelligent design theorists complain that evolution by natural selection still has not been proven.

Alternative reality

Trump and his defenders in Congress echo this pattern. Even though Trump has firsthand knowledge of some of the facts under dispute – whereas his supporters may not – all seem to have bought in fully to the idea that the actual political situation is not the one pictured in the mainstream consensus of facts and evidence, but instead is based on an alternative reality.

Here are the five ways Trump and his allies use the same strategies as science deniers:

Conspiracy theories: During his questioning of Ambassador Bill Taylor and other witnesses at the impeachment hearings, Republican counsel Steve Castor repeatedly pursued a debunked conspiracy theory involving an alleged plot in which the Ukrainian government – and not the Russians – interfered with the 2016 presidential election because they were out to get the president.

Cherry-picking: Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that President Trump told him, “I want nothing from Ukraine. I want no quid pro quo.” Trump and his supporters focused on this statement as evidence of his innocence, despite the fact that in other testimony by Sondland that day, he said, “Mr. Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky…Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.”

Discrediting experts: President Trump has repeatedly – and falsely – claimed that State Department and CIA employees such as Bill Taylor, George Kent, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman and others who have testified in the impeachment hearings are “Never Trumpers,” a term for Republicans who do not support Trump – and who therefore have no credibility. His supporters have latched onto this tactic. GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said on Sept. 20, after the whistleblower complaint was made public: “It looks to me like another deep-state attack.”

Illogical reasoning: Trump supporters have claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky never complained that he felt pressured by Trump to do the investigations into the Bidens that Trump sought. Trump himself has described the July 25 conversation he had with Zelensky in which he asked for the investigations as “perfect.” But news reports have shown that Zelensky did in fact feel pressured, and analysts have pointed out that Zelensky would risk losing crucial U.S. support were he to anger Trump by saying that he felt pressured.

Double standard for opponents: Trump claimed that written testimony from the whistleblower was unacceptable, despite the fact that he himself had only given written testimony in the Mueller investigation. Some of his supporters seem to agree and have tried to compel the whistleblower’s in-person testimony.

Partisan logic

What might be behind the similarities between Trump defenders and science deniers?

Perhaps, like science denial, all fact denial is basically the same.

All ideology supports the reflex to believe what you want to believe.

Scholars have studied the role of identity in shaping belief and concluded that sometimes even empirical beliefs can be tribal,reflecting what the other people on your team want you to believe. Adherence to a belief is not always based on evidence.

The danger, of course, is that even as new facts come in, people won’t change their minds. This is the direct opposite of good empirical reasoning.

It is the hallmark of science that beliefs should be based on evidence, and that people should be willing to change their beliefs based on new evidence. This means that people should be able to specify in advance what evidence, if it existed, would be sufficient to get them to change their minds.

But are Trump and his congressional supporters doing that?

Like science deniers, no amount of evidence seems sufficient to change their partisan beliefs that the phone call with Zelensky was proper and that Trump “did nothing wrong.”

Even when the facts are overwhelming, congressional Republicans seem, like science deniers, willing to contort their beliefs and torture their logic, to stick to the party line because that is who they are.

As Sen. Lindsey Graham recently put it, “I don’t care what anybody else says about the phone call … The phone call, I’ve made up my own mind, is fine.”

In science, such behavior means that one is eventually read out of the profession – you’re not fired, your tenure isn’t revoked, but you’re no longer taken seriously anymore.

In politics, it is not yet clear what the consequences might be.

Lee McIntyre is the author of: Post-Truth.

MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US

manafort, solomon black ledger nunes

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/19/republicans-use-impeachment-hearings-smear-ukrainian-helped-expose-manafort

nunes 11/20/19 djt had right to be concerned about ukraine, out to get him

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/30/democrat-strategist-alexandra-chalupa-goes-on-bizarre-rant-after-devin-nunes-mentions-her-during-hearing/

no lvx twt

democrat Strategist Alexandra Chalupa Goes on Bizarre Rant After Devin Nunes Mentions Her During Hearing

Alexandra ChalupaFacebook

KRISTINA WONG

30 Sep 201929

3:50

Ukrainian-American Democrat strategist Alexandra Chalupa, who sought dirt from Ukraine on Trump campaign officials during the 2016 election, went on a bizarre Twitter rant after House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) name-checked her during a recent committee hearing.

During his opening statement at a hearing last Thursday, when Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testified, Nunes drew comparisons between the Democrats’ campaign to smear Trump through Russia collusion allegations and the current allegations about Ukraine.

Nunes began:

The current hysteria has something else in common with the Russia hoax. Back then, they accused the Trump campaign of colluding with Russians when the Democrats themselves were colluding with Russians in preparing the Steele dossier. Today, they accuse the president of pressuring Ukrainians to take actions that would help himself or hurt his political opponents.

He brought up six times when Democrats pressured Ukraine to do something, including when Chalupa — while a Democratic National Committee contractor — asked Ukrainian officials for dirt on Trump campaign officials and tried to arrange for the then-Ukrainian President to comment on the Trump associates’ alleged ties to Russia:

— Joe Biden bragged that he extorted the Ukrainians into firing a prosecutor, who happened to be investigating Biden’s own son;

— Three Democrat senators wrote a letter pressuring the Ukrainian general prosecutor to reopen investigations it reportedly froze on former Trump campaign officials;

— Another Democratic senator went to Ukraine and pressured the Ukrainian President not to investigate corruption allegations involving Biden’s son;

— According to Ukrainian officials, Democratic National Committee contractor Alexandra Chalupa tried to get Ukrainian officials to provide dirt on Trump associates and tried to get the former Ukrainian President to comment publicly on their alleged ties to Russia.

— Ukrainian official Serhiy Leshchenko was a source for Nellie Ohr, wife of Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, as she worked on the anti-Trump operation conducted by Fusion GPS and funded by the Democrats.

— And of course, Democrats on this very committee negotiated with people they thought were Ukrainians in order to obtain nude pictures of Trump.

Chalupa, about an hour later, made bizarre accusations against Nunes — who exposed that the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid for the dossier used to smear Trump with allegations of Russian collusion.

Chalupa accused Nunes of “character assassination campaigns” against the U.S. intelligence community, the FBI, and witnesses. She claimed without explanation that he was “key in obstructing justice and gaslighting Americans.”

She claimed he “made public lists of American (sic) on Putin/Trump’s enemies list.”

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

• Sep 26, 2019

Few have done more to help cover up for the crimes Vladimir Putin committed against the United States than @DevinNunes.  This includes character assassination campaigns against our Intel Community, FBI, & witnesses. He’s been key in obstructing justice and gaslighting Americans.

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Days before the secretive meeting Putin and Trump held in Helsinki in July 2018, Rep Nunes, then Chairman of the House Intel Committee, made public lists of American on Putin/Trump’s enemies lists.  It was an intimidation tactic and witness tampering. It put Americans in danger.

2,135

6:36 AM - Sep 26, 2019

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705 people are talking about this

She claimed Nunes held “secretive meetings” in Montenegro in April 2017. She then said without clarifying what she meant that the “‘Ukraine collusion’ narrative is fake.”

“They’re the ones who planted it – Manafort and Giuliani. They’re worried now because they were hoping it would give them cover in the Russia probe & a pardon for Manafort. Instead they left a two year trail of collusion,” she said.

She did not clarify whether she was referring to her efforts to seek dirt from Ukraine on former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort:

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

• Sep 26, 2019

Replying to @AlexandraChalup

The media should look into the secretive meetings Rep. Nunes held in Montenegro in April 2017, including what proxies of Manafort’s or the Kremlin were there. Same month when Deripaska was worried about sanctions. Nunes has chosen protecting the Russian mafia over Americans.

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Republicans know the ‘Ukraine collusion’ narrative is fake. They’re the ones who planted it - Manafort and Giuliani. They’re worried now because they were hoping it would give them cover in the Russia probe & a pardon for Manafort. Instead they left a two year trail of collusion.

2,004

6:36 AM - Sep 26, 2019

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665 people are talking about this

She then made sweeping claims that “Republicans hate [and] smear whistleblowers” and “love foreign hostile adversaries”:

Republicans hate & smear American whistleblowers who have urgent information to protect U.S. national security.

Republicans love foreign hostile adversaries who attack America’s democracy, steal Americans’ private communications & make them public to help Republicans steal power

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Republicans hate & smear American whistleblowers who have urgent information to protect U.S. national security.

Republicans love foreign hostile adversaries who attack America’s democracy, steal Americans’ private communications & make them public to help Republicans steal power

2,028

6:59 AM - Sep 26, 2019

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746 people are talking about this

Follow Breitbart News’ @Kristina_Wong.

2020 ElectionPoliticsAlexandra ChalupaBruce OhrDemocratic National CommitteeDNCFusion GPSJoseph MaguireNellie OhrPaul ManafortRussiaRussia collusionSteele dossierUkraine

./..

aha, anti-sem is really Ur- conspiracy?

1119 about to label him crazy but then saw ingraham BS on soros not that much worse (destroy electoral college)

Congressman Steve King wrongly outs George Soros’ son as Trump whistleblower

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, wrongly identified the whistleblower who triggered…

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an wash mo 1119

no lnx

Here are 11 absurd conspiracy theories conservatives must believe in the Trump era

.

Written by Washington Monthly November 10, 2019

As Donald Trump and his conservative defenders begin to construct a conspiracy theory that Adam Schiff  personally orchestrated a massive conspiracy to entrap Trump in Ukraine, it’s worth noting just how many conspiracy theories you have to believe in just to be a standard Republican these days. Political parties in all eras have a number of questionable orthodoxies, but the sheer number of conspiracy theories that make up mainstream Republican ideology is remarkable. A quick rundown would include but not be limited to;

1. The belief that 10,000 climate scientists all around the world are either stupid, or engaged in a massive criminal conspiracy to concoct bad science in order to receive…more government grant funding. And that no other scientists are exposing it.

2. The belief that there is a giant conspiracy across all of news media to make Republicans look badand elect Democrats–in spite of continually unfair press coverage of candidates like both Bernie Sanders *and* Hillary Clinton–in exchange for…what? It’s never really clear.

3. The belief without evidence that there is a giant conspiracy across local, state and federal elections officials all across the country to engage in mass wide-scale voter impersonation fraud. Needless to say, this would be insanely complicated, incredibly risky and hugely inefficient.

4. The belief that that there is a giant conspiracy topush migrants to the border in order to change the demographics of the U.S., in order to…increase taxes and gain “control”? This is a pretty nonsensical conspiracy, but it’s among the most common. It’s no surprise that this sort of rhetoric echoes fascist antisemitic tropes, which is why George Soros is so commonly included.

5. The belief that there was a deep conspiracy to elect a man named “Barack Hussein Obama” to the presidency in order toimplement socialism in America…and that the shadowy socialist cabal picked a guy named “BarackHusseinObama” for the job. Or made up his birth certificate from scratch and decided on one of the most unlikely presidential names imaginable in his birth year.

6. The belief that the “Deep State” entrapped Trump with Russia entanglements before the 2016 in order to derail his presidency if he won, but didn’t use it to stop him from winning, but were blindsided when he won, but have stymied his every move afterward.

7. The belief that there is a giant unexposed conspiracy of 100,000s of teachers/faculty across PreK and higher education to indoctrinate young people. Rather than, you know, people not buying into garbage and bigotry once they learn something.

8. The belief that atiny group of obscenely rich industrialists are the only truthtellers, the only ones looking out for the “forgotten man”, while millions of middle class professionals and civil servants are corrupt liars. This one is particularly ironic, as it represents a twisted funhouse version of Marxist theory.

9. The belief that millions of people want to disarm them to leave them defenseless against looters, burglars and Liberal Fascism ™, rather than just want their kids not to get shot at school again and again by trigger-happy Rambo cosplayers.

10. The belief that Green Energy is a scam to give connected companies money and make coal miners homeless,rather than an effort to save millions of lives from climate change, pollution and black lung.

11. The belief that social services are an intentionally corrupt scam to keep minority groups on the “Democrat Plantation” ™, rather than a good-faith effort to make up for the predations of a brutal market in a society riddled with horrific structural racism.

It goes on and on. And that’s just the standard stuff you hear from most GOP politicians on any given day. It doesn’t even get into the really weird conspiracies that millions of Republican voters actively believe, likeQAnon, secret 5th column communists, pedophile illuminati,etc. It also doesn’t touch the dangerously errant shibboleths like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “anyone can escape poverty if they really want to” which, while not conspiracy theories, are false articles of faith with destructive consequences.

Again, it would be one thing if these beliefs were limited to the GOP base. But it’s not just the rubes. It’s the Senators and the Representatives. It’s the President and his lawyers. They all feed from the paranoid conservative infotainment trough, which has to up the ante every year in order to make the world as it really is match up somehow with false conservative ideological orthodoxy.

It’s conspiracy theory turtles all the way down. And needless to say, in a two-party system, it’s incredibly dangerous for one party to be this far gone from reality.

new

https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclairs-boris-epshteyn-fearmongers-about-undocumented-immigrants-raping

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/bill-barrs-alternate-universe-investigation-has-a-goal-right-wing-authoritarian-rule

no lnx

Bill Barr’s alternate universe ‘investigation’ has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

Written by Heather DigbyParton October 25, 2019

Students of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.

But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society,with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom)which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.

Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)

Barr is described as supremely confident in his beliefs, which is to say that his overweening arrogance is not an act put on someone who is overcompensating to hide insecurity. He believes in this theory and when it became obvious that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not long for the  job, Barr and his legal cabal appear to have seen the clueless and corrupt Donald Trump as a perfect instrument to test their theory, and perhaps set legal precedents that would enable future right-wing presidents to use the full power of the presidency to dominate American politics without regard to democratic norms or congressional checks and balances.Indeed, they had been setting the stage for such a man for decades.

It’s also obviously the case that Barr, and perhaps his Reaganite cronies as well, are suffering from the malady known as Fox News Brain Rot, the symptoms of which are an extreme susceptibility to absurd right-wing conspiracy theories and an inability to believe anything that contradicts them. (Barr once said that there was more evidence for the bogus Uranium One charges than the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which confirms the diagnosis.)

That is the toxic combination of views has the Attorney General of the United States running all over the world seeking evidence to back up a ridiculous conspiracy theory in which Ukraine, the “deep state,” the Intelligence agencies of Italy, the U.K. and Australia, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee all conspired to frame Russia and Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They call this an investigation into the “origins” of the Russia investigation, which is also being handled by the Department of Justice’s inspector general and special counsel John Durham, appointed by Barr.

Barr’s personal intervention is outside the boundaries of the normal procedures, but that is yet another example of his “unitary executive” theory: He works for the president and the president has the power to assign him to any task, including being an international man of mystery. So far, Barr appears to be coming up goose eggs with the foreign intelligence services. The Wall Street Journal reported that he is “sparking discord in several foreign capitals, going outside usual channels to seek help from allies in reviewing the origins of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation begun during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

On Thursday night the Times set the political world aflame with a report that Durham has officially opened a criminal investigation into the matter.No one is sure what basis there is for this, but reports over the past week or so suggest Durham’s team is focusing intently on the people Donald Trump often rails against in his public statements, including former FBI agent Peter Strzok and possibly high-level intelligence community personnel such as former CIA chief John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper.

The timing of the story is obviously designed to counter the very bad news coming out of the House impeachment investigation in the House on a daily basis. This isn’t surprising. We’ve been expecting that Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., would hold parallel hearings into the origins of the Russia investigation, as promised. Graham is now balking because the Senate rules would require that he allow Democratic participation. (The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released two substantial reports on the 2016 election, making clear that they came to the same conclusions as the FBI and the intelligence community regarding Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, also complicates matters for him.)

So Graham has been reduced to introducing a meaningless resolution saying that the House is being unfair, obviously hoping to appease Trump and keep his homegrown followers happy.  According to the Daily Beast, it’s not working. In fact, TrumpWorld wants Graham to call House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to testify before Graham’s Senate committee, which would be a serious violation of congressional norms. He seems reluctant for the moment, but who knows what he’ll be willing to do as time goes on?

So for the moment the task of bringing the Fox News alternate-universe conspiracy theory to the mainstream falls to Barr and Durham. They have both reportedly been to Ukraine in recent weeks, presumably searching for that elusive “DNC server” that Trump constantly babbles about.  Maybe they will manage to delight the Trump base by trying to prosecute some FBI and CIA personnel. Barr seems willing to push the boundaries beyond anything we could have imagined, so that’s not as outrageous as it sounds.

The only remedy for this is for Congress to reassert its own prerogatives and impeach the president and, if necessary, his henchmen. If they fail to hold him accountable for the vast abuse of power and corruption of his office, the precedents will be set and the “unitary executive” will become the working model for all Republican presidents, just as Barr intends. The next one will no doubt be more efficient at using it than Donald Trump.

==

mick sinks trump b/c of: ?

an 919

no lnx

Who fed Donald Trump his bogus Ukraine conspiracy theories?

Written by David Atkins / Washington Monthly September 30, 2019

One of the more bizarre elements of Donald Trump’s self-inflicted Ukraine scandal is his seemingly genuine belief that some nefarious Democratic scheme is hidden on Ukrainian computers. And one of the most important questions we should be asking is where he got that information.

First, some context: while most of attention has focused on the White House’s hamfisted attempt to gather dirt on the Biden family and its apparently widespread (and illegal) misuse of classification to hide politically damaging and legally incriminating information, there is also another sideplot: his conspiracy theory that Clinton’s missing emails, and perhaps other nefarious things, are somehow being stored on Ukrainian servers. This is a reference to what is known as the “Crowdstrike” conspiracy theory, a very fringe right-wing conspiracy theory so bizarre it barely makes it way onto onto Fox News. Rachel Sandler breaks it down at Forbes thus:

Silicon Valley-based CrowdStrike was hired in 2016 by the DNC to investigate the origins of the hack. The company didn’t give the DNC’s physical server to the FBI, which has been seized on by conspiracy theorists as evidence of a cover up.

According to the theory, which has been prominent on right-wing blogs and news websites and repeated by Trump and former campaign consultantRoger Stone, Democrats and CrowdStrike concocted evidence to frame Russia for the hack in order to discredit Trump’s win in 2016.

The supposed evidence of Russia’s innocence relies on the belief that a DNC server has been hidden in Ukraine, possibly by CrowdStrike’s cofounder Dmitri Alperovitch.

That belief may stem from a statement by President Trump in a 2017 interview with the Associated Press, in which he questioned why the FBI didn’t look at the DNC server, that CrowdStrike is owned by “a very rich Ukrainian.” Alperovitch is actually a Russian-born American citizen.

The theory is, of course, totally bogus. It’s also an attempt to absolve Russia of its culpability in the hacking of the DNC:

Ultimately, the president seems to be alluding to an idea that alt-right commentators and pro-Russia sympathizers have pushed for years: that CrowdStrike was wrong about Russia hacking the DNC—and, moreover, that CrowdStrike intentionally blamed Russia for political reasons. CrowdStrike’s findings have, of course, been repeatedly affirmed by the intelligence community, the Justice Department, members of Congress, and the office of Robert Mueller. Last year the government indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hacking plot…

These straw-grasping claims and distortions of fact are fuel for the fire of disinformation. Further, the notion that there is some missing “server,” and that the server might exist somewhere—like in Ukraine—has no basis in reality. The DNC’s network consisted of many servers and computers which either had be put out to pasture, rebooted, or rebuilt to rid them of malware and intruders. As the DNC explained in a 2018 lawsuit filed against the Russian government, it had to “decommission more than 140 servers, remove and reinstall all software, including the operating systems, for more than 180 computers, and rebuild at least 11 servers” as a result of the hacking.

The unanswered question in all this is how Donald Trump came to believe in this nonsense, and why he continues to believe it. His own employees and administration official tried again and again to disabuse him of these notions, but he refused to give them up:

President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday.

Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Mr. Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said he told the president there was no basis to the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and did so on behalf of the Democrats. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Bossert said he was “deeply disturbed” that Mr. Trump nonetheless tried to get Ukraine’s president to produce damaging information about Democrats.

Rudy Giuliani has been significantly involved in the obsession over Ukraine, as his bizarre spiels on cable news networks have amply demonstrated.Most recently he claimed to have been attempting to prove that Donald Trump (and, by extension, the Russians) was “framed by the Democrats”–a notion that Trump recently promoted on twitter.

But it seems unlikely Giuliani has been Donald Trump’s primary conspiracy theory conduit. Rather, he seems to have been roped into it by Trump, and enjoys the cable news limelight.

One might think that Trump got the information from random corners of the internet. But the problem there is that the president barely knows how to use a computer, and has to have articles printed out for him and put on his desk.

So who was feeding him these conspiracies? Why did he continue to believe them even as his own intelligence services and White House staff were attempting to disabuse him of them?

We still don’t know. But we deserve to find out.

David Atkins is a writer, activist and research professional living in Santa Barbara. He is a contributor to the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal and president of The Pollux Group, a qualitative research firm.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-conspiracy.html

How a Fringe Theory About Ukraine Took Root in the White House

President Trump has promoted a false conspiracy theory involving Democrats, an obscure security firm and the 2016 election — including on a call with the Ukrainian president that has led to an impeachment inquiry.

/The New York Times

By Scott Shane

Oct. 3, 2019

In an April 2017 interview with The Associated Press, President Trump suddenly began talking about the hack of the Democratic National Committee a year earlier, complaining that the F.B.I. had not physically examined the compromised server.

“They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based,” the president said.

“CrowdStrike?” the surprised reporter asked, referring to the California cybersecurity company that investigated how Russian government hackers had stolen and leaked Democratic emails, disrupting Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

“That’s what I heard,” Mr. Trump resumed. “I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian; that’s what I heard.”

More than two years later, Mr. Trump was still holding on to this false conspiracy theory. In his July call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, he summed it up in a sort of shorthand— at least according to the White House memorandum, labeled “not a verbatim transcript.”

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people …,” the president said. It is unclear whether the ellipses indicate that words were omitted or that Mr. Trump’s voice was trailing off.

Then he added one novel detail: “The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

Now, Mr. Trump’s call for Ukraine to look into his CrowdStrike story forms the background to the House impeachment inquiry, which is focused on the second request he made: that Mr. Zelensky investigate Mr. Trump’s possible 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Trump has placed a concoction of disprovable claims, of the kind usually found on the fringes of the web, squarely in the middle of American politics and diplomacy.

The tale of the supposedly hidden server may have appealed to Mr. Trump because it undercut a well-established fact that he has resented and resisted for three years: The Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to help him win, an effort thoroughly documented by American intelligence agencies and amply supported by public evidence.

By contrast, there is no evidence to support the president’s vague suggestion that Ukraine, not Russia, might be responsible for the hacking, or that CrowdStrike somehow connived in it. But his alternate history has provided a psychological shield for the president against facts that he believes tarnish his electoral victory.

Mr. Trump has long called for better relations with Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and brushed aside complaints about its conduct. So there is a certain symmetry to his suggestion that Ukraine, Russia’s opponent and the victim of its territorial grab, may somehow have framed Russia for the 2016 election activity.

“Ukraine is the perfect scapegoat for him, because it’s the enemy of Russia,” said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington who regularly visits Ukraine and is writing a book called “How to Lose the Information War.”

She noted that a number of Ukraine-linked stories, some of them distorted or exaggerated, have been pulled together by Mr. Trump’s supporters into a single narrative.

For example, there is the idea, promoted by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, that Ukraine’s government actively sabotaged Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. A Ukrainian-American lawyer who consulted for the D.N.C. looked into the finances of Paul Manafort and spoke with Ukrainian embassy officials. But there appears to have been no organized Ukrainian government effort to intervene — certainly nothing comparable to the activities of Russian intelligence agencies ordered by Mr. Putin.

It is true that a Ukrainian legislator helped publicize documents on Mr. Manafort’s multimillion-dollar payments from a Ukrainian political party, leading to his resignation as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman. But the claim of Mr. Manafort’s wrongdoing turned out to be justified. He is now serving seven and a half years in prison for financial fraud and other crimes.

In May, Mr. Trump recalled the American ambassador to Kiev, Marie L. Yovanovitch, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2016, telling others she was scheming against his administration. She has denied it.

And Mr. Trump has repeatedly charged that Mr. Biden, who handled Ukrainian affairs as vice president, tried to get a prosecutor fired for investigating a Ukrainian energy company that paid his son, Hunter, handsomely as a board member despite a lack of experience in Ukraine. In fact, multiple countries were pressing for the firing of the prosecutor, who they thought was turning a blind eye to corruption.

“Now it seems like all of these conspiracy theories are merging into one,” Ms. Jankowicz said. She studies disinformation, she said, but Mr. Trump produced one claim she’d never come across.

“I do this for a living, and I’d never heard anyone say the servers were in Ukraine,” she said.

Twitter removed a video posted by Mr. Trump that showed a meme of Nickelbacker’s lead singer, edited as an attack on Joe Biden.

In the 27 months between Mr. Trump’s two citations of the CrowdStrike-Ukraine conspiracy theory,it has survived despite many denials from CrowdStrike, the F.B.I. and people directly involved in the investigations. It has survived despite the fact that the D.N.C. put one of its hacked servers on display — not in Ukraine but in its Washington offices beside the filing cabinet pried open in 1972 by the Watergate burglars(and a photo of the two artifacts ran on The Times’s front page). It has survived despite the indictment prepared last year by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, laying out in extraordinary detail the actions of 12 named Russian military intelligence officers who hacked the D.N.C. and other election targets.

The speculation springs from what Mr. Trump has called a “big Dem scam”— the false notion that the F.B.I. never really investigated the D.N.C. hack. In fact, according to people directly involved, CrowdStrike was in regular contact with the bureau in spring 2016 as it examined dozens of servers used by both the D.N.C. and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

It is true, as Mr. Trump has often tweeted, that F.B.I. agents never took physical possession of the Democrats’ servers. But CrowdStrike supplied the F.B.I. with digital copies of the servers so that the bureau could assess the Russian malware infecting them. The Mueller investigation later confirmed CrowdStrike’s findings.

Still, the president has clung to the theory linking CrowdStrike, Ukraine and the D.N.C. servers despite the repeated efforts of his aides to dissuade him, Thomas Bossert, his former homeland security adviser, said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “The D.N.C. server and that conspiracy theory has got to go,” he said. “If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”

To go in search of the roots of Mr. Trump’s CrowdStrike-Ukraine conspiracy theory is to travel the internet’s most peculiar provinces and the darkest threads on Twitter and Facebook. On 4chan and pro-Trump spaces on Reddit, on websites likeZeroHedge.com and Washington’s Blog, you can find plenty of speculation about evil manipulation by CrowdStrike and secret maneuvers by Ukrainians — often inflamed by Mr. Trump’s own statements.

Until the president’s statements, however, even internet speculation did not attribute CrowdStrike’s ownership to a rich Ukrainian or suggest that the D.N.C. servers were hidden in Ukraine.

George Eliason, an American journalist who lives in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists fought Ukrainian forces, has written extensively about what he considers to be a “coup attempt” against President Trump involving American and Ukrainian intelligence agencies and CrowdStrike. He said he did not know if his writings for obscure websites might have influenced the president.

“CrowdStrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove,” he wrote in an email. “Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the U.S. to take a hardline stance against Russia? Are they using CrowdStrike to carry this out?”

Mr. Eliason and other purveyors of Ukraine conspiracies often point to the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, as the locus of the schemes. The Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk has made donations to the council and serves on its international advisory board; Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder, who was born in Russia and came to the United States as a child, is an Atlantic Council senior fellow.

That connection seems slender, but it may be the origin of Mr. Trump’s association of a wealthy Ukrainian with CrowdStrike.

Pro-Trump media leaped last week to defend the president’s Ukraine theories. Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show that Mr. Trump’s “reference to CrowdStrike, mark my words, is momentous,” though he did not say why.

And Russian state news outlets are always ready to cheer on Mr. Trump’s efforts to point the blame for the 2016 hack away from Moscow. On Sept. 25, after the White House released its memo on the Zelensky call,Russia’s Sputnik news website ran a story supporting Mr. Trump’s remarks.

The Sputnik article cited Mr. Eliason’s writingsand suggested that CrowdStrike might have framed Russia for the D.N.C. hack — if it occurred at all. It quoted a Twitter account called “The Last Refuge” declaring: “The D.N.C. servers were never hacked.”

All this mythmaking about the 2016 hack frustrates Robert Johnston, who was the lead investigator for CrowdStrike on the D.N.C. inquiry. Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and Cyber Command operator, said he could make no sense of Mr. Trump’s assertions.

“It doesn’t connect with anything in my experience,” he said. “I’d be interested in the president of Ukraine’s impression.”

Mr. Johnston, now chief executive of the cybersecurity company Adlumin, said he was weary of the conspiracies surrounding what he considered a straightforward conclusion. Having seen the digital fingerprints of Russian intelligence in earlier hacking cases, he felt there was little doubt about the identity of the perpetrators.

“I don’t know how you get to this point,” Mr. Johnston said of the fantasies Mr. Trump has promoted. “This is a story that just won’t die.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Tale of Sabotage Took Root in Oval Office.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-conspiracy.html

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/mike-adams-via-infowars-impeachment-inquiry-against-trump-part-of-plan-to-genocide-human-race

Mike Adams via Infowars: Impeachment Inquiry against Trump Part of Plan to Genocide Human Race

mike Adams, a far-right conspiracy theorist and scam artist behind a site called Natural News, warned Infowars listeners that “globalists” are orchestrating genocide against the humans, and that part of that plan is the announcement of an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. If impeachment fails, Adams says, the globalists will simply assassinate Trump.

Since Infowars was banished from nearly every social media site, viewership of the network and its lead star Alex Jones has plummeted. Jones has been ensnared in a handful of defamation lawsuits brought against him, and his network has been ratcheting its typically bizarre and nonsensical message to new levels of nihilistic weirdness.

On yesterday’s episode of Jones’ program, Adams was an in-studio guest, assisting Jones in providing commentary on a press conference at the White House with Trump and President Sauli Niinisto of Finland. But before the press conference started, Adams launched into a rant about his frustrations that humanity was “failing right now to get angry enough” about a supposed “globalist” plot to kill all humans.[cf larouche hit on aoc]

“There’s a soft kill of humanity, and there’s a soft coup of Trump right now. Both of these are going to go to the hot phase. Both of these are going to go to hard kill and hard coup. This is what’s crucial to understand. They’re happening in parallel. They are the exact same globalists—they are, and they are linked. If they destroy Trump, they also succeed in destroying humanity because Trump represents the last hope for humanity to have a free nation on this planet,” Adams said.

Jones burst in, saying, “And that’s what’s so crazy is he really is for real and then people aren’t going, ‘This is wonderful!’ They’re like, ‘No! We don’t want it!’”

“Well, right. And humanity is going to be overrun here. Humanity is going to be absolutely destroyed if we don’t turn this around and wake people up enough,”Adams said. He insisted “there should be a million people swarming Washington, D.C., peacefully and lawfully right now” to put pressure on the nation’s leaders, presumably to stop the apocalyptic plan Adams believes is taking place. Jones agreed, urging what viewers he still has to track down their elected officials and “get in their face” and intimidate them.

In an unexpected twist, Adams distorted what a NASA scientist told The Telegraph about plans for NASA and the European Space Agency to send two rovers to Mars to drill into surfaces and search for life on the planet, and used the mischaracterization to further warn about what he foresees as the coming systemic murder of the human race by elites.

“It’s going to be life on Mars, death on Earth. They are genocidally cleansing, ethnically cleansing this planet to try to kill us off while they’re going to announce, ‘The universe is filled with life, but you don’t deserve it because you’re a lowly Earthling, a lowly human,’” Adams said.

Jones replied, “Yeah, it’s obviously the big secret,” and theorized that this plan to genocide the human race is “why they’ve got Trump compartmentalized.” Jones said that the shadowy elites plotting the destruction of the world are also trying to prevent Trump from learning that cures for cancer have already been developed.

Adams said, “You can’t even say it enough. The American people think that they’re in a fight right now with Trump, trying to save Trump from this illegal treasonous coup carried out by these seditious crisis actors in the media—who are CIA puppets, by the way. This is just the beginning of the fight. If Trump survives impeachment, don’t run around and think that, ‘Victory, victory!’ No. They’re going to try to assassinate Trump. They’re going to use area-effect weapons.”

It’s worth remembering that Trump appeared as Jones’ guest on this program during his campaign for president.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/are-conspiracy-theories-really-on-the-rise-in-the-us-the-answer-might-surprise-you/

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-friends-rudy-giuliani-links-911-terrorism-venezuela

video:

On Fox & Friends, Rudy Giuliani links 9/11 terrorism to Venezuela

Giuliani: “We have to get rid of Maduro”

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/the-myth-of-eurabia-how-a-far-right-conspiracy-theory-went-mainstream

guk no lnx

The long read

The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

Once an obscure idea confined to the darker corners of the internet, the anti-Islam ideology is now visible in the everyday politics of the west. How did this happen? By Andrew Brown

Fri 16 Aug 2019 01.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 16 Aug 2019 07.48 EDT

In July 2011, a quiet European capital was shaken by a terrorist car bomb, followed by confused reports suggesting many deaths. When the first news of the murders came through, one small group of online commentators reacted immediately, even though the media had cautiously declined to identify the attackers. They knew at once what had happened – and who was to blame.

“This was inevitable,” explained one of the anonymous commenters. And it was just the beginning: “Only a matter of time before other European nations get a taste of their multicultural tolerance that they’ve been cooking for decades.”

“Europe has been infested with venomous parasitic vermin,” explained another. “Anything and everything is fine as long as they rape the natives and destroy the country, which they do,” said a third.

As the news grew worse, the group became more joyful and confident. The car bomb had been followed by reports of a mass shooting at a nearby camp for teenagers. One commenter was “almost crying of happiness” to be proved right about the dangers of Islam. “The massacre at the children’s camp,” another noted, “is a sickening reminder of just how evil and satanic the cult of Islam is.”

A couple of hours after the first reports of the bomb explosion in central Oslo, a few doubts emerged to cloud the picture: “Because the targets in the shooting were all good little leftists, won’t the shooter be played up as a rightwing extremist, whatever his actual motives?” one person asked.

When information emerged to suggest that the attacker might be a “tall Nordic guy”, one of the commenters, who called himself “Fjordman”, realised the true nature of the disaster: “Judging from some of the recent information, it must be treated as a serious possibility that this is actually some Timothy McVeigh, not a Muslim. It is too early to tell. If that is indeed the case … it would practically destroy my country, and make the working conditions for people like myself incredibly difficult for a long time to come, I’m afraid.”

The truth turned out to be worse than Fjordman feared. The massacre in Oslo had not been committed by Muslims. It was the work of a white supremacist, Anders Behring Breivik, who had detonated a bomb in Oslo, killing eight people, and then shot dead 69 others, many of them teenagers, at a youth camp run by Norway’s Labour party. And, according to the manifesto he published online, Breivik had been directly inspired by Gates of Vienna – the blog where all these comments appeared on the day of his massacre. Breivik called the ideology that justified his murders “The Vienna school”, after the blog.

Fjordman, whose real name is Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, now lives in obscurity in provincial Norway. He outed himself as the man behind the pseudonym to a Norwegian tabloid in the weeks following the massacre – butmanaged to avoid testifying at Breivik’s trial, thanks to the intervention of high-powered lawyers paid for by the Middle East Forum, a rightwing American group that would later sponsor Tommy Robinson– real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – in Britain. Nonetheless, Jensen’s influence on Breivik, however indirect, had been considerable.

Breivik borrowed part of the title of his manifesto, A European Declaration of Independence, from one of Fjordman’s blog posts, and many of the chapters in it were simply reprintings of Fjordman’s postings on various blogs, mostly Gates of Vienna, but also a far-right and passionately anti-EU site called the Brussels Journal.

Gates of Vienna was, and still is, run by Edward “Ned” May, an American computer programmer from Washington DC. It was among the first in a wave of blogs that urged the US to war after the shock of 9/11, and almost certainly the most fanatically anti-Muslim. It takes its name from the siege of Vienna in 1683, when an Ottoman Turkish army was defeated by a Polish-led one. Its essential thesis is that this was only one battle in a long war and that Europe and its civilisation are constantly threatened by a Muslim invasion.

On these varied online forums, the narrative was always the same: a liberal cabal was conspiring with hostile Muslim powers to hand over the decent working people to Islam. This was the animating myth of the bloggers, calling themselves the “counter-jihad”, who congregated at Gates of Vienna and other like-minded sites – and inspired both the violence of Breivik and the message of the racist far-right parties that have transformed European politics in the past decade.

But all of these later conspiracy theories took inspiration from a founding myth of contemporary Islamophobia: an invented plot, known as “Eurabia”, to destroy European civilisation. This is the doctrine that Jensen promoted and Breivik acted on, a hidden underpinning of a movement that has changed the world.

Once an ideology confined to the kookier corners of the internet, the idea of Eurabia is now visible in the everyday politics of the US, Australia and most of Europe: when Trump tweets about stabbings in London and falsely claims that crime in Germany is “way up”, he is invoking the Eurabian myth, taken as fact on Fox News, that European liberals have surrendered their cities to Muslim criminals.

The spread of the belief that elites conspired to push Muslim immigration on their native populations is also the story of a conspiracy theory that was nourished on some of the very first blogs and message boards, started appearing in mainstream discourse after 9/11, and thentook on a life of its own, even while the supposed facts behind it were exposed as ridiculous. It is a lesson in the danger of half-truths, which are not only more powerful than truths but often more powerful than lies.

Eurabia is a term coined in the 70s that was resurfaced byGisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband. She wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”). In a series of books, originally written in French and published from the 1990s onward, she developed a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims in exchange for oil.

The original villain of Littman’s story was General Charles de Gaulle. It is difficult for an outsider to understand how De Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazis and was probably the greatest conservative statesman in French history, could be reinvented as the man who betrayed western civilisation for money. But Littman had lived many years in France, and the French far right hated De Gaulle, and indeed tried several times to assassinate him. Not only had De Gaulle fought the Vichy government, he had also admitted defeat in the long and hideously bloody war of Algerian independence – granting an Arab Muslim country its freedom at the expense of the French-Christian settler population, who had to retreat to France (and whose descendants formed the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front).

Agreeing to Algerian independence was understood by the French far right as a betrayal. De Gaulle had been brought out of retirement and restored to power in 1958 because he was believed to be on the side of the settlers in their war, which was opposed by much of the left. And so, to the far right, the Mediterranean came to seem like the frontline in a long, shifting struggle between rival colonialisms, Christian and Muslim, in which the Muslims had won a great victory in Algeria. Where would their new advance stop?

Littman’s argument, framed by her experience in Egypt (which a French force had invaded, along with the British and Israelis, in 1956), was that Islam imposed a second-class status on all non-Muslims, whom they ruled. This status of “dhimmitude” – a coinage of Littman’s, meaning subjection to Islamic rule on pain of “forced conversion, slavery or death” – was now to be extended to Europe.

According to Littman, her books describe “Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilisation, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilisation that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.”

She saw tentacles of the great conspiracy in committees of blameless tedium and obscurity, such as the Euro-Arab Dialogue, an institution set up by the European Economic Community and the Arab League in the 70s to promote greater discussion between the regions. Her conspiracy theory was dismissed in 2006 by the Israeli historian Robert Wistrich as “the protocols of the elders of Brussels”, but what mattered more was the place he chose to challenge her ideas: a conference in Jerusalem on antisemitism to which she had been invited despite her lack of academic status. September 11 had changed everything for Littman, she told Haaretz after the conference: “In the United States, I am certain that the September 11 attacks woke people up, including the Jewish community that had previously ignored me, because it belongs more to the left.”

She explained to Haaretz the future she saw for Europe. “We are now heading towards a total change in Europe, which will be more and more Islamicised and will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world.”

This was the idea that the Norwegian Jensen was enchanted by, and which, as Fjordman, he transmitted to Anders Breivik.

Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far-right National Rally (formerly National Front) party, applauds the former US presidential adviser Steve Bannon after his speech at the party’s annual congress in March 2018.

Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far-right National Rally (formerly National Front) party, applauds the former US presidential adviser Steve Bannon (left) after his speech at the party’s annual congress in March 2018. Photograph: Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images

Jensen is unusual among Eurabia believers in that he has actually had some experience of the Muslim world and even speaks Arabic. He is the son of a socialist politician in Norway and studied Arabic in Cairo – his earlier university studies in Bergen had included English (which he writes fluently), Russian, Arabic and Middle Eastern history. In 2000, he had been interviewed by the local paper back in Norway, and spoke enthusiastically about his hosts in Egypt: “Outside the tourist areas, you meet friendly, hospitable, curious and open people who want to get to know you. I have been part of their daily lives. We’ve been invited to their homes, and talked and smoked shisha together.”

That was Jensen’s first encounter with Islam, and he was still in Cairo at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He says he saw then that there were some Muslims who celebrated the slaughter, and he also saw that this wasn’t reported in the Norwegian papers. The next year, he worked for the Norwegian Refugee Council in the disputed city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Unusually among Scandinavians who have worked with Palestinians in Israel, he identified with the Israelis. He narrowly escaped a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, at a bar where two of his colleagues had been killed in another attack the previous year. The experience cemented his growing fear and loathing of Islam.

The fact that the Norwegian press took a generally pro-Palestinian line while he and his friends had been the victims of Palestinian terrorism helped to convince Jensen that Islam was an existential threat to European civilisation which the politically correct establishment was wilfully ignoring. Like Littman, he seems not to acknowledge any element of nationalism in Palestinian consciousness: it is all either Arab or Muslim. In fact, the belief that Islam is hostile to national consciousness is quite widely held on the right: the philosopher Roger Scruton brought it up in a controversial speech on nationality in Hungary in 2013, in which he contrasted European Christian nations with Islamic empires.

In 2003, Jensen returned to Norway, where he attempted to make a name for himself as a public intellectual. At first, he was hostile to feminism, accusing feminists of destroying Norwegian manhood. But the focus of his concerns soon switched to Islam. He started writing under the pseudonym “Norwegian Kafir” on an American blog called Little Green Footballs, which loudly and fervently supported the invasion of Iraq. From then on, his writing appeared in English, on American-hosted blogs. There, he hammered into shape the narrative of elites, specially identified with the EU, who are destroying and betraying Europe by the deliberate encouragement of mass immigration.

At this point in time, the Eurabian conspiracy appealed largely to those who had long perceived a conflict between Islam and the Judeo-Christian west – with Israel as a beleaguered and persecuted outpost of western values. These people, largely on the American right, were among the earliest exponents of Eurabia – but as they never ceased to complain, theirs was not an attitude very widely shared in Europe. What would soon supply the emotional force of the fantasy was another set of ideas about global migration, less conspiratorial in their essence, but much more widely accepted among generally apolitical Europeans. These, also, originated in France, where they were known as the “great replacement”.

The idea of the great replacement had its origin in a blatantly racist French novel of the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints, in which France is overthrown by an unarmed invasion of starving, sex-crazed Indian refugees when the French army is not prepared to fire on them. The moral of the book is that western civilisation can only be saved by a willingness to slaughter poor brown people. Steve Bannon, among the founders of the rightwing news site Breitbart and a former adviser to President Trump, has referred to it repeatedly.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the naked racism of The Camp of the Saints kept it largely out of public debate. But the rise of Islam as a global force allowed the question to be recast. If the threatening masses were defined by religion rather than by skin colour, then hating them could be presented as an intellectual commitment rather than a racist one.

And the paranoid did have a large, shadowy half-truth to fall back on. The demographic shrinkage facing Europe is real and undeniable, and it was obvious in the early years of this century, too. So are the much greater birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. In 2002, Russia and Pakistan both had populations of about 145 million; by 2017, Russia’s population was 144 million while Pakistan’s was 200 million.

The next stage in the development of a xenophobic populist worldview was for the two narratives to merge, so that Islam and Muslims became both a conspiracy and a demographic threat.

The 9/11 attacks changed attitudes to Islam in much of Europe and the US. Israel and the US now shared a sense of being under attack from Muslims. Without 9/11, Littman would have remained an obscure crank, and Jensen more obscure still. But the assault on the twin towers unleashed an immense backlash of wounded American pride and nationalism that led to the devastation of two whole countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, and countless deaths. It also fuelled a demand for explanations. Theories about the unique malevolence and danger of Islam answered a popular hunger. George W Bush declared at the time that the US had no quarrel with Islam, but many of his compatriots disagreed.

One of the many bad fruits of 9/11 was the new atheist movement, a phenomenon marked by mutual self-praise and undeviating hostility to Islam. Even if the ostensible target of much of the hostility was Christianity, the new atheists tend to consider Islam far worse and more “religious” a religion. The American writer Sam Harris’s breakthrough book The End of Faith from 2004 now reads like Bat Ye’or without the inconvenient scaffolding of easily disproved facts. “We are at war with Islam,” he writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists … Armed conflict ‘in the defence of Islam’ is a religious obligation for every Muslim man ... Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”

In the run-up to the Iraq war, and after the invasion, coverage in American newspapers and on television was, to a European eye, jingoistic in the extreme. The possibility of defeat was unthinkable. Nonetheless, a new wave of bloggers began using the term “MSM” for “mainstream media” as a disparaging reference to the large media organisations’ pretended neutrality. One of the earliest and most influential of these was Little Green Footballs, founded and run by Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles-based former session guitarist with an interest in web design. It was typical of the moment that he was an opinionated amateur with no credentials, whose real advantage was that he could build websites at a time when this required some programming skill.

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Jensen, commenting on Little Green Footballs as Norwegian Kafir, made it a distribution point for Eurabian ideas. Another was Gates of Vienna itself, run by Ned May under the moniker Baron Bodissey after a sage in the sci-fi novels of Jack Vance. Then there was Jihad Watch, run by the American author Robert Spencer. Both Spencer and his frequent collaborator Pam Geller were banned from the UK in 2013 for making statements likely to foster hatred and violence between communities.

The only European blog of note in this constellation was the fanatically anti-EU site the Brussels Journal, where the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan was a contributor. The Brussels Journal was run by Paul Beliën, a far-right Belgian journalist and author. Jensen was active on all these sites, taking part in discussions in which the Eurabian beliefs gave rise to something that called itself the counter-jihad movement.

Nowadays, when Facebook effortlessly spreads disinformation around the world, it is difficult to recapture the sense of revelation, and of belonging, that once accompanied the discovery of a new blog. The cramped but, to its adherents, strangely comforting thought world of the counter-jihad blogs turned politics into a gigantic online game. Anyone could play and everyone could find in it their inner child: “Some people think I’m weird; some think I am exceptionally intelligent,” Jensen had told a reporter when he was still a student in Cairo.

The boundaries between these blogs and the “MSM” they affected to despise were porous. Some writers aimed for a high-minded tone about the dangers of Muslim immigration: the former Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell published in 2009 a book, Reflections on a Revolution in Europe, that recapitulates the idea of a slow-moving Muslim barbarian invasion from a position of Olympian disdain: “Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury and crime … Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation … If you walk north across the Piazza Della Repubblica in Turin, you see, mutatis mutandis, what the Romans saw. To the east, two well-preserved Roman towers remain, and so do the walls built to separate citizens from barbarians. Today, in the space of about 60 seconds on foot, you pass from chic shops and wine bars through a lively multiethnic market into one of Europe’s more menacing north African slums.”

Some were less highbrow. In 2004, the Daily Telegraph gave a column to the Canadian prophet of American greatness Mark Steyn, who had originally made his name as a witty critic of musical theatre. Doom and horror was all he saw in Europe’s future. As early as 2002, he said: “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark” – a remark he was still proudly quoting for Telegraph readers in 2005, when Iraq had become a slaughterhouse.

In terms that anticipated Jensen, Breivik and the alleged manifesto of the man charged with the Christchurch massacre, Steyn wrote (and the Telegraph published) this prophecy: “In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Yugoslavs figured that out. In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43% to 31% of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26% to 44%.”

‘Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’!’ reads a campaign poster in Berlin for the far-right party during this year’s European elections.

‘Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’!’ reads a campaign poster in Berlin for the far-right party during this year’s European elections. Photograph: Clemens Bilan/EPA

Compare Steyn in 2005 with the manifesto of Patrick Crusius, who confessed to murdering 22 people in El Paso earlier this month: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion ... America is rotting from the inside out, and peaceful means to stop this seem to be nearly impossible.”

In 2007, the believers in a counter-jihad began to meet up in the real world. After a preliminary meeting of bloggers, commentators and Danish and Norwegian sympathisers in Copenhagen, attended by Jensen, a conference was arranged by May and the far-right Flemish party Vlaams Belang, in Brussels in 2007. This brought together most of the ideologues of Eurabia, as they attempted to transform it from an idea into a movement. Littman was the keynote speaker. Others present were Geller and Robert Spencer from the US, and Gerard Batten, later briefly the leader of Ukip in Britain. Ted Ekeroth, of the nationalist, rightwing Sweden Democrats, also attended.

As both Ukip and the Sweden Democrats rose to become powerful political forces, anxieties about terrorism were subsumed into much wider anxieties about demography, and about status within the old order. The American anthropologist Scott Atran has carried out extensive research into the mindset of the young men who become Islamic terrorists: the combination of wounded pride with the delight of belonging to a movement which has both global, apocalyptic significance and a living presence in a friendship group is tremendously important in recruiting jihadis. The same dynamic operates among their enemies: Breivik was remarkable chiefly in that he was so solipsistic that he could radicalise himself without the aid of any friends in real life, only those he imagined on the internet. He had at one stage approached his intellectual idol, Jensen, via email, who brushed him off as “boring as a vacuum cleaner salesman”.

You do not have to be a jihadi to feel the tug of these compulsions. The counter-jihadis, just as much as their enemies, believed they were entering an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. This is a century of wounded pride and anxieties about status for almost everyone.

Despite all this, there were some signs, even before the Breivik killings, that the original Eurabian front would break up. Those who were opposed to immigrants in general began to separate from those who hated Muslims in particular. Johnson, the founder of Little Green Footballs, excommunicated most of his followers in 2010 because of their increasing closeness to parties of western Europe that he regarded as being descended from fascists – the Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the Sweden Democrats, although he also denounced the English Defence League. Johnson was a genuine philosemite, who could not forgive the taint of antisemitism.

The anti-immigrant right had good reasons for separating itself from the anti-Muslim right. If the logic of the “Vienna school” – Jensen, Spencer and Geller, May and Littman – led inexorably to civil war and the righteous slaughter of Muslims and their leftie enablers, then most of the right shrank back from it. Commenters such as Douglas Murray and Caldwell quite genuinely believed that Breivik was insane, and that his actions had no relation to the ideas that he espoused. There may in this have been an element of self-deception, but it is also a testimony to the sort of instinctive, unthinking decency we all need sometimes to rescue us from the consequences of our ideas. It seemed that some kind of pragmatism would prevail.

The hope now seems deceptive. What changed this was above all the election of the US president, Donald Trump, whose then adviser Bannon was a believer in a “brutal, bloody ... global war” against “Islamic fascism”. They showed that there was a huge constituency for racialised hatred and despair and – for them – no real negative consequences, electoral or otherwise, in pandering to it.

Since Breivik’s massacre, his own beliefs have only become more widespread. They have spread into the politics of all European countries. In the campaign for the European elections this May, the German far-right party AfD ran posters showing a naked white woman being pawed by dark-skinned men in Arab headgear. One had stuck his fingers in her unresisting mouth. “Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’,” said the caption. Millions of people who have never heard of Bat Ye’or, of Fjordman, or even of Breivik and Bannon, now understand that poster at a glance, and no amount of evidence will shake their certainty. They now believe all politics comes down to the words of one of Trump’s more recent tweets: “The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them … Be strong & prosper, be weak & die!”

But who, in this situation, are the losers, and who are the strong? Last week, in an apparent attempt to emulate Breivik, a rich, disaffected young Norwegian, Philip Manshaus, shot his way through the entrance gates to a mosque in the upmarket suburb of Oslo where he lived and started firing at the congregation. He was wrestled to the ground by an unarmed 65-year-old Muslim, Mohammed Rafiq, who then held him down, with the help of another man, until the police arrived. On the Gates of Vienna blog, this episode was not deemed worthy of mention. Instead, its devoted readers were told that Muslims had been responsible for a recent outbreak of animal cruelty in Sweden.

•Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/spider-man-far-from-home-is-a-rumination-on-fake-news/

...

Surprisingly enough, one of the first films to seriously engage with this reality is the latest offering of the Marvel superhero franchise, Spider-Man: Far From Home. Featuring Tom Holland’s playful, web-slinging hero on a school trip to Europe, the film’s initial conflict is set as typical space-drama Marvel fare: Earth is under attack from “Elementals,” an invading class of giant monsters from a parallel universe, which can be thwarted with the help of superhero Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio, who inadvertently came to our world with the monsters.

While Spider-Man and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury buy this preposterous story, it is later discovered to be a ruse. The Elementals and their violent attacks are actually the carefully choreographed products of Beck and his colleagues, all disgruntled ex-employees of the late Tony Stark’s weapons manufacturer. Beck’s superpowers and the Elementals are merely sophisticated 3D projections, but the damage they cause is real, thanks to an army of invisible drones. Beck and company’s goal is simple: to “save” the world from their own attacks, so they may finally bask in the hero status denied to them when Stark misused their creations.

Far From Homeis not exactly subtle about its real-world implications. Like the premise of Homecoming—where a resentful blue-collar contractor, played by Michael Keaton, becomes the super-villain Vulture—it feels a tad ripped from the headlines, with the use of the phrase “fake news” eliciting chuckles from the Brooklyn audience I watched it with. Nevertheless, Far From Homeis one of the few mass-market films to seriously engage with how demagogues can employ false military conflicts to their own advantage.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/qanon-conspiracists-appear-at-trump-rally-only-hours-after-fbi-warning-on-far-right-conspiracy-group/

no lnx ah

Far-right proponents of the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory — which claims that an alliance of Hollywood actors and Washington, D.C. politicians, among others, have been engaging in an international child sex ring —are not only unhinged; they are also potentially dangerous, according to the FBI. And this week, the Washington Post reports, some QAnon proponents turned up at a rally for President Donald Trump on the same day the FBI issued a bulletin warning that the group could be dangerous.

According to the bulletin, proponents of QAnon as well as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory have the potential for violence. In 2016, Pizzagate proponents claimed that Democrats were using a Washington, D.C. pizzeria for child sex abuse.

The bulletin reads, “The FBI assesses theseconspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts.And it goes on to say thatreports “of a sudden rise in threats and unfounded accusations against a given individual or business may indicate impending conspiracy theory-driven crime or violence.”

On Thursday at a Trump rally in Cincinnati, according to the Post, a supporter named Brandon Straka used a QAnon slogan: “where we go one, we go all.” And other QAnon proponents were seen at the rally as well.

In the cultish QAnon community, Trump is held in high regard: QAnon theorists believe his presidency is meant to help carry out a worldwide battle against a child sex ring — and Q is an anonymous figure who sends sporadic messages on the battle.

==

==

aha "agenda" means  secret (long term) plan to do evil, get control tyranny that takes our freedom sovereignty liberty etc thus conspiracy theory

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/facebook-algorithm-changes-suppressed-journalism-and-meddled-with-democracy/

no lnx many graf

Facebook algorithm changes suppressed journalism and meddled with democracy

July 24, 2019 7.07am EDT

Jennifer Grygiel

Assistant Professor of Communications (Social Media) & Magazine, News and Digital Journalism, Syracuse University

[Disclosure statement

Jennifer Grygiel owns a small number of shares in the following social media companies: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Alibaba, LinkedIn, YY and Snap. Grygiel also owns nominal amounts of the following cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum.]

Facebook’s News Feed algorithm determines what users see on its platform – from funny memes to comments from friends. The company regularly updates this algorithm, which can dramatically change what information people consume.

As the 2020 election approaches, there is much public concern that what was dubbed “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential election could happen again. But what’s not getting enough attention is the role Facebook’s algorithm changes play, intentionally or not, in that kind of meddling.

A key counterpoint to the Russian misinformation campaign was factual journalism from reputable sources – which reached many of their readers on Facebook and other social media platforms. As a social media researcher and educator, I see evidence that changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm suppressed users’ access to credible journalism in the run-up to Trump’s election.

Political operatives know Facebook serves as a gatekeeper of the information diets of more than 200 million Americans and 2 billion users worldwide. Actions and abuse by others on the platforms have generated much concern and public discussion, including about how much disinformation and propaganda Americans saw before the election. What has not been talked about enough is the effect that Facebook’s algorithmic shifts have had on access to news and democracy.

Changing the system

In mid-2015, Facebook introduced a major algorithm change that pivoted readers away from journalism and news, to deliver more updates from their friends and family. The change was couched in friendly language suggesting Facebook was trying to make sure users  didn’t miss stories from friends. But social media data shows that one effect of the change was to reduce the number of interactions Facebook users had with credible journalism outlets.

A few months before the 2016 election, an even bigger algorithm change toward friends and family posts took a second toll on publisher traffic. A wide range of news publishers found that their content was significantly less visible to Facebook users.

Examining the numbers

In my research, I looked at Facebook engagement for mainstream news outlets surrounding the 2016 election. My findings support others’ conclusions that Facebook’s algorithm greatly suppressed public engagement with these publishers.

Data from CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring company, shows that Facebook traffic dropped noticeably at CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, The New York Times and The Washington Post after the company updated its algorithms to favor friends and family in June 2016.

That proves the algorithm worked the way it was designed to work, but I am concerned that major U.S. publishers were suppressed in this way. Voter interest in the presidential election was higher in 2016 than in the previous two decades, and misinformation was rampant. Facebook’s changes meant that key news organizations across the political spectrum had a harder time getting the word out about credible election news and reporting.

Alarm bells

Facebook was aware of concerns about its algorithm even before the election happened. One of Facebook’s own engineers flagged these potential effects of Facebook’s algorithm changes in July 2015. Three months later, Zuckerberg’s mentor, Roger McNamee, also attempted to alert Zuckerberg and Facebook executives that the platform was being used to manipulate information about the election.

Just after the election, reporter Craig Silverman’s research at BuzzFeed showed that fake election news had outperformed “real news.” In late 2018, Facebook’s own company statement revealed issues with how its algorithm rewarded “borderline content” that was sensational and provocative, like much of the hyperpartisan news that trended in advance of the election.

More recent research by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center shows that Facebook traffic continued to decrease significantly for publishers after a further Facebook algorithm change in January 2018.

Prof. Grygiel calls for algorithmic transparency on MSNBC.

Algorithmic transparency

To date, research on how Facebook’s algorithm works has been limited by the lack of access to its proprietary inner workings. It’s not enough to investigate the effects of the changes in Facebook’s News Feed. I believe it’s important to understand why they happened, too, and consider Facebook’s business decisions more directly and how they affect democracy.

Recent insight into the company’s internal processes suggest that Facebook is beginning to understand its power. In July 2019, Bloomberg News revealed that the company haddeployed software on its own platform to look out for posts that portrayed Facebook itself in potentially misleading ways, reducing their visibility to safeguard the company’s reputation.

Some international legal scholars have begun to call for laws to protect democracies against the possibility that algorithmic manipulation could deliver electoral gain. There’s no proof that Facebook’s changes had political intentions, but it’s not hard to imagine that the company could tweak its algorithms in the future, if it wanted to.

To guard against that potential, new laws could bar changes to the algorithm in the run-up periods before elections. In the financial industry, for instance, “quiet periods” in advance of major corporate announcements seek to prevent marketing and public-relations efforts from artificially influencing stock prices.

Similar protections for algorithms against corporate manipulation could help ensure that politically active, power-seeking Facebook executives – or any other company with significant control over users’ access to information – can’t use their systems to shape public opinion or voting behavior.

tags: Facebook

Google

Mark Zuckerberg

2016 US Presidential Election

Peter Thiel

2020 US Presidential Election

Social media and democracy

Algorithm transparency

==

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/when-right-wing-fake-news-gets-someone-killed/

no lnx

Martin Longman / Washington Monthly July 23, 2019

In March 2019, when I heard the head of the Gambino crime family, Frank Cali, had been gunned down in his front yard on Staten Island, I assumed that we were entering into another power struggle between New York’s five families. Little did I know that the murderer was not a gun-for-hire, but a Trump-supporting lunatic who had become so deluded by the QAnon deep-state conspiracy theory that he decided to attempt a citizen’s arrest. Or, at least, that’s what the shooter’s lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb, wants us to believe.

On the evening of March 13, twenty-four year old Anthony Camello arrived alone at Mr. Cali’s home in Todt Hill, Gottlieb says, believing that he could lure the mob boss out of his home, place him in handcuffs, and bring him to the police station. Only the first part of his scheme worked out as planned.

Apparently, Camello rammed his pickup truck into Mr. Cali’s Cadillac, which was parked outside his home. When Mr. Cali came out of his house to see what the hell was going on, there was some kind of confrontation, most of which was captured in grainy surveillance footage. I’m not sure how well that video evidence lines up with what Gottlieb is saying, but here goes:

“He ardently believed that Francesco Cali, a boss in the Gambino crime family, was a prominent member of the deep state, and, accordingly, an appropriate target for a citizen’s arrest,” wrote Mr. Comello’s lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb…

…Mr. Comello had become convinced that Mr. Cali was part of the so-called deep state, a cabal of criminals that conspiracy theorists claim controls the United States government. Mr. Comello also believed he was a chosen vigilante of President Trump.

“Mr. Comello became certain that he was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself, and that he had the president’s full support,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote.

There had been early speculation after Comello’s arrest that he was romantically interested in one of Mr. Cali’s relatives, but Mr. Gottlieb doesn’t mention anything along those lines. Instead, he says that his client just went down a QAnon rabbit hole.

That delusion will be part of a package of evidence that Mr. Gottlieb says he plans to submit to the court that prove Mr. Comello is not guilty by reason of mental defect. Mr. Gottlieb is seeking to have the court place Mr. Comello in psychiatric treatment, rather than prosecute him on murder charges. Mr. Comello is being held in protective custody as he awaits trial.

Now, here’s a description of what actually happened:

But [the video] shows the suspect’s truck apparently deliberately hitting the vehicle — perhaps to get Cali to come out of his home. The two shake hands, the license plate from the suspect’s vehicle falls off, the suspect picks up the license, hands it to Cali, then pulls a gun and shoots as Cali puts the license in his own car, according to the source.

Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said Thursday that 12 shots were fired, with at least six striking Cali.

Shea said Cali tried to use his car as a shield to protect himself during the shooting.

“Mr. Cali was struck several times by gunfire. In trying to elude additional gunfire, [he] fled to the rear area of his private vehicle,” he said at a press conference.

And here is what Gottlieb apparently plans to say happened when his client appears in court:

Mr. Comello took handcuffs with him to Todt Hill on March 13, Mr. Gottlieb said, but his plan was foiled when Mr. Cali refused to submit to a citizen’s arrest. Instead, Mr. Gottlieb said, the Gambino leader reached toward his waistband. Fearing for his life, Mr. Comello shot Mr. Cali 10 times and fled, Mr. Gottlieb said.

Comello was arrested three days later in nearby Brick, New Jersey.

At Mr. Comello’s first court appearance in March, he displayed symbols and phrases associated with QAnon scrawled on his hand in pen. He first began to take an interest in political conspiracy theories, Mr. Gottlieb said, in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s 2016 election.

“Mr. Comello’s support for ‘QAnon’ went beyond mere participation in a radical political organization,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote. “It evolved into a delusional obsession.”

Prior to murdering Mr. Cali, Comello reportedly attempted two separate times to effect a citizen’s arrest of New York City mayor and now presidential candidate Bill de Blasio. He also tried to convince the U.S. marshals at the Federal District Court in Manhattan to help him arrest Democratic congressional members Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff,whom he believed were in Manhattan at the time.

Now, I don’t know if the video footage will support Gottlieb’s assertion that Mr. Cali reached for his waistband and that Mr. Comello therefore feared for his life. But if he wants to try to convince a jury that Mr. Comello is not guilty by reason of mental defect, the fact that he decided to deliberately ram a mob boss’s Cadillac seems like all the evidence he needs to prove that his client is out of his mind. The QAnon stuff is superfluous.

On the other hand, someone was very nearly killed as a result of the similar Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In both cases, a supposed pedophilia ring was involved. In both cases, the suspect believed themself to be the hero who would set things right. Edgar Maddison Welch showed up at a Chevy Chase, Maryland pizza parlor armed with an AR-15 and fired three shots, striking the restaurant’s walls, a desk, and a door. Apparently, he stopped when he realized there was no evidence that any pedophilia was occurring on the premises.

After his arrest, [Welch] told police that he had made the 350-mile drive up to the capital to investigate claims regarding a conspiracy theory, circulating online, that quickly came to be called “Pizzagate.”

According to this outlandish set of claims, leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, contained coded signs and messages revealing that Comet Ping Pong was actually a front for an occult, child sex slave ring involving the owner of the restaurant, James Alefantis, Podesta, and Clinton herself.

Of course, there has been a real pedophilia ring surrounding Donald Trump’s good friend Jeffrey Epstein. But talking about that doesn’t exactly serve right-wing interests. They got their claws into both Mr. Welch and Mr. Comello. Both of them were absolutely marinating in right-wing conspiracies about the Clintons and Nancy Pelosi. Comello saw Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters as criminals because they were critical of the president, and he was convinced the president would support him, his lawyer says, if he arrested them and Bill de Blasio and the head of the Gambino crime family.

There are lot more people out there who are convinced by this stuff than are willing to bring a gun somewhere to try to address the supposed problem. The president claims that a lot of real news is actually fake, but he doesn’t talk about the genuinely fake news that benefits him and gets other people killed.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-donald-trump-era-requires-a-new-theory-of-conspiracy-theories/

Drutman

Richard Nixon may have had his enemies list, but no president has ever publicly embraced conspiracy theories quite like Donald Trump. From claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States to insisting that millions of people voted illegally in 2016, Trump’s rise and presidency have been filled with vague, false accusations targeting his enemies. When one drops, another follows. Trump only gave up on birtherism during the presidential campaign by preposterously declaring that it was his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, who had first raised doubts about Obama’s origins.

Trump’s taste for the conspiratorial might be a source of idle curiosity were he not the president of the United States. But he also might not be the president of the United States if his style of rambling insinuation and intimidation didn’t resonate with many voters. More than two-thirds of Republicans have consistently expressed doubts about Obama’s citizenship, making Trump’s birtherism an early campaign asset. Trump leaped to the top of primary polls on the strength of an announcement speech filled with baseless assertions, including the claim that Mexicans were sending “rapists” across the border. And now that he is president, his style is spreading, taking on a self-reinforcing logic.[LOIO ?!] ...new book by political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum offers timely and insightful answers to these questions. They call this practice “the new conspiracism.” And in their book, A Lot of People Are Saying, they explain why this nihilistic form of political discourse is so hazardous.

Conspiracist thinkers have long claimed special knowledge about the secret workings of the world and its hidden levers of power. But the new conspiracism is, Muirhead and Rosenblum write, “something different.” If classic conspiracism is corkboards overloaded with index cards and string, the new conspiracism is messy spaghetti tossed angrily and performatively against the wall, sauce and all. It is Alex Jones claiming that the parents of Sandy Hook victims were “crisis actors.” It is William Barr saying that he thought the FBI spied on the Trump campaign. Unlike the conspiracism of the Progressives, who saw corruption everywhere, these assertions are not ideologically coherent. They don’t hint at remedies. The goal is simply to make a hash of things by casting doubt on the motives and workings of one’s opponents, undermining the foundations of compromise.

This, Muirhead and Rosenblum worry, “makes democracy unworkable.” Democracy, after all, requires a degree of shared understanding and the potential for legitimate agreement. It requires faith in the ability of knowledge-producing institutions to generate basic facts, and for politicians and political parties to argue over which facts are most important and what to do in response to them. The new conspiracism takes a hammer to these possibilities. It sets out to sabotage government agencies, universities, political parties, and other key institutions, leaving only authoritarian demagogues to impose their own reality on the wreckage.

Trump, for example, sought to delegitimize an unfavorable court ruling by pointing out that the judge had Mexican ancestry and was therefore presumptively untrustworthy. He chalks failures up to a bureaucratic deep state determined to sabotage him. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” he once told a Kansas City crowd.

This has a self-reinforcing logic. If government agencies are made to seem illegitimate, for example, morale falls. Good people leave. Government agencies perform worse, thereby justifying the criticism. The cycle feeds on itself.

Over time, people acclimate themselves to the disorienting feeling that everybody in power is lying to them, and nothing can ever be believed—what historian Robert Jay Lifton calls “malignant normality.” The disappearance of common sense (in the most literal meaning: widely shared understanding) means that collective political action is, as Muirhead and Rosenblum write, “closed down by disorientation.” Adding to the danger is that, like many slow-moving processes, this one is hard to detect, because we adjust. The new conspiracism “hollows out our democratic institutions little by little, day by day.”

Muirhead and Rosenblum offer two main explanations for the new conspiracism’s emergence: technology and tribalism. Technology has cast aside traditional knowledge gatekeepers, like newspaper editors and television news producers. Things used to be “true” because they came from trusted news sources. Today, they become “true enough” through sheer repetition—because a lot of people are saying it. You see enough people in your social media network sharing stories about Pope Francis endorsing Trump (to pick just one prominent example), and of course it must be true. (It was not.) Retweets and Facebook shares have replaced editors as validators and judges of newsworthiness.

Us-versus-them tribal politics contributes to the problem by obviating the need for verification. If “we” believe that “they” are evil, then bare assertion is all the proof that is needed: My opponents are bad people. Of course they’re out to get me.In the world of highly polarized politics, we already know we’re right. Who needs more evidence?

Muirhead and Rosenblum are keen to the asymmetries of the new style. Though the new conspiracism isn’t inherently a partisan project, it isfar more aligned with the antigovernment agenda of the Republican Party.Most government programs are actually quite popular. But by tearing down faith in government through nihilistic attacks, antigovernment elites can win the support of voters who might otherwise be turned off by an agenda that includes cutting social safety programs.

Antigovernment activism helps explain why the new conspiracism is most evident in the United States. The Republican Party is an outlier among major right parties in advanced democracies, which have all accepted broader government involvement in the economy and the modern social welfare state in some form. No other major right party wants to return to its country’s pre-1932 approach to economic policy.

American two-party polarization is also relatively unique, and this binary lights up ancient and emotionally charged friend-versus-foe switches in our brains, shutting down reason. Comparative studies of “affective polarization” (how we feel about other partisans) find that cross-partisan hostility is highest in the U.S., precisely because our elections pose a simple us-or-them choice. In other countries, where the presence of more viable parties keeps politics from collapsing into a long-standing, one-dimensional political conflict, partisans tend to be less hostile to each other. [altho in recent elections EU centrists got hollowed out by far rt and left?] ot of People Are Saying is a tremendous contribution because it identifies and names a new style of political discourse and clarifies the danger it poses. Yet, as is common with many scholarly books that bring great insight into describing problems, the solution section falls flat.

For example, Muirhead and Rosenblum argue that political leaders should be “speaking truth to conspiracism . . . even if it means electoral defeat.” This is fine advice on paper. But it is hard to heed, since reelection is the primary incentive guiding most politicians. There is a reason that most elected Republicans, despite their original opposition, are far more likely to cheerlead and defend Trump than criticize him.

In making their peace with Trump,[gop]  they’ve updated their mental models. Trump may not be perfect, but the Democrats are the real danger. And at least Trump is supporting the right policies, even if his behavior is reckless. And besides, if I challenge him, I’ll lose, and be replaced by somebody else who’s even less likely to control his excesses. The human mind is capable of remarkable gymnastics in the art of self-preservation and self-justification.This is the same underlying partisan polarization that powers the new conspiracist mind-set in the first place. In a two-party political system with distinct, sorted parties, dissenting voices have no place for representation. Once they dissent, they are quickly out of power, where far fewer people listen to their speeches.

Perhaps, then, one way out of the destructive political binary that helps power the new conspiracism is to support electoral reforms that would create a system of proportional representation, enabling multiparty democracy. In such a system, Never Trump conservatives might have formed a party that could win political offices, fighting back against the new conspiracist mind-set from a place of power.

Reforming our electoral system is a tall task. But it may be vital. As Muirhead and Rosenblum show, our current political discourse existentially threatens American democracy. At a time when so much attention focuses on Trump’s formal abuses of power, A Lot of People Are Saying shines an illuminating spotlight on the even more destructive power of his words, and the wild eddies of unreason they unleash.

Unfortunately, tearing down is far easier than building back up. Whether American democracy can contain and marginalize this new conspiracism remains to be seen. But we are running out of time. The more it grows, the harder it becomes to stop.

==

journalist Anna Merlan explains in her new book, “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power,

Republic of Lies book started w/ cruise

https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-june-27-2019/

==

an hnn

Moon landings’ Nazi problem

History News NetworkJune 24, 2019

Somewhere in the scarier reaches of the internet, a conspiracy theory circulates that the Nazis landed on the moon in 1942. Maybe you’ve never heard that 27 years before Apollo…

==

an

Apparently a little thing like starting, then pausing, a war, and leaving half the nation’s military swirling around the Persian Gulf in confusion, isn’t enough of a distraction for Donald Trump’s morning. He took time away from his detailed military planning to take to Twitter and plop down  a brand new the-media-is-out-to-get-me conspiracy theory.

According to Trump, The New York Times was “feeding false stories about me, and those associated with me, to the FBI.” Trump then says that this shows how the Times had “unprecedented hatred” toward him. In follow-up tweets, Trump even blames the Timesfor initiating the Russia investigation. hat’s actually behind this enormous media and FBI conspiracy that’s so important Trump took time out from starting a war to whine about it? Just this—A New York Timesreporter called the FBI and asked for confirmationon a story they were already working on concerning Jared Kushner. And when the Times ran the story three days later, it mentioned that it had called the FBI for that confirmation.

But now right wing media sources have apparently obtained the email asking the FBI to confirm the story. Which, like the word “insurance” in a tweet is being ripped into pieces and turned into “proof” that the media was feeding stories to the FBI to initiate investigations. Which is wasn’t. But confirmation starts with a ‘c’ and conspiracy starts with a ‘c’ so … how much proof do you need?

And now, back to your already scheduled war-related chaos.

==

mma tag 619 grab

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/conspiracy-theories/

• MAY 31, 2019 11:28 AM

Here’s Who Fox News Considers ‘Prominent’ Conservative Voices

• MAY 21, 2019 2:58 PM

Snopes Puts Kelly Kullberg at Center of Anti-Muslim, Pro-Trump, Conspiracy-Promoting Network

• MAY 17, 2019 12:15 PM

Trump-Approved Conspiracy Kook Says Military Sprays Chemicals in the Sky to Sow Societal Chaos

• APRIL 12, 2019 10:37 AM

TPUSA Shares Photo with Visual Nod to ‘White Genocide’ Conspiracy Theory

• MARCH 25, 2019 4:26 PM

Fox News White House Correspondent Inflames QAnon

• MARCH 19, 2019 1:27 PM

Man Accused of Murdering a Mob Boss Was Interested in QAnon

• MARCH 13, 2019 2:21 PM

Jacob Wohl is in the Hot Seat (Again)

• MARCH 4, 2019 6:17 PM

CPAC Unable to Separate Itself From the Right’s Formerly Fringe Elements

• FEBRUARY 25, 2019 12:41 PM

Pennsylvania GOP Candidate Shared ‘Pizzagate’ Post

• FEBRUARY 12, 2019 5:09 PM

Owen Benjamin: Another ‘Red Pill’ Overdose Victim

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/this-is-what-happens-when-conspiracy-theories-go-mainstream/

Conspiracy theories can seem so absurd they’re almost funny: major politicians are actually 12-foot lizard people, the U.S. government was responsible for 9/11, the fluoride in our drinking water is there not to strengthen our teeth, but to control our minds. It’s easy to dismiss such ideas as nonsense.

Sometimes, however, theories escape the confines of online message boards and social media and turn dangerous, even fatal. No one laughed when a man named Edgar Welch drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., and fired shots at innocent people in a pizzeria because he was a “believer in Pizzagate,” a theory spread by people like right-wing radio show host Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton and her close advisers ran a pedophilia ring out of the pizzeria’s basement. There also was no laughter when James Alex Fields drove his car into a crowd at a 2017 white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Va., killing anti-racist protester Heather Heyer As journalist Anna Merlan explains in her new book, “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power,” “While conspiracy theories are as old as the country itself, there is something new at work: people who peddle lies and half-truths have come to prominence, fame, and power as never before,” thanks to the Trump administration’s outward embrace of some of their biggest boosters.

As a reporter for Jezebel and Gizmodo, Merlan covered various conspiracy theories, including those held by white nationalists, UFO enthusiasts and anti-vaccine advocates. After one story, for which she attended a conspiracy-themed cruise aptly called “The Conspira-Sea,” Merlan writes, “I tried to forget about it. I had done a kooky trip on a boat, the kind of stunt journalism project every features writer loves, and it was over. Conspiracy theorists, after all, were a side show.”

Ater the 2016 elections, however, such theories went from cultural sideshow to political main event. People like Michael Flynn, who spread Pizzagate theories on social media, was briefly the national security advisor and had the ear of President Trump, for example.

“Republic of Lies” is an illuminating, occasionally scary book that explains conspiracy theories, how they spread, their history in the United States, and what, if anything, can be done to  prevent them. Truthdig spoke to Merlan by phone to learn more.

Ilana Novick:Your book starts with a story about attending “The Conspira-Sea,” a conspiracy-themed cruise featuring UFO experts, Sandy Hook “truthers” [people who believe that the 2012 mass shooting never happened], and anti-vaccine advocates, among other groups. What made you decide to go from one story about a cruise to a whole book about conspiracy theories?

Anna Merlan: The impetus was Trump’s election. When I went on the cruise, it was very much with the understanding that Trump was sort of reviving a lot of interesting conspiracy theories and a lot of energy in conspiracy communities, because they thought that he was going to break open all these dirty secrets and dark schemes. I had also written about the ways that he was generating a lot of excitement among white supremacists, and so I was thinking about what all those communities were going to do when he lost, and then he didn’t. It seemed like a valuable time to really consider what I did and didn’t know about this country, and also the ways that these communities that I had thought of as fringe were taking a more central role in our politics and our culture.

IN:You focus on multiple groups and their conspiracies, ranging from white supremacy to UFOs to Pizzagate. How did you decide which groups to profile, and why?

AM: I really wanted to do a survey, first of all. I didn’t want to focus narrowly on one conspiracy community, because I was aware of the diversity of views in that world. I also felt like all of these groups had something to teach us about the way that the history of secrecy in politics and government, and the history of inequality in America, are reflected in conspiracy communities. The only group I would say that I didn’t really spend any time with—well, there are two groups: climate change skeptics, which I wish I had done more with, and flat-earthers, which I didn’t, because I didn’t feel like I had a lot to learn about flat-earthers. Maybe I was wrong.

IN: In the book, you cite academic studies of conspiracy theorists and theories that found people who were disadvantaged—economically, socially, culturally—were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Now, it seems, they’ve reached the highest, most privileged levels of society, with even the president and members of his administration claiming they are victims of witch hunts and cover-ups. Why do you think that shifted?

AM: I think that one thing we know generally is that people who are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories believe themselves to be under threat. For some people, like black Americans, that threat is more real, and for others, like white supremacists, for instance, who believe that they are at risk of being invaded and put under Sharia law, that threat is not real. But certainly the sense of personal and economic and social instability is a predictor of believing in conspiracy theories. It’s interesting—the ways that even a belief that is not rational, like the idea that the government is going to break into your home and take your guns, does predispose you to believing in conspiracy theories.

IN:From the Pizzagate group that believes that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta have a pedophilia ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza place, to the UFO truthers who discuss sexual abuse at the hands of aliens, it seems that child abuse, and pedophilia in particular, is at the heart of some of these theories. Why do people get so obsessed with the idea of children being hurt as part of conspiracy theories?

AM: The oldest conspiracy theory about child abuse is the blood libel, which is the conspiracy theory that Jews were kidnapping and murdering Christian children to use their blood in matzo. The blood libel has been incredibly durable as a conspiracy theory. You hear it being repeated in literal form all over the world. You also see what I would argue are extensions of it, like the satanic panic and Pizzagate, which are both predicated on this idea of a powerful group of evildoers meeting in secret. I think some of it is that, in America, the suspicion of ritualistic abuse is never far away. I think it has something to do with the religious roots of this country. We tend to believe in a powerful, evil, satanic group of evildoers, and see that as literally possible.The other thing that I would argue is that if you believe that your ideological enemies are hurting children, there’s nothing that isn’t justified against them. I came to see that particular conspiracy theory as sort of a rhetorical justification for violence, because nothing is worse than hurting children, and nothing is not excusable if you are trying to prevent a child injury. If you’re trying to up the rhetorical stakes, that is a logical place to go.

IN: Is that true even for people like Alex Jones, who promotes a crisis-actor theory—the idea that the school shooting at Sandy Hook never happened, or was a false flag designed to clear the way for the government to take people’s guns and attacks parents whose children died and survivors of that shooting?

AM: I think that he and other people who have promoted the crisis-actor conspiracy theory would argue that what they’re doing is important for nothing less than the fate of humanity. They are justified in attacking people who look like grieving parents, but who they would argue are not. The other thing, of course, is that with the crisis-actor conspiracy theory folks—Alex Jones and others—they’re trying to claim this gigantic conspiracy theory to stage mass shootings, and of course they can’t find the actual culprits because they don’t exist. The only people who are visible to them are the parents, are the survivors of these people who have died. It is both ghoulish and not surprising that they tend to fixate and fasten on those people, because they are the only people who are real people. They have never successfully made a case for who in government, for instance, is staging false flags. They obviously can’t call for any kind of drastic action against those people.

IN:You write that throughout its history, the United States has spied on civil rights leaders, performed sometimes dangerous medical experiments on unwilling participants, and otherwise abused its power, often trying to cover it up. Given that history, does the United States government bear any responsibility for the spread of many of the ideas you discuss?

AM: There are so many conspiracy theories that are based in a somewhat contorted but basically reasonable historical understanding of what the American government has done. There are a ton of medical conspiracy theories that really do refer back to a history of sometimes secret medical experimentation on unwitting, socially disadvantaged people, like inmates and children in state care. And there are a lot of conspiracy theories, even conspiracy theories about things like false flags, that do refer back to actual action by the American government and other world governments. So arguably, the thing that the U.S. government could do better to prevent the spread of conspiracy theories would be to be a more just and transparent government to begin with. That would have been great, but at this point, some of the sort of conspiratorial nature of the U.S. is almost like a form of generational trauma—that so many things that seem outlandish had been proven to be real over the course of American history that there is almost this permanent, unfixable sense of distrust and suspicion.

IN:I remember early coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign seemed almost like a joke. This was despite the fact that he opened his campaign calling Mexican immigrants rapists, and promising a Muslim ban. Many people found him funny. Even as measles rates were trickling up, I remember some pundits brushing off anti-vaxxers simply because celebrities like actress and former co-host of “The View” Jenny McCarthy were promoting the theory that vaccines are dangerous. Does our mockery lead us to ignore the true danger behind these groups?

AM: Yeah, I think historically we have downplayed the role of conspiracy theories in American politics. And as you’re pointing out, when we do discuss them, a lot of times there’s a lot of mockery. There’s so many jokes about conspiracy theorists, including the sort of prototypical one, which is that they all wear tinfoil hats, right? And so it can make it really hard to assess when they are becoming genuinely influential or important. Because we know that they do tend to wax and wane in strength and importance throughout American history. And it’s an interesting balancing act, too. And it’s one thing that a lot of journalists who cover this stuff grapple with—how do you write about these things without either giving them more prominence or pretending they have any legitimacy, but also while genuinely trying to understand their importance and the sort of effects that they have? I think it’s really, really hard to assess. Something like QAnon I never thought would have become as large as it is.

IN: Can you talk a little bit about what QAnon is?

AM: QAnon is essentially an internet-based conspiracy theory that is focused on the idea that there is a secret, high-level Trump operative who is leaving clues about a future mass arrest of Trump’s opponents or some gigantic consequential action that Trump is about to take. And so this person calling themselves Q appeared on 4chan and started leaving these clues, which they called “crumbs.” And it became a really popular conspiracy theory among people who like the idea that Trump was doing a really good job and was not under any kind of investigation and was, in fact, preparing to arrest all of his political opponents and usher in this sort of glorious new age. And so there’s been a lot of attempts to figure out where QAnon came from—if it was a prank, if it was deliberately planted, or how exactly it came to be. But I think it can speak to the fact that internet-based conspiracy theories especially can spread in a way that is really surprising, even if they seem nonsensical to outsiders.

IN: Tell me about your experience covering white supremacist groups.

AM: I think that the sort of resurgence of open white supremacist communities in the United States is obviously something that has been fed by the politics and rhetoric of the Trump era. And I think it is very much tied to the resurgence in certain kinds of far-right conspiracy theories. I don’t think the two phenomena are separate. Also, white supremacists especially traffic in very old conspiracy theories, whether it’s the blood libel, Holocaust denial. They employ a lot of conspiracy theorist rhetoric. And so I wanted to spend time with those people to better understand how they fit into the conspiracy world. There were several white supremacist podcasters who just focus on conspiracy theory stuff and love talking about things like reptilians. There are a bunch of white supremacist folks who have gotten very engaged in the idea of tall lizards ruling the world. So, I would say that writing about them is hard, because the temptation to make fun of them is so strong, because they are really such a pathetic and comical group of people. But then, both in the book and in other times that I have interviewed white supremacists, the most alarming, upsetting thing is how young some of the people in those crowds are and this realization that there is a new generation of racists coming up all the time, who can find an ever-increasing justification for violence. The rally that I was at, as I write about in the book—one of the groups that was there with Vanguard America, who later attended the Charlottesville rally, and one of whose marchers, James Fields Jr., is the person who killed Heather Heyer by driving into the crowd in his car. So in a lot of ways, that particular section of the book for me was the point where I thought a lot about the ways that violence can be not unpredictable. It’s almost like it’s a place where I thought a lot about how I have to take people’s rhetoric seriously, even if by my assessment they look pathetic or stupid or disorganized. Those people were saying that they were looking forward to a violent confrontation with anti-fascists. They were really, really excited about it. They were disappointed that it didn’t happen in Kentucky. And arguably, if law enforcement communities had been paying more attention to those groups, maybe what happened in Charlottesville could have been avoided.

IN:How can journalists cover these groups without simply giving them an extra platform for hate speech and disinformation, both for the right, and even for the #resistance groups and Louise Menschs of the world who promote various falsehoods about the Mueller report?

AM:I’ve definitely seen a couple of examples recently of stories that I felt like were mostly just a platform for hateful ideas and weren’t super responsibly reported. And I would say I think the most important thing when we’re covering these groups is, rather than giving them an endless amount of space to explain their viewpoints and espouse their hateful ideas, I think it’s much more useful to understand the means that they’re using to organize, the avenues through which they’re spreading hate or disinformation, and, crucially, who is funding them. Some of the best reporting about some of these groups is about the ways that they are tapping into mainstream power and influence and money. So I do think that there’s value in covering these groups, but I don’t think there is value in covering youth groups just to say, “This is what they believe, and they have a lot of YouTube subscribers.” I think we need to go a little bit deeper than that.

IN:I’ve seen a lot of discussion in the media about intent, when it comes to people like Alex Jones, who are making money off spreading their ideas. I was wondering if you think it matters whether or not people like him believe what they’re promoting—if intent matters when their words lead their followers to do things like try to shoot up a pizza place or harass the parents of school shooting victims.

AM: That that is a very common question—whether Alex Jones or whomever believes what he’s saying. And I would argue, first of all, that that’s not really something that is [knowable] for us. We’re not omniscient, we’re not his spiritual confidant or his spouse or whatever. There are some things that are simply not knowable to outsiders. What I care about is what they have spent their time doing. Alex Jones, for instance, has had a 25-year career that is based around making outlandish claims that are very often about false-flag conspiracy theories. That was one of the earliest things that he did with the Oklahoma City bombing. So whether or not he believed that, we certainly know how much time he has invested in claiming it to be true.

IN:Looking ahead, do you think that there is anything to be done to combat the spread of these ideas?

AM: I think we know that conspiracy theories especially flourish during times of social upheaval, and when we are asking big questions about who we are socially and politically and what we want to be as a country or the world. And we also know that conspiracy theories flourish in climates where people feel dispossessed, locked out of systems of power. They don’t understand the institutions that are governing their lives and they can’t influence them. So I do think, as idealistic as this is, that if we put ourselves in the world of building a more just and transparent society, conspiracy theories will lose some of their grip. They’re never entirely going to go away, because they’re part of a free and open and sort of tumultuous discourse, but they don’t have to be what they are now, which is this increasingly sort of influential and often malevolent force.

IN: As we all witnessed during the 2016 election, social media was a critical part of the spread of conspiracy theories, on both the left and the right. What do you think about Facebook and Twitter’s attempts to deal with the spread of conspiracy theories on their platforms?

AM: Every social media platform has shown that they are really bad at policing themselves. All of their attempts, especially Facebook’s, but not just Facebook, has been incredibly confused. The rollouts have been really strange. The people that they choose to ban from their services and the people they allow to stay can often be completely bizarre. I think we’re seeing that a lot of social media companies really just respond to public pressure and try to do whatever they can to get people to stop yelling at them. I also just fundamentally hate the idea of Facebook being left to police itself, for instance, because I think they’ve proven that they can’t do it. I think that social media bans in general inarguably make individual people less powerful. They are having an effect on Alex Jones’ audience, or Milo Yiannopoulos’ or Gavin McInnes’. Those people have less of an audience than they did, but I’m not sure that it actually does a whole lot to slow down the ideas that these people are promoting. I don’t think that there are fewer anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, for instance, or fewer anti-immigrant or white nationalists ones. I think it’s just sort of a matter of weakening individual people. So I don’t think that we have really come up with a satisfying explanation yet. And I would argue that a lot of the focus on social media bans is looking for sort of a technological solution to what is really a much more complex problem. So I think this is something we’re going to be arguing about for a long time, and I think, unfortunately, some of this is just coming far too late to begin with.

IN:On a lighter note, what is it about UFOs that makes them such an enduring obsession, even, as you note in the book, for politicians like former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid?

AM: I think that the belief in aliens is one of the oldest and largest and sort of most stable conspiracy subcultures there is, not just in the U.S., but around the world. And some of that is due to just the sheer number of people who have seen something that they can’t explain, the amount of information that we have about governments researching UFOs, sometimes in secret, as with the case of the Department of Defense program that was revealed at the end of 2017. And some of it, too, is just because I think a lot of people believe that we are not alone in the universe, and are keenly interested in the idea of finding out who else is out there. At its most benign end, UFO and alien subcultures are really kind of a positive thing, because they really have to do with human curiosity about the rest of the universe and a real desire to look beyond what is going on in our day-to-day lives and reach out and touch something bigger and more mysterious than us. So, I have to say that my time with UFO books is definitely the most restful, and in some ways made me the most optimistic about the future of this country.

==

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-approved-conspiracy-kook-says-military-sprays-chemicals-in-the-sky-to-sow-societal-chaos/

Lionel Lebron, a YouTube conspiracy theorist who posed for a photo with President Trump in the Oval Office last year, claims that the federal government and military are manipulating the climate over the United States to sow chaos and disorder in society.

Dan Wigington of Geoengineering Watch joined Lebron on his YouTube podcast to discuss the government’s alleged routine of spraying chemicals into the sky in order to influence the climate in ways that shape world events and sow chaos into the American population. The duo specified that they wouldn’t call the chemicals sprayed in air “chemtrails” because the word “chemtrail” is too often associated with conspiracy theories. Rather, the duo opted to say that their theories are about “geoengineering.”

“Semantics are important and I don’t want to be an anti-semantic,” Lebron joked.

The science community has debated the ethics of using chemical agents to curb the effects of climate change, but the ideas are often considered to be far-fetched and too risky to attempt on a large scale. However, Lebron and Wigington pile conspiracy theories onto that scientific debate—theories about military forces using geoengineering to “topple nations” in “weather warfare,” and to destabilize society.

Wigington said that government agencies use chemicals sprayed in the sky to keep portions of the United States cooler than the rest of the planet so that it “confuses and divides the population as to the true state of the climate while the planet descends into total meltdown.”

“Not only is climate modification used for weather warfare, to topple nations without those nations ever knowing they were at war—nations in the Middle East and Africa and elsewhere that are forced to allow U.S. occupation. It’s used as a weapon of war, but also it’s used to confuse, divide, and thus pacify populations,” Wigington said.

Lebron agreed.

“Just like free radicals are so dangerous because they’re always trying to cleave and grab something, the worst thing that the military industrial complex, cabal, whoever you want to call these people—the asset-stripping jackals—the worst thing they could have happen is stability, calmness, power, strength, a sense of solemnity, purpose, cooperation. They don’t want that,” Lebron said. “Anything that makes them skeptical, that makes them run to the streets, run to the religions, run to their science—just run.”

Wigington went on to claim that weather forecasters are able to read scripts predicting the path of hurricanes because the government is using microwave beams and Raytheon military products to steer the aquatic cyclones.

Lebron is a QAnon conspiracy theorist who posed for a photo in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump last year. The Daily Beast reported that Lebron claimed to have taken the picture with Trump after he received a “special guided tour of the White House,” and that an Oval Office photo op with the president is something that would typically require a senior administration official’s blessing. Earlier this week, Lebron filmed an interview with actress Roseanne Barr, who is a QAnon believer.

==

nice case study: escalator effect

ref no lnx twit

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2018/10/31/george-soros-and-migrant-caravan-how-lie-multiplied-online/1824633002/

How a lie about George Soros and the migrant caravan multiplied online

USA TODAY followed the rapid spread of a social media conspiracy theory about George Soros and migrants that grew from obscurity to the political mainstream.

Brad Heath, Matt Wynn and Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY

Updated 12:27 p.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

How a George Soros conspiracy theory spread from online to cable news

USA TODAY followed the spread of a social media conspiracy theory about George Soros and migrants that grew from obscurity to the political mainstream.

This is the life of a lie.

Three weeks ago, a caravan of Hondurans began walking nearly 2,000 miles to the United States. Their ranks grew as they inched north and, along with them, falsehoods grew, too. But one stands out: aconspiracy theory that liberal billionaire George Soros, a Jewish immigrant, is paying the migrants to make the journey – or even orchestrating it.

Members of Congress and the president’s son both repeated it. Conservative celebrities, too.

It also may have resonated in darker places. Cesar Sayoc, the man charged with mailing pipe bombs to Soros and other prominent critics of President Donald Trump, dwelled at length online about conspiracy theories involving the Hungarian-American philanthropist.

Robert Bowers, charged with killing 11 people worshiping in a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, used his social media accounts to post extensively about the caravan, including circulating an image of refugees in Guatemala purportedly climbing into a truck with a Star of David on the side.

But it began with a handful of posts in the caravan’s early days.

One of the first was from a North Carolina writer who goes by the screen name “lorettatheprole.” Loretta Malakie has more than 6,000 followers on Twitter,to whom she directs frequent posts about “white genocide,” Jews and the “invading force” approaching the border.

On Oct. 14, Malakie posted a link to an article about the caravan, with a single word of commentary: “Soros.”

That same day, identical posts appeared over the course of 20 minutes in six pro-Trump Facebook groups. Combined, those six groups had 165,000 members. A user who gave the name Philip Balzano, a Trump supporter from Chicago, wrote to the Trump Train group: “Here Comes ANOTHER Group of Paid for New Demoncratic Voters Just in Time for the Primaries... The Financier aka ‘Win at All Costs’ ‘Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste’ the Evil George Soros and His 140+ Orgs, Should Be Classified as Terrorist and Terrorist Orgs.”

Malakie declined to comment, though on Twitter she panned the USA TODAY reporter who called her as “evil.” Balzano did not respond to an interview request sent through Facebook.

The Soros theory was not new – it had made the rounds during previous caravans in the spring and again in August. In fact, one Facebook user posting in October provided as evidence a video of Glenn Beck discussing the spring caravan’s alleged connections to Soros.

GEORGE SOROS WEBSITE

This time, though, the theory snowballed, gaining political purchase as the caravan became a flashpoint in the final weeks of a contentious midterm campaign.

“It’s really significant how these memes can go from feverswamp-ish places to be amplified by lawmakers, even the president," said David Carroll, associate professor at The New School's Parsons School of Design in New York. “From there, the impact on world events can’t be underestimated.”

Lies, of course, are not new either. But social media can turn a breeze into a hurricane. It carried this falsehood to millions with a few taps on a screen. It also left a distinct trail that makes it possible to follow how lies spread and who told them, a map of their trajectory from the darker corners of the internet to the political mainstream.

USA TODAY followed that path by examining tens of thousands of social media posts on three major mainstream social media sites: Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

Over the next three days, a few louder social media voices weighed in. By Oct. 16 – four days after the caravan departed – the combined following of accounts mentioning both Soros and the caravan had reached 2 million, still a pebble in the flood tide of social media.(The total includes some duplicates because people follow more than one account.)

On Twitter, someone with the username “LibertyBell1000” warned about 42,000 followers that Soros had “manufactured yet another immigrant caravan ‘crisis.’ ” Another, using the name “WhoWolfe,” asked “Anybody else think Soros and the Dirty Dems are behind this?”

More posts spread across Facebook. Trump supporter Randy Penrod posted in a group called “The Deplorable's,” with about 186,000 members, “Our stable leader just called out the Soros conspired invasion of new Democrat voters in a tweet just moments ago.”

Tap, tap, tap.

It took just one more day for the theory to reach critical mass, breaking through into widespread public consciousness.

The evening of Oct. 17,a Republican member of Congress posted a video on Twitter of what he said was people in Honduras handing out small sums of money to migrants.

“Soros? US-backed NGOs? Time to investigate the source!” he wrote.

Rep. Matt Gaetz would later concede that he was mistaken about where the video was shot (it was Guatemala). But by then his message had metastasized, spreading far beyond the 153,000 people who follow the north Florida congressman’s tweets.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter retweeted it to her 2 million followers. So did Sarah Carter, a journalist who’s a frequent guest on Fox News.

Jack Posobiec – a correspondent for conservative cable news television channel One America News Network – got more specific, implying Soros was renting RVs for the migrants.

Posobiec was among the early proponents of “Pizzagate,” a social-media conspiracy that falsely claimed then-candidate Hillary Clinton and other Democrats were running a pedophile sex trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. It drew a man with a gun to Comet Pizza, where he intended to rescue the children.

The next day, even more influential voices repeated it.

One was the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who retweeted Gaetz’s post to his 3.1 million followers. The younger Trump has been actively campaigning for Republicans on television and the campaign trail in the lead up to the midterm elections. A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. declined to comment.

On Twitter alone, at least 43,000 accounts with a combined 127 million followers carried some message linking Soros to the caravan over those two days; most fanning the conspiracy, a few seeking to knock it down.

On Reddit, where users share and comment on news and memes, the lie exploded. Five posts in The_Donald subreddit tied Soros to the caravan. Within a week, there would be 10 times more. The_Donald has 675,000 members.

Ten days after the caravan began in Honduras, police started intercepting what appeared to be pipe bombs – PVC tubes packed with what the FBI later called “energetic material,” wrapped with tape and attached to a clock – that had been sent to Soros and other prominent critics of President Trump.

By the time police found the first of those bombs in Soros’ mailbox in Westchester County, New York, the lie about his involvement with the caravan had been posted by 20,000 more users on Twitter – to a combined audience of 117 million – and more weighed in on Facebook, Reddit and other sites.

It was like a runaway train. Unstoppable.

Another member of Congress, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, said in a Fox News interview that he couldn't “help but think that Democrats, perhaps Soros and others, may be funding this thinking it will help them.”

By then, the lie also was at an inflection point. Online, the biggest voices were those debunking it.The day before the bomb was found at Soros’ house, the most prominent people mentioning the theory on Twitter had no longer been conservative commentators but instead New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Chelsea Clinton.

But researchers say repetition is repetition. Even exposing a lie plays a central role in mutating fantasy into fact, or at least a matter of debate. Here, news coverage – including this story – play a significant role.

“The choices reporters and editors make about what to cover and how to cover it play a key part in regulating the amount of oxygen supplied to the falsehoods, antagonisms, and manipulations that threaten to overrun the contemporary media ecosystem,” Syracuse University professor Whitney Phillips wrote in a paper this year on disinformation.

Attention alone can lend credence to the very information critics mean to undermine.

By Oct. 22, posts debunking the theory also emerged. One from Arizona Christian conservative Joshua Feuerstein was among Facebook’s most-viewed videospushing the Soros-caravan connection. Feuerstein is best known for characterizing Starbucks’ shift to generic red holiday cups as a war on Christmas.

His video purported to show Honduran migrants on a truck. Accompanying text popularized a direct connection not just to Soros, but to the midterms: “They are not coming on foot as CNN #FakeNews says! George Soros is paying for them to show up at the border by mid term elections!”

The video and text drew 137,000 views.

Exactly how far the lie linking Soros to the migrant caravan has traveled is impossible to measure in full. Messages on 4chan and other sites where conspiracies germinate disappear quickly. Gab – a social media site that attracted right-wing figures banished from more mainstream platforms – itself was on the verge of disappearing this week. Even on mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram, many messages are private.

Still, by the morning of Oct. 27, it had spread to hundreds of millions of users onmainstream social media, and found its way to many more on cable news.

That morning, federal prosecutors allege that trucker Robert Bowers stormed into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot 11 worshipers to death. The authorities have offered few details about what might have motivated him to attack, but online Bowers left his own trail of grievance and conspiracy.

Using the handle OneDingo on Twitter, Bowers shared anti-Jewish content and criticized President Trump. Since January, he was a regular on Gab, too, where his bio read: “Jews are the children of Satan.” The image on his Gab account referred to a white supremacist meme. His last message read: “Screw your optics, I'm going in.”

And by the next day, he did.

In the aftermath, as the news media rushed to cover the killings and to explain the internet conspiracies that might have precipitated such a massacre – the lie spread anew.

Originally Published 6:54 a.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

Updated 12:27 p.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

Far-right grifters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have pushed a number of conspiracy theories previously; recently they failed in trying to smear special counsel Robert Mueller.

The Daily Beast reported that the man purportedly behind allegations against South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg came forward to say that the entire thing was actually the idea of Wohl and Burkman and that all the allegations were false: "Kelly said he expressed concerns about the scheme but Wohl told him to sleep on it. When Kelly woke at around 11 in the morning, Wohl 'was already dressed in a suit because he "can’t do a Monday if he isn’t in a suit”' and—of more significance—the fabricated statement had been posted to Medium, along with fake Twitter and Gmail accounts in Kelly’s name. According to Kelly, Burkman tried to calm his nerves by claiming that he was a '"star"’ and people are eating me up.' The trio, according to Kelly, ate Subway sandwiches, during which Kelly continued to express his regrets. Burkman and Wohl tried to calm him down by promising to purchase 'any house I wanted' and insisting that his family would 'get over it.'"

In the short time before Wohl allegedly posted the vague accusations online and the real Kelly came forward to dispute them, far-right media ran with them -- despite no actual evidence whatsoever. Not only did a number of far-right digital outlets run with it, but Trump-favorite cable news station OANN did as well. OANN later covered the collapse of the smear, saying it made no sense -- never mentioning that it had covered the smear a day prior.

ref

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/02/26/robert-mueller-hoax-how-jacob-wohl-created-sexual-harassment-plot/2993799002/