CONSPIR 6
ESTB 7 25
MERRI OK
SOME 5 BAK HERE VERY LONG
SEE HYPE THREAT FOX INGRAHAM DEMONIZ
SEE SOC MEDIA CRM 4 MANOSPHERE ALGORITHM ESCA ECHO HYPE FEAR
CONSPIR5725
CHINA GOP STEAL ELECTION 7 26
SEE QANON ON EPSTEIN IMPLODE, OBAMA TRAITOR RUSSIAGAte SOROS TULSI GABBARD
SEE DEEP STATE
SEE TUCKER TRUTHER GT REPLACEMENT MIGRANT CRIME
HUGO CHAVEZ GHOST REBOOT BENNY 1 26 VENEZ
4/22
bak fail2X
SEE CONSP 6 SIC 7 25
see disinfo
see Big lie
see gubmint deep state JONES INFOWARS
see trump trans 2 heddeth tulsi, rfk...
earth2
gt replacement white genocide racism -->see new world order sci-fi dystopia
see agenda term
see false flag deep state uniparty gubmint coming for your stove /dollars/ kids
see hype fear eg human traffic, pedo coming for your kids Drag
see globalist NWO
see qanon doh
see echo escalator amplify eg joe rogan tiktok FEVER SWAMP
see jesse watters fox CRM
// racism eg kamala earpiece debate bc dumb
see moral panic prophets weather manic hurric 3
rumble has ALL of them incl liz ppl and chemtrails
4 field error on 4?
hunter laptop china corruption BS?
vaxx big pharma 9 25 watters
see loomer HAITI EAT PETS
poso escalator?
SEE SOROS PAID PROTESTER WALTON REBEL DTR?
what is venn with wingnuttery/ agnotology?
see reductionism one single evil cause vs complexity
AHA CONSPIR --> RW POL VIOLENCE RADICALIZATION INFILTRATION
BAK 7 25
---
anythings new here or just reboot remix?
---
aha blood libel and satan witch are foundational?occult hidden threat
---
NOTE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PLAUSIBLE IF USEFUL IE SUPPORT DOGMA
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MMA
Laura Ingraham claims there is a leftist “plan” to “overthrow” the government. What in the world is she talking about?
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 10/22/26
Republicans are panicking and right-wing media are desperately churning out “fear porn” as polls continue to point to a devastating midterm environment for their party with less than two weeks remaining before election day. From presidential rallies to Fox News primetime, MAGA stalwarts are trying to bolster their party’s turnout by warning Republican voters that if they do not go to the polls, their freedom and very lives may be at stake.
That increasingly deranged environment is generating a level of demagoguery that at times becomes simply absurd.
Fox host Laura Ingraham, for example, announced on her show Wednesday that if Democrats win control of the U.S. House and Senate, a leftist cabal of activists, journalists, “top former staffers” in the Obama and Biden administrations, and even Democratic governors will carry out a plot to force President Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act as a mechanism to “dissolve” the U.S. Constitution and “crush their enemies.”
The argument that the left is planning to destroy the federal government if and only if Democrats triumph in the midterms makes a lot of sense as an attempt to scare Republicans to the polls but none at all as a plot in its own right.
Questions abound: Why in the world is this plan only enacted after Democrats achieve actual congressional power for the first time in Trump's second term? If there is clear evidence of a sweeping plot including “top” Obama and Biden officials, why is the best example Ingraham can point to former Obama White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen talking about protecting the Constitution with legal action? Why does the plan revolve around getting Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — an outcome MAGA pundits like Ingraham herself have been lobbying for and Democrats have publicly opposed?
Lastly, why does Ingraham think this grand conspiracy is underway? We don’t really know — she cited no direct evidence for what on-screen Fox graphics described as “The Left’s Plan To Overthrow The U.S. Gov’t.”
But Ingraham’s claims align with a conspiracy theory that Jennica Pounds, a right-wing influencer who goes by the pseudonym DataRepublican and briefly worked for the Defense Department this year, floated over the weekend based on videos of activist meetings she obtained. Pounds’ claim of a leftist “operational plan” seems to be much less than advertised — but has nonetheless been trumpeted this week by prominent MAGA figures like Glenn Beck, Vince Coglianese, Jesse Kelly, and podcaster-turned-deputy-FBI-director-turned-podcaster Dan Bongino.
It’s the sort of wildly incendiary claim that should demand copious evidence before making it to the airwaves of a major news outlet — but Fox is a MAGA propaganda network devoted to Republican electoral victory at any cost.
Unpacking Ingraham’s evidence-free claim of a leftist plot
Ingraham built her conspiracy-minded edifice on a faulty foundation.
She began her opening monologue on Wednesday by using a deceptively cropped video snippet of Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) to allege that the former CIA officer had promised “punishment for young conservatives.”
While many on the right have tried to generate outrage based on that false interpretation, Slotkin had actually been discussing how providing “accountability” for mid-level enablers of the Trump administration’s corruption could disincentivize similar behavior in the future.
From there, Ingraham pivoted to arguing that Democratic victories would hasten the downfall of the republic. “If voters give Democrats control of the House and even the House and the Senate, the punishment that Slotkin alludes to will be severe,” she claimed, adding that such punishment would be “meted out not only against individuals and corporations that work with Trump, but against the democratic system itself.”
After explaining that an unnamed leftist “they” intend to “force Trump's hand and use Paris riots, perhaps, as their guide,” Ingraham laid out her understanding of the “plan.”
“Now, the radical left's current thinking is that if they're able to mobilize in huge numbers in the streets, President Trump, if it's nationwide, will decide to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows him to deploy the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement,” she said. “Activists will then claim widespread abuses as the military struggles to restore law and order. Then the press will collaborate with activists, amplifying their wild claims with video snippets on social media.”
“Then blue state governors — this is their dream — seeing the chaos, will unite to try to override federal authority, take over federal functions, and eventually even rewrite our Constitution or just dissolve it altogether,” she continued.
Ingraham went on to claim that “this scenario is being openly discussed among top former staffers of Obama and Biden, former government employees of agencies like USAID, and of course community organizers” — but provided no examples of anyone actually discussing such a scheme.
Instead, Ingraham claimed that the plot’s adherents say they’re “reforming the government” rather than “overthrowing it,” adding, “former USAID staffer Danielle Reiff makes it sound like utopia.” Ingraham then played a brief clip of Reiff appearing on a December edition of Dr. Paul Zeitz’s Revolutionary Optimism Podcast and saying: “You have to reform your institutions so that it, you know, that becomes the foundational framework for society. And so, we're going to have to, if we want to live in peace and deeper democracy, reform our legal frameworks to foster collaboration across divides and unity and diversity.”
The Fox host later described Eisen as “one of the godfathers of this effort” because he “advances the fraudulent claims that democracy is in crisis.” But she provided no evidence actually linking him to the supposed “plan,” instead airing a clip in which Eisen is asked if he thinks of his work as part of a “war” and replies, “Yes — peaceful, lawful, vigorous battle, you do have to think of it in those terms to stop what Donald Trump began after the 2020 election and has continued a coup against the Constitution.”
Ingraham concluded her monologue by suggesting that “the real tyrant” is not Trump but “Democrats like Slotkin, who want to remake the government to crush their enemies.”
Ingraham then brought on Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), telling him, “These conversations, this playbook, is real. They might not be able to get there in the next year or so, but they have that plot cooking.”
Schmitt replied in part that “their march through the institutions is almost complete” and “the goal is absolute and total control” with “no room for dissent.”
“When you go vote, there’s a lot of issues that are on the table that you’re voting on, but I think a central issue is what the Democrats are willing to do with power,” he added. “They’re telling us all over again, and I think it’s terrifying and why this election is so important.”
Video
Citation
From the October 21, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle.
What “conversations”? What “playbook”? Who is supposed to be behind this “plan,” and how developed is it?
Ingraham didn’t say.
Where we think this is coming from
Jennica Pounds is a MAGA influencer with nearly 1 million followers who posts online under the moniker DataRepublican and is perhaps best known for accusing a Trump administration official who was attempting to hand her a scoop of trying to entrap her to commit a crime. Following that August debacle, she and the Pentagon disclosed that she had been secretly working as a special government employee for the Defense Department (according to Pounds, she applied for a credential as a “journalist” in the Pentagon press corps, received a press pass in April, held it until June, and joined the administration in July).
Soon after her Pentagon role became public, Pounds launched a website mapping left-wing groups called “DSA Explorer.” And on Sunday, Pounds (“fresh off her brief stint as a Special Government Employee with the Pentagon,” according to RedState’s writeup), claimed online that she had obtained access to a vast trove of transcripts and recordings of online meetings of progressive activists.
She then laid out a narrative that closely resembled what Ingraham ran with on Wednesday:
You've heard that the DSA is proposing structural reforms to America, including abolishing the Senate and imposing term limits.
What you not have heard is - there is an operational plan to put it all into action. If the Democratic Party sweeps 2026, then DSA will become “foot soldiers” in constant clashes with the administration to cross a “red line” or invoke a “doomsday scenario” - meaning, President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, probably sometime in 2027.
Then, a lot of coordinated responses kick off, including delegitimizing the federal government itself and handing that legitimacy to Democratic governors. 2028 then becomes a vote on whether to keep America governance as-is or to burn it all down to appease a “young and brown” demographic.
But the 1-minute video snippet Pounds appended to her post does not show anything like a well-developed “operational plan” to do anything at all, much less one involving DSA “foot soldiers” plotting to force an invocation of the Insurrection Act.
Indeed, Pounds appears to be taking a series of disaggregated remarks from different people at different calls and events and weaving them together into a single coherent apocalyptic narrative. By her own subsequent admission, “almost nobody knows the ‘grand plan’ so to speak,” the various parties “simply agree to play a role.”
The video attached to Pounds’ original post, titled “April 10, 2026 - R2T core team call,” shows Reiff and Zeitz, from the podcast clip Ingraham aired, on an online video call with three other individuals. Zeitz recounts a recent meeting he and Reiff had with more influential figures at Governors Safeguarding Democracy, described as “a forum that convenes Democratic governors,” to discuss their “work around the emergency scenario planning.”
Reiff then says that they were asked in the meeting to develop “a panel of a couple of people who could talk to the governors, who could do a briefing for the governors and walk them through like the doomsday scenario and help them think through what their options are as a response,” and adds that such an opportunity would be “a huge breakthrough for us.”
That video and others Pounds released triggered a firestorm on the right, with influencers and podcasters largely adopting her narrative.
But Tim Pool, of all people, suggested she’d gotten out over her skis.
“Many people have asked me my thoughts on this and asked me what I think is going on, and I’ve said, listen, DataRepublican, with all due respect, coming out and just saying I have this data is not enough to launch a story,” he said on his show on Tuesday. “I cannot just come out and say hey, guys, someone says they’ve seen stuff the DSA is doing.”
That’s apparently a higher standard than Fox requires — because if Ingraham were aware of hard evidence of the leftist plot to destroy the country she claimed exists, she surely would have aired it. Instead, her coverage leaves so many obvious questions unanswered that it only emphasizes just how frenzied the network has become as it tries to concoct enough “fear porn” to save the GOP from electoral devastation.
Is it possible Pounds has a recording of random activists proposing something resembling her above plan? Sure, but that wouldn't be evidence of a grand conspiracy involving people with actual power and influence — and says nothing about the plausibility of such a plot, which in this author's opinion is frankly nonsensical.
//
Fox News is peddling election “fear porn” about Democrats to rescue Republicans
10/16/26
10/22/26
Peter Navarro rails at Fox News personalities: “Turn Fox off”
10/20/26
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10 26 PAYWALL
How Trump’s ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Investigation Failed to Become the New QAnon
by Mike Rothschild
10.19.26 |
In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
People love a grand conspiracy. The bigger the scheme is, the more people get drawn into it. And the more details and players that are involved, the more believable it seemingly becomes. After all, who would go to the trouble of making up something so complicated? It must be true.
And nobody loves a conspiracy more than President Trump. He and his inner circle especially seem to have fallen in love with what has literally been dubbed “The Grand Conspiracy.” It’s a hopelessly complex, entirely unevidenced theory claiming that a high-ranking group of political figures have been plotting in the shadows for years to stop Donald Trump from making America great again through investigations, indictments and impeachments. It has all the hallmarks of the type of grandiose schemes that Trump supporters especially fall for: countless players, sprawling plots, intricate secrets, and a total lack of evidence that it actually took place.
Despite lacking cogent answers to foundational questions such as “what it is” and “who is doing it,” revenge for the Grand Conspiracy has been a driving force in the administration, prompting an investigation that has trundled along over the last year and a half, involving dozens of officials looking for some reason to indict the president’s enemies.
And there are many, many enemies. They include a greatest hits of Trump’s obsessions and grievances, from former special counsel Jack Smith to minor players like former FBI agent Peter Strzok, and even former President Barack Obama himself. According to Grand Conspiracy believers, they are all powerful Deep State figures who supposedly worked together in a single, years-long scheme to destroy Trump and undo the will of the people.
Precisely what these conspirators have actually done remains unclear — even, seemingly, to the prosecutors themselves, who, per the Wall Street Journal, complained to the Justice Department that they weren’t getting much guidance from the local U.S. attorney. The probe is now being run out of Washington, where it continues to baffle those assigned to move it forward.
In the last few weeks, there have been a host of indications that DOJ efforts to prosecute these figures — and tie them all together into one grand scheme — are falling apart. And, as the Grand Conspiracy prosecution flails at DOJ, the claims also aren’t doing much in the court of public opinion, where Republicans are looking for anything they can find to shore up their crumbling midterm prospects.
Trump has, in the past, excelled at turning his personal grievances and enemies into Republican grievances and enemies. But people aren’t especially interested anymore, at least not if one looks at the Republican Party’s numbers in 2026 midterm polling and beyond. Trump voters seem to now be wondering how Trump’s beefs and feuds impact their own lives. They continue to express their disappointment that the president hasn’t curbed inflation, went to war in Iran despite explicit promises of no new wars, and has failed to bring closure to the Jeffrey Epstein debacle.
With the GOP’s midterms prospects looking bleak, Trump’s most loyal influencers are nonetheless leaning into the Grand Conspiracy narrative to present the illusion that everything is going to work out if they just hang on a little longer and vote Republican. Over and over during the past year, everyone from mainstream pundits like Sean Hannity and Dan Bongino to candidates like Mike Lindell and a host of anonymous conspiracy theorists have played up the Grand Conspiracy as the investigation that will finally bring down the Deep State and bring Trump the vindication he has always deserved.
“John Brennan and Jack Smith have some real, major explaining to do, and that they’re probably going to be under some major indictments in the Grand Conspiracy hearing,” declared Benny Johnson in an October interview with Roger Stone where the two traded speculation about the activities of the “seditious cabal” that’s tried to ruin Trump’s life.
“If Jack Smith is not held accountable, you are going to have a very angry base,” conservative writer Julie Kelly declared on Trump stalwart Mark Levin’s radio show a day earlier. “We already saw the Russiagate perps get off. Hopefully, we’ll have some accountability in Florida and the Grand Conspiracy investigation.”
Like so many other past Trump-world conspiracy theories and “investigations that will reveal everything,” Grand Conspiracy believers are setting themselves up not for triumph, but for more disappointment.
What Does the Grand Conspiracy Involve?
Like many conspiracy theories with countless components and players to track, the intricacies of every allegation in the “Grand Conspiracy” are too complicated to cover in full. They are also irrelevant to understanding the greater gist of the theory, because many either don’t exist in a way that can be proven, or are not crimes at all. The more you examine the details, the more you drift away from the bigger picture.
The short version of the supposed scheme involves everyone from Barack Obama and Joe Biden to Hillary Clinton and James Comey. Glimpses of the conspiracy can, its proponents hold, be seen in in countless forms: Jack Smith’s probe into Jan. 6; the Steele Dossier that gave us infamous allegations like the “pee tape”; Trump’s impeachments; the Biden-era Jan. 6 and classified documents indictments; the New York hush money case involving Stormy Daniels; and the numerous FBI probes into Russian interference in 2016 and Trump’s ties to Moscow.
All of the above was done to subvert Trump’s landslide victories, and to take Trump off the board because he was a threat to the Deep State’s control over global politics, the conspiracy theory holds. Despite failing in 2016, the conspiracy plotters continued to make his life miserable while he was in office through impeachments and probes, then they tried to put him in prison after the 2020 election was stolen from him. Even after he won again, the legal warfare and persecution have never stopped.
But now Trump is taking action. The “Grand Conspiracy” investigation is how the investigators will be investigated, and how the persecutors will be persecuted. Running for a time out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida, the sprawling probe has involved major Justice Department figures, countless prosecutors and agents, and untold millions of dollars spent running down something that continues to elude basic understanding or evidence, all the while trying to turn it into something that a jury might be able to make heads or tails of. It’s not going well so far.
The Grand Conspiracy and QAnon
If all of this is starting to sound like a more official version of QAnon, there’s a reason. It’s a more official version of QAnon.
Like the “Grand Conspiracy,” QAnon — which began in October 2017 with a series of cryptic 4chan posts about Hillary Clinton’s imminent “arrest” — revolves around Trump’s enemies being brought to justice in a secret, yet satisfying way. In thousands of cryptic riddles meant for followers to decode, Q promised military tribunals for supposed Deep State luminaries like Obama, the Clintons, George Soros, and countless others.
The conspiracies it alleged became hopelessly complicated, virtually impossible for anyone to fully understand. Many, in fact, were contradictory and nonsensical, based on phony “evidence” or vague predictions. And nothing Q “predicted,” from Clinton’s arrest to public executions of Democrats to the revealing of secret new technologies and cures for disease, ever happened.
Trump, of course, is the focal point of both movements. In the “Grand Conspiracy,” he is the target of the Deep State, fighting for his freedom and his very life. Meanwhile in QAnon, the Deep State is Trump’s target, with the president personally posting on 4chan when he needs to communicate with his followers.
But while the context is different, they share a similar devotion to fantastical stories over facts, to compelling narratives over actual ones. And they share many of the same characters. Kash Patel promoted QAnon on numerous occasions, while “Grand Conspiracy” figures like DOJ special prosecutor John Durham and former FBI director James Comey also had prominent places in Q’s narrative, as both heroes and villains.
Ultimately, QAnon wasn’t started by Trump’s inner circle, but they found it useful to exploit its tenets. The “Grand Conspiracy,” of course, comes directly from Trump and his allies. But not only is it floundering legally, it’s not clear if the plot is proving useful to keeping the base engaged and, ultimately, to the GOP’s electoral chances.
The issue with the “Grand Conspiracy” is not the prospect of its targets being hauled off to prison. It seems unlikely to ever get that far. It’s that government-endorsed conspiracy theories like it, when they find an audience, are remarkably durable and excel at driving anger toward enemies of the state. They can move people toward violence, unhinged hatred, and even betraying their own country; all in service of a paranoid plot that doesn’t exist and nobody can prove.
Revolutionary France was full of bloody acts of revenge against supposed plots by foreign and domestic enemies working in vast spheres of influence that could never quite be proven. During the leadup to the Civil War, countless citizens of both the North and South believed the other side was plotting with foreign agents and secret societies to take over their states. And the rise of Nazism was fueled by relentless propaganda accusing a web of international Jewish financiers of “backstabbing” an undefeated Germany at the end World War I as part of a communist conspiracy that needed to be violently destroyed to save the Reich.
Fortunately, the Grand Conspiracy does not seem to be enjoying the same success as those historical precedents. Even QAnon managed to keep generating discussion and speculation for years, gaining new followers even as it recycled its plots and descended into inscrutable riddles. It created a narrative that has stubbornly lodged itself into mainstream conservatism. The “Grand Conspiracy,” meanwhile, is quietly flopping, as prosecutors fail to bring the investigation to fruition, and Republican voters worry more about gas prices and food costs than who might have committed minor infractions a decade ago.
But like Revolutionary France and Nazi Germany, even the grandest conspiracy outlives its usefulness when people figure out they’re being had. And the “Grand Conspiracy” might have already hit that point. It’s not moving the needle with voters, and it’s not actually getting anyone convicted.
When it fails, it will require yet another new conspiracy theory to explain how it all went wrong.
Mike Rothschild writes Rough Edges for TPM, covering fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. He is a journalist and expert in the growth and impact of conspiracy theories. He is the author of the first complete book on the QAnon conspiracy movement, 2021’s The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything; as well as Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories in 2023.
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AN 10 26
Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly is having a difficult time accepting that the conspiracy theories around James Talarico were false, and legitimate journalists can't stop mocking her.
After a week full of conspiracy theories, a right-wing personality posted an audio recording that he claimed was from a woman working for a mental health facility in Ohio that confirmed Talarico had been a patient there. The facility, Lindner Center of Hope, released a statement Sunday afternoon telling journalists that it would never reveal any patient's name because it would violate HIPAA.
By Sunday evening, the Center sent out a statement making it clear that Talarico was never a patient there. Talarico, for his part, reposted the statement saying that he'd never even been to Ohio.
Kelly couldn't understand.
"Could you pls clarify @LindnerCtrHope: 1. Has James Talarico been to your facility at all at any point in the last 9 days? 2. Was the facility operator who said he had been there mistaken? Will you allow her to speak publicly?" she asked on X.
The recording from political commentator Nick Sortor is authentic, but it didn't contain all of the information.
The Bulwark obtained the full six-minute recording, where the woman on the phone makes it clear that Talarico was never there. Sorto didn't put that in his audio edit, meaning he knew that Talarico wasn't at the facility, but broadcast the claim anyway.
"Sortor hadn’t actually made the call. That was Amacher, who had also cut his teeth filming the Portland ICE protests. Amacher had posted call logs that indicated his actual conversation with (allegedly) the person at Lindner lasted roughly six minutes. So, we asked him for the full recording (not the 45-second clip Sortor had posted). And, thankfully, he sent it along."
"It turns out, that the 45-second portion came at the very end of the actual call. What came before was a series of lies Amacher told to trick the apparent Lindner employee into handing over private information. It also included the employee’s repeated denials that anyone named 'James Talarico' was in her system at all," the report said.
Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith noted, "What a crazy information environment."
"No wonder she got fired from NBC. Totally conspiracy-pilled," commented political analyst and strategist Neera Tanden.
"What stage of grief is this?" asked ZenithPolls founding partner Adam Carlson.
"You’ve really lost the plot buddy," ex-Republican Sarah Longwell shot back at Kelly.
Huffington Post reporter SV Dáte commented to Kelly, "Trump acts like a complete lunatic every single day, if suddenly we’re that concerned with mental health."
NewsNation's Chris Cuomo got in on the mockery too, "Next target."
Patrick Pfingsten, who writes for The Illinoize and hosts in the afternoon on WMAY News, noted, "'Never' seems as if it would cover the last 9 days."
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AN 9 26
The MAGA-sphere was struggling to recollect itself after one of its latest conspiracy theories went down in flames on Tuesday.
MAGA maven Sean Hannity deleted a post on Tuesday accusing former special prosecutor Jack Smith of having contact with a prosecutor investigating President Donald Trump for attempted election subversion while attending an NBA game in Atlanta.
Earlier Tuesday, the MAGA social media machine was already up and churning with the accusation as Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) leveled the question at Smith before live cameras on, telling Schmitt he had text messages from Smith's team that Jack Smith was in Atlanta Feb. 2024, one day after DA Fani Willis admitted a relationship with co-worker Nathan Wade.
"What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warriors Hawks game the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair," said Schmitt, adding: "I don't think you know that we have this stuff, I'll give you a second to process it."
But there was no processing required, as Smith quickly dismembered the accusation by explaining that he had attended an entirely different game.
News media pounced elements of the MAGA echo chamber that had fired prematurely before understanding their target.
“Are you going to update this tweet now that it is clear the senator mixed up the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes? I mean, this is absurd stuff,” wrote Tangle News founder Isaac Saul of former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge, who had claimed Smith “seemed off balance” and “taken aback when Schmitt said he was bringing receipts” of memos, transcripts and texts.
MAGA leader and Fox News entertainer Hannity had already quietly deleted his own similar accusations hours later on Tuesday, without apology or explanation.
“Clearly the talking points and marching orders were sent out to push this story before it was revealed that Schmitt either lied or was embarrassingly wrong and confused the Atlanta Hawks with the University of Iowa Hawkeyes,” one heckler said on X.
But other media, including New Republica writer Brian Beutler, had screenshot Hannity’s claim, and reposted it after its sudden absence.
“Here’s a deleted tweet from Hannity, who won’t admit error, won’t chastise Schmitt, and won’t lose stature with anyone on the right, including the most of the blue-check community on this website,” Beutler said. “This is what you all like about him!”
Other members of the online MAGA community were slower to action, with Alt-right entertainer Benn Johnson failing to delete his own Schmidt-related post later that Tuesday.
“Are you really this ignorant or just pretending to be,” said one commenter beneath Johnson’s lingering post.
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RWW
- Paige Winfield Cunningham @ The Washington Sun: RFK Jr. Headlines Anti-Vaccine Group’s Conference, Discusses Chemtrails
The health secretary told Children’s Health Defense that it has a “strong and steadfast friend at the White House” in President Donald Trump.
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mma 9 26
Vice President JD Vance used his keynote address to the GOP’s midterm convention to echo one of Tucker Carlson’s most infamous statements, just one week after publicly refusing to distance himself from the right-wing podcaster.
“Two years ago, we have to remember — our nation, ladies and gentlemen, was tired,” Vance told the attendees in Dallas on Thursday night. After citing factory closures and drug overdoses, he continued: “We were tired of seeing the cartels and the criminals given free rein over our great country. And we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.“
Who was “called racist” for suggesting “our country was becoming dirtier and poorer”? That would be Carlson, who declared that immigrants were the cause.
“Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this,” Carlson told his Fox News audience during a December 2018 monologue. “We have a moral obligation to admit the world's poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement.” He then aired footage of what he described as “an endless chain of migrant caravans” in Mexico.
Carlson’s statement that immigrants make the United States “poorer” is incorrect, and his claim that they make it “dirtier” was widely recognized as bigoted. More than two dozen companies dropped their ads on his show in response.
But Carlson refused to back down, repeatedly offering similar remarks and using his Fox show to mainstream other white nationalist tropes and talking points. And a few years later, an enterprising would-be GOP politician adopted the host’s language in a successful effort to win his favor.
On July 1, 2021 — the same day he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate — Vance went on Carlson’s Fox program and told the host that he was running to ensure that his kids “live in the same great country that I lived in. And if we don't do something, if we don't fight back against what's going on in our country, they're going to lose it, they're going to grow up in a country that's much poorer, that's much dirtier, that's much uglier, and where they can't even speak their mind as citizens.”
Carlson fawned over Vance throughout the interview. “I probably shouldn't say this, I'm really glad you're doing it,” he said at its conclusion. “I admire you and I wish you luck, very much. Thank you for doing this. Congratulations.”
Vance would continue to mimic Carlson’s rhetoric on the host’s show, and Carlson in turn backed his Senate campaign on-air — and used his personal relationship with Donald Trump to convince Trump to endorse Vance. Two years later, he helped convince Trump to select Vance as his 2024 running mate.
Since then, Carlson has dived even further into the right-wing fever swamps. He became the nation’s most prominent 9/11 conspiracy theorist; declared that “the defining fact of our lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated”; warned frequently of the influence of “demons”; and hosted a notorious white nationalist and a Nazi apologist for friendly interviews. That last point has triggered calls on the right for Vance to disavow or distance himself from the man who helped cement his political career.
But instead, Vance used a September 3 White House press briefing to portray Carlson as merely a “friend” with whom he sometimes has “political disagreements,” and to attack his critics as un-American.
And last night, Vance gave a wink and a nod to Carlson and his audience on the biggest stage available to him.
// mma
Tucker Carlson helped make JD Vance. The VP refuses to condemn his antisemitism.
09/01/26 3:11 PM EDT
JD Vance’s wildly disingenuous response to his Tucker Carlson problem
09/04/26 11:47 AM EDT
09/11/26
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- Layla A. Jones @ Talking Points Memo: How a Baseless, Right-Wing Social Media Panic Led to Dramatic Changes at the Census Bureau
When longtime Indiana politician Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) lobbed a powerful allegation against the Census Bureau last October, what had been a low-profile, fringe GOP conspiracy theory burst to the fore. Banks said he believed the Census Bureau had injected errors in the decennial population count and survey which were so severe, they netted Democrats more representation in Congress at the expense of Republican seats.
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AN 8 26
President Donald Trump's list of failures continues to grow, and as a new analysis from MS NOW argued, he has now resorted to seeking punishments for those who tell the truth about his unpopularity.
In a piece published Monday morning, Steven Benen, a longtime contributor to the network and producer for host Rachel Maddow, discussed Trump's recent demand that his FCC Chair, Brendan Carr, investigate NBC and anchor Kristin Welker after comments she made about him having a "mixed" endorsement record in the midterms so far. Trump accused this of being "purposeful inaccuracy" that ought to be investigated.
“How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?” Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday. “Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment... The Press is a Disgrace to our Nation, and I hope that Chairman Brendan Carr, and the fine people of his Commission, will take this Threat to our Country very seriously.”
Benen called this demand from Trump "brazen nonsense," and highlighted how ridiculous the anger seemed given that Welker's comment only came "in passing during a live shot on NBC’s local D.C. affiliate." He further argued that the post from the president "reflects an inherently authoritarian worldview — one in which media professionals are supposed to fear federal investigations for telling the public the truth."
He also highlighted a follow-up post Trump made on Sunday, accusing the media of using "fake polls," which just so happen to be the ones in which his approval and popularity are faltering.
"The missive came five days after the Republican concocted a deeply weird conspiracy theory alleging that the national surveys conducted by major independent news organizations, universities and research institutions have been secretly being coordinated by Democratic officials, as part of a fiendish and undisclosed plot to make GOP voters feel discouraged," Benen detailed. "There are, according to the president’s same pitch, a series of undisclosed polls that paint an entirely different picture about public attitudes, but that we’re apparently not allowed to see for reasons Trump hasn’t explained."
He added later: "Time will tell whether Carr and his colleagues take the president’s directives seriously, but let’s not miss the forest for the trees: Confronted with data showing his broad unpopularity, Trump can either (a) change course; (b) accept the fact that his presidency lacks public support; or (c) pursue investigations into journalists and independent entities that have dared to present him with information he doesn’t want to see or hear. The fact that he’s choosing door No. 3 isn’t surprising, but it does offer a timely reminder about his twisted perspective."
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8 26 RWW
- Tom Latchem and Will Neal @ The Daily Beast: Conspiracy Nut Fronting Trump’s $2.3B Flub Revamp Revealed
The public face of DHS’s self-deportation competition made a name for himself by role-playing as a jihadist.
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- Anti-vax conspiracy theorist Mat Staver is now warning that the nation's blood supply has been contaminated by the COVID-19 vaccine: "Many of us who did not get the COVID shot do not want COVID-tainted blood."
rww 9 26
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reboot?
gmail 7 26 zeteo pt 2
Leading virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen dives into what the evidence actually shows about the origins of the Covid pandemic. Spoiler alert: It's not what Trump, RFK Jr. and Gabbard are telling you
...as Tulsi Gabbard departed her role as the director of national intelligence, she released what she characterized as a bombshell reveal that former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci lied to Congress about masterminding virology research that created SARS-CoV-2, which leaked from a lab and caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), has done the same, releasing a trove of similarly uninformative documents this week, which mostly show some of my co-authors joking around, discussing politics, and changing their minds when faced with evidence (full disclosure: they mention me in the context of complimenting my Twitter game). Paul claims this is evidence that they conspired with Fauci to help him cover up the truth about the lab leak by writing a paper for a scientific journal.
These documents are not proof of anything besides showing that, yet again, efforts across multiple intelligence agencies and the Senate HSGAC failed to uncover any hard evidence that a “lab leak” occurred. That’s because the sole piece of evidence supporting that version of events is that the pandemic began in Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies coronaviruses. There was also a market, where live animals were sold.
This is the second part of a two-part series. In Part 1, I examined how disinformation about the “lab leak” is being weaponized to attack science and persecute scientists, including Fauci, furthering the advancement of authoritarianism and erosion of democracy in America. Part 2 discusses what the evidence actually shows about the origin of the pandemic – and none of it indicates that it started in a lab.
What Evidence?...
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MMA
Right-wing ghouls revive the Seth Rich conspiracy theory 10 years after his murder
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 07/09/26
It's 2026 and MAGA lickspittle Benny Johnson is hosting a discussion of whether Hillary Clinton had former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich killed in 2016.
“This is why it's called a conspiracy theory,” former American Conservative contributing editor Chris Brunet told Johnson during a lengthy interview about Rich’s tragic murder on Johnson’s show Wednesday. “It's because it's a conspiracy of top DNC officials, including Hillary Clinton, to essentially murder Seth Rich in cold blood, is the conspiracy theory. And I believe that's what happened. I don’t believe he was the victim of a random mugging.”
Brunet added that President Donald Trump “should open a new investigation into the murder of Seth Rich to try to find his killers.”
“I would love for there to be a full investigation into this,” Johnson replied, later telling his audience to subscribe to Brunet’s Substack and “send tips if you know anything about this.”
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From the July 8, 2026, edition of The Benny Show as aired on YouTube
These ghouls are reviving the Seth Rich conspiracy theory nearly a decade after it first became a cause célèbre for the online right, which baselessly linked Rich’s tragic murder on July 10, 2016, in what police determined was an unsolved botched robbery while he was walking home late at night in Washington, D.C., to WikiLeaks’ release 12 days later of thousands of internal DNC emails whose contents damaged Clinton’s presidential campaign.
News accounts citing intelligence sources quickly suggested that Russian hackers had stolen the emails and provided them to WikiLeaks; the U.S. intelligence community publicly stated in October 2016that Russia had hacked the DNC; and the final report from then-special counsel Robert Mueller, who secured indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers for the DNC hack, concluded that the emails were stolen and released through WikiLeaks as part of a Kremlin plot to undermine Clinton’s campaign. But right-wing conspiracy theorists, seeking to undermine arguments that Trump was too close to the Kremlin, claimed based on just about nothing that Rich had been the true source of the emails, and that he had been murdered — perhaps on Clinton’s order — in retaliation for their release.
The conspiracy theory was relegated to far-right fever swamps at first. But the story burst into the mainstream 10 months after Rich’s death, after Fox News published a thinly sourced online article and aired a series of on-air segments that bought into the far-right narrative.
Veteran Fox host Sean Hannity became the conspiracy theory’s biggest champion, arguing that it debunked “the whole Russia collusion narrative.” Meanwhile, Rich’s anguished family begged him and the rest of the conspiracy theorists to stop. “With every conspiratorial flare-up, we are forced to relive Seth’s murder and a small piece of us dies as more of Seth’s memory is torn away from us,” his parents wrote in The Washington Post. Ultimately, Fox retracted its article, claiming that it had not met the network’s standards, and Hannity stopped talking about the story.
This was perhaps the saddest and most grotesque saga I’ve seen come out of the right-wing media in my 19 years at Media Matters. And as the 10th anniversary of Rich’s murder approaches, the conspiracy theorists are back.
The hook for Brunet’s appearance on Johnson’s show is an allegation from attorney Ty Clevenger, posted online Monday and boosted the next day by the conspiracy theory site Gateway Pundit, claiming that “an attorney for the government told me that I would soon be getting confirmation that several hundred pages of documents related to Seth Rich were found in a previously-hidden room at FBI headquarters” where they were supposedly “among the files designated for destruction.”
Jim Hoft, an endless font of credulity and stupidity, explained in his post why this is supposed to matter:
This is the same FBI that originally told Clevenger back in 2017 it had zero records on Seth Rich because the bureau “was not involved” in the investigation of his death. They claimed it was nothing more than a “botched robbery” handled solely by local D.C. police.
Over the years, through relentless FOIA litigation and court pressure, the FBI has been forced to admit it actually possesses thousands of pages of Seth Rich documents, including his work laptop, an image of his personal laptop, and a DVD. Yet they continue to fight tooth and nail to keep the full truth hidden.
One possible explanation for this alleged disparity is that while the FBI did say in May 2017 that it was not involved in the investigation of Rich’s death, Mueller’s April 2019 final report suggests that some investigation did subsequently take place: It specifically confirms that Rich was not the source that provided the DNC emails to WikiLeaks. The records, in other words, could have been created while the FBI was knocking down the online right’s conspiracy theory.
The fever-swamp explanation, however, is that the FBI was in on the conspiracy in which Clinton had Rich killed for leaking the DNC emails to WikiLeaks, covered it up, kept all the evidence through the four years of the first Trump administration and the four years of the Biden administration and only decided to destroy them when Trump came back into power, but waited too long and his minions found it.
Dabbling in this particular insanity is not without risk. While Fox did not hold its employees accountable for their repulsive behavior, the network paid what was reportedly “a lucrative seven figure payment to the Rich family” to get them to settle a lawsuit. But the story offers Johnson’s ilk a priceless opportunity to talk about FBI documents that aren’t the Epstein files that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is illegally withholding.
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OMFG
The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous
Right-wing media figures including Steve Bannon, John Solomon, and Cleta Mitchell appear to be weaving together a narrative about interference by China in US elections to justify a national emergency to curtail voting rights
Written by John Knefel
Published 07/02/26
Over the last several weeks, the outlines of a plot have begun to emerge that could signal how President Donald Trump, along with MAGA media figures and activists, could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national emergency posed by China.
The details of the scheme remain publicly vague, and may not yet come to pass, but the short version looks something like this: First, the White House would declassify and release documents purporting to show foreign interference in U.S. elections, especially by the Chinese Communist Party.
Next, Trump would use that supposed “proof” of a stolen election to declare a national emergency, thereby — according to those pushing this idea — giving him extraordinary powers over the upcoming midterms. That move would serve as a way to advance the anti-voting rights measures in the SAVE America Act, like forcing voters to prove their citizenship, without having to actually pass the law — which Congress, so far at least, appears reluctant to do.
The main players here come not only from the fever swamp backwaters of MAGA media, but also from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is a central node, attempting to advance the operation on his War Room podcast, aired on right-wing network Real America’s Voice, long a major source of misinformation about the 2020 election.
The main players here come not only from the fever swamp backwaters of MAGA media, but also from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House
Bannon’s RAV colleague John Solomon, whose role in the plot appears to be running the declassification effort, was recently appointed to a White House “task force” into supposed election integrity. Solomon was Media Matters’ Misinformer of the Year in 2019 for his role in laundering misinformation about the Bidens and Ukraine through his opinion columns.
Also in the mix is Peter Schweizer, who founded the Government Accountability Institute with Bannon and has moved from spreading misinformation about the Clintons to claiming that China is taking over the United States by exploiting birthright citizenship.
Then there’s Cleta Mitchell, a right-wing lawyer who was on the January 2021 call when Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough ballots to tip the state his way. She referenced Schweizer in a June 20 appearance on War Room, positively paraphrasing an argument he made on his podcast acknowledging that much of the voting activity he wants to suppress is actually legal.
“Peter Schweizer put it pretty well last week in a podcast that he does with Eric Eggers, and the question they posed is: If fraud is made — if election fraud is made legal, is it still fraud?” Mitchell asked. “Because what's happened in California over the last decade is that the far-left Democrat, socialist, Marxists, communists have completely upended every vestige of election integrity.” (Bannon had teed her up by referencing the Los Angeles mayoral primary, claiming without evidence: “They stole it right in front of our face and laughed at us the entire time.")
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From the June 20, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
Mitchell is supported by a loose array of election deniers who have called on Trump to issue an executive order to seize “king-like powers” over voting systems, supported by the national emergency decree.
Bill Pulte, the newly installed acting DNI, and his recently appointed chief of staff, former Republican National Committee official Christina Norton, also appear to figure heavily into the plan. On June 20, Bannon said Pulte’s role at DNI is “to get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Ten days later, Bannon described Norton as “one of the top election fraud people in all of the RNC” and said Pulte is “signaling where he's going on this” with her hiring, adding that “my understanding is that there is going to be real revelations about the stealing of the 2020 election."
The same day, NBC News reported that Solomon’s task force “is gathering thousands of pages of documents from U.S. intelligence agencies, with plans to declassify some of them, so President Donald Trump can amplify new accusations about past elections.” In describing his unpaid role at the White House, Solomon said he will be releasing “some documents, some secrets you should know about when it comes to weaponization, election integrity, other things."
Solomon’s recent media footprint offers clues about what he is likely looking to find, declassify, and present — possibly out of context. The subhead of a May 6 article of Solomon’s states: “The evidence continues to stack up that the U.S. intel community sought to downplay China's actions in 2020 as Trump sought reelection.” Then, during a May 19 interview, he said: “We do know the FBI had grave suspicions that China was trying to rig the election, probably with help from people on the ground, to help Joe Biden specifically."
The Supreme Court’s narrow June 30 decision to protect birthright citizenship could turbocharge the Bannon-Solomon-Pulte scheme, in part by providing fodder for anti-Chinese sentiment on the right. On Solomon’s website, Just The News, an article about the birthright citizenship case referenced Schweizer’s book and hyped the supposed China menace.
Birthright citizenship abuse via birth tourism, when foreign nationals travel to the United States on temporary visas specifically to give birth, is an issue that Trump addressed early in his second term.
Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer detailed this practice extensively in his 2026 book, “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” in which he described how China has industrialized the practice on a large scale through an organized industry.
Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute told FactCheck.org that “birth tourism is a very small occurrence – of the 3.6 million U.S. births annually, a tiny fraction is due to foreign women who are not regularly domiciled in the U.S. coming here for the purpose of giving birth to secure U.S. citizenship for their child.”
And as the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind noted: “Consulates have a ton of discretion under existing law to deny someone a visa. And suspicion of birth tourism _has_ served as a reason to deny visas in the past. If the problem is insufficient enforcement, good news, you can solve that problem without changing the law or Constitution!”
Bannon stated plainly on June 29 that Solomon’s “task force” and “also Pulte” would be central to creating a “predicate” for the declaration of a national emergency and subsequent executive order achieving the anti-voting rights goals of the SAVE America Act.
On June 30, Bannon interviewed another of his RAV colleagues, Wayne Allyn Root, who further elaborated what a national emergency declaration could look like.
“Stop talking about the SAVE Act and do a national security emergency for elections, which is the SAVE Act, which contains everything that's in the SAVE Act, Steve, and more and more,” Root said.
Just days earlier, on June 24, Trump canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill to pressure Congress to pass the stalled out SAVE America Act, which he referred to as a “National Emergency."
The “predicate” Bannon is hoping to manufacture could also be for other election initiatives the administration is working on — such as trying to force courts to give the administration access to various state voter rolls — an issue the administration is facing significant resistance to.
Whether this harebrained plot congeals into an active conspiracy to subvert the midterms remains to be seen, but given that Trump has already tried to overturn one election it would be a mistake not to take these rumblings seriously. There may indeed be an emergency — it’s just not the one that Bannon and company are talking about.
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June 26, 2026, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria Bartiromo
MARIA BARTIROMO (ANCHOR): Meanwhile there's this, Kevin O'Leary appeared as a guest on this program back on May 11 and discussed the ongoing controversy surrounding his planned data center project in Utah. Now, he made certain claims relating to the opponents of that project. Mr. O'Leary has now corrected the record and explained that he has no evidence that the Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Josh Kanter, Taylor Knuth, or Gabrielle Finlayson are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Media is likely — likewise aware of no evidence that they are funded by or acting at the direction of or in coordination with Chinese interests in opposing Kevin O'Leary's project. Fox News Media apologizes for the error.
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06/25/26
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AN 5 26
The Internet is full of conspiracy theorists who, knowing the stigma associated with the “conspiracy theorist” label, try to conceal their tendencies by seeming reasonable. Yet a new study reveals a simple tell that these conspiracy theorists have — and it may not be what you think.
“Exploratory linguistic analyses revealed that conspiracism was associated with greater use of conspiracy-related vocabulary (e.g., deception, government), a disproportionate use of sophisticated words, and increased syntactic complexity,” explained the authors of a recent article in the scientific journal PLOS One. “These results suggest that conspiracism may emerge more readily at the lexical level rather than through fully structured narratives. We discuss potential methodological and theoretical factors contributing to these unexpected results, including the roles of context, perceived relevance, motivation, and collective social dynamics. We also consider the possibility that conspiracism may not directly translate into conspiratorial narratives.”
In other words, conspiracy theorists like to gussy up their arguments with ornate language and seemingly-sophisticated forms of analysis, all of which serve to conceal from the public whether their ideas are provably connected to demonstrable facts.
“If so, we recommend comparative research on online vs offline conspiratorial writing to clarify whether conspiracy theories emerge spontaneously from genuine beliefs or are constructed strategically, detached from genuinely held beliefs,” PLOS One concluded.
To learn this, the study authors asked participants to watch an apocalyptic thriller, Leave the World Behind,which is notable for its ambiguous ending. When the nearly 400 study participants were asked to write essays interpreting the movie’s vague information, the scholars — using AI to break down the statistics — found that conspiracy theorists use complex language to make their ideas seem more credible. The use of this language, and the fact that it is consistently untethered to any kind of concrete evidence, is the tell.
“We were surprised that conspiratorial narratives did not emerge as we had predicted,” Alessandro Miani, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and the study’s lead author, told PsyPost's Eric W. Dolan. “We preregistered the hypothesis that people higher in conspiracism would ‘fill the gaps’ of an ambiguous film with conspiratorial interpretations, and we ran two studies with two different conspiracy-belief scales. In both, the expected link between conspiracism and conspiratorial narrative content simply wasn’t there.”
This is not the first study to determine how cognitive processes influence people believing or not believing in conspiracy theories. In February 2024, The Conversation released a breakdown of numerous studies that traced individual thinking styles to one’s propensity to believe in conspiracy theories.
“Research shows that our thinking style can be predictive of susceptibility to conspiracy theories,” The Conversation explained. “The dual processing theory of cognitive style suggests that we have two routes which we can use to process information.”
The Conversation added, “One route is the fast, intuitive route which leans more on personal experiences and gut feelings. The other route is a slower, more analytical route which instead relies on elaborative and detailed processing of information.” Overall “what you tend to see is that people who are not necessarily smarter but who favour the more effortful, analytical thinking style are more resistant to conspiracy beliefs. For example, a British 2014 study found that those who scored highly for questions such as ‘I enjoy problems that require hard thinking’ were less likely to accept conspiracy beliefs.”
The article added, “It also found those who were less likely to engage in effortful thinking styles and more likely to use intuitive thinking showed a higher belief in conspiracy theories.”
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AN 5 26
President Donald Trump was the first reality TV star to become president, but when it comes to tabloid entertainment entering the White House, he may not be the last — at least according to one expert.
After discussing how former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden recently appeared on Candace Owens' podcast to discuss the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, America’s relationship with Israel and the Charlie Kirk assassination, The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell, an expert on tracking voting patterns, argued that Owens may soon run for president in her Monday post.
To illustrate her point, she quoted a number of voters, such as a Biden-to-Trump North Carolina voter named Mycal who said “I think Candace Owens is great. I would vote for her in a minute.”
Another Biden-to-Trump North Carolina voter, Daniela, wrote that “if we would’ve swapped out Candace for Kamala, they would’ve had this in the bag.”
Similarly a Trump-voting Gen Z woman, Kim from Virginia, adopted the popular far right mantra of claiming persecution for their beliefs.
“ I’m sure I’ll catch a lot of flack for this one, but I am a Candace Owens fan,” Kim told Longwell. “I think she’s a very smart lady. I would be interested to see her give it a shot for sure.”
Meanwhile Nancy from Minnesota said that “ I think Candace Owens would be an awesome president, and if she were to run, I think it would take a lot for me to not vote for her. I would love to see someone like Candace in office.”
Longwell noted that Owens has said that she'll run for president, possibly with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) as her running mate. Yet it is unclear if she is simply trolling or being sincere, although Longwell pointed out that regardless of her intentions, the mere plausibility of her candidacy is instructive.
“It’s become clear in these groups that she is trading some of her mainline MAGA listeners—the kind who supported Trump for his stance on low taxes and traditional gender roles—for the more generally conspiracy-brained,” Longwell wrote. “Anecdotally, there are multiple people in my office whose apolitical family members and friends tune in to Owens for her reality TV takes, and get exposed to her whack-job political analysis in the process. But one person’s whack-job is another person’s fearless truth-teller.”
She added, “The conclusion to draw from my hundreds of focus groups with Trump voters in recent years, is this: Owens has moved from a hero of the ‘MAGA establishment’ to an avatar for a more sprawling and more exotically crazy coalition. Trump’s 2024 victory was largely built on wedding establishment MAGA types who wanted tax cuts, judicial appointments, and mass deportations with the conspiracy theorists who defy neat political categories. That was the reason he allied with RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement. Owens at one point seemed like one of the few figures who could maintain that marriage. And maybe she can. While there are signs that establishment MAGA fans are moving on from her, if she ever chooses to run for office, the exigencies of an election may very well bring them home again.”
After praising Owens for being articulate, savvy in building her base and capable of demonstrating independence from “MAGA proper,” Longwell concluded that Owens’ popularity shows America may one day have Trumpism without Trump.
“We might just end up trading the MAGA movement as it’s currently constituted for an even more deranged and conspiracy-addled one,” Longwell wrote.
Longwell is not the first to note Owens’ rising star power. Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye wrote in March that Owens has capitalized on the assassination of Charlie Kirk to spread conspiracy theories about his widow, Erika Kirk.
"With Kirk's assassination at a Turning Point USA event in Utah last September, the MAGA movement faced a genuine tragedy," Tesfaye wrote. "His widow, Erika Kirk, stepped in to lead the organization. But within weeks, before the grief had even begun to settle, Owens began publicly questioning the circumstances of Kirk's killing and spinning conspiracy theories on her podcast…. What started as insinuation soon metastasized into a serialized spectacle: 'Bride of Charlie,' a multi-episode YouTube series targeting Erika Kirk personally…. In the series, which is still ongoing, Owens hints that Kirk's murder was an inside job, suggests foreign agents may have been involved and implies that Erika Kirk has 'ulterior motives' in leading TPUSA."
Tesfaye added that although "the conservative establishment has, belatedly, tried to fight back against Owens' accusations” against one of their movement’s leaders, they "have largely failed to land a blow.” She added that “the real reason right-wing media cannot stop Candace Owens is that they built her. And, more importantly, they built the engine that fuels her: the machinery of conspiratorial media, which is immune to the tools that might once have contained it.”
Tesfaye concluded, “For decades, conservative media has thrived on a business model that monetizes outrage and distrust. The more outrageous the claim, the greater the engagement. The more distrust sowed toward institutions — universities, media, elections, public health, the FBI — the more loyal the audience becomes."
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U CHIC AGAIN // AOC YT 5 26 IST OF POL
May 6, 2026
The Salem Witch Trials. MK Ultra. JFK was a***ssinated by government operatives. The moon landing was staged. 9/11 was an inside job. COVID was a plandemic. Trump won 2020. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t k*** himself. Birds aren’t real. PizzaGate. QAnon. Climate change. America has always had “conspiracy theories” – but how did they move from the margins of our democracy to the center of power? Where is the line between investigating corruption and buying into conspiracies – and who gets to draw it? Featuring Brace Belden, co-host of the TrueAnon podcast, Christopher Fee, Professor of English at Gettysburg College, and Elise Wang, assistant professor at Cal State Fullerton and researcher of the long history of conspiracy theories. Moderated by Jamelle Bouie, columnist at the New York Times. Co-sponsored by International House.
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05/08/2026
by
- David A. Lieb and Geoff Mulvihill @ The Associated Press: Virginia Supreme Court strikes down Democrats’ redrawn US House maps, giving Republicans a win
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved Democratic congressional redistricting plan, delivering another major setback to the party in a nationwide battle against Republicans for an edge in this year’s midterm elections.
- Nikki Schwab @ The Daily Mail: Marjorie Taylor Greene's journalist fiancé quits Washington to focus on their Trump-free nuptials
Former Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene's journalist fiancé, Brian Glenn, is also quitting Washington.
- Brendan Rascius @ The Independent: Pastor leads wild dedication ceremony for Trump’s giant gold statue at his own golf course
The president himself called into the ceremony to thank the religious leader and guests in attendance.
- David Edwards @ Raw Story: Sean Duffy reveals he took a 7-month road trip for reality show while transportation head
Former Fox News contributor Sean Duffy revealed that he spent seven months making a reality show while serving the country as Secretary of Transportation.
- Hannah Knowles @ The Washington Post: Anti-woke Vivek Ramaswamy confronts racism in his run for Ohio governor
Vivek Ramaswamy built a political brand casting racism as an obsession of Democrats. As a Republican running for Ohio governor, he’s facing racism on the right.
- Zachary Leeman @ Mediaite: Joe Rogan Stunned After Tim Burchett Suggests Would-Be Trump Assassin Was ‘Programmed to Do It’ MKUltra-Style
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) suggested during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the CIA could be behind would-be assassins targeting President Donald Trump.
- Hatewatch: ‘Greater Than’ effort revamps anti-LGBTQ+ junk science against marriage equality
On Jan. 28, the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Them Before Us led the announcement of the “Greater Than” campaign, an effort to repeal marriage equality. The campaign represents an alliance of at least a dozen anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups and other allied organizations to promote the debunked claim that “gay marriage resulted in child victimization.”
- Faithful Politics: Peter Montgomery on the Religious Right and Christian Nationalism
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BOEBERT UFO FALLEN ANGELS // GREGG ---- TELEPORT WAFFLE HOUSE
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AN 5 26
President Donald Trump has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories, from the racist "birther" theory aimed at former President Barack Obama to falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Trump's conspiracy theories have been repeatedly debunked: Obama's birth certificate clearly show that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961 — not in Kenya, as Trump claimed — and one vote recount after another confirmed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square.
Regardless, Trump often doubles down on conspiracy theories despite evidence contradicting them. And according to Salon's Amanda Marcotte, his "addiction to conspiracy theories" keeps coming back to haunt him.
Trump himself has been the subject of conspiracy theories, including claims that the three assassination attempts he survived were staged. Marcotte stresses that while "there is no evidence" that Trump "staged" any of those "high-profile attempts on his life," he has contributed to an environment in which more people are likely to believe bogus conspiracy theories involving him.
"A new survey from NewsGuard shows that 54 percent of Americans are open to the theory that at least one of the attacks was staged, with only 38 percent saying definitively they believe all three were real," Marcotte explains in Salon. "When asked about each separate assault — the 2024 shooting that grazed Trump's ear at a Pennsylvania campaign stop, the arrest of the armed man at the president's West Palm Beach golf course later that year and the recent incident at the White House Correspondents' Dinner — fewer than half said these events were authentic. No one deserves more blame for this state of affairs than Trump himself, and not just because he's spent a decade lying and sowing his own conspiracy theories, giving permission to both his allies and his opponents to take a looser approach to the truth."
Marcotte adds, "Once in a while, a conspiracy theory may be wrong but still manages to channel authentic frustrations. This particular one is false, but its underlying assumptions about the president — that he's a liar, and that he's manipulative, corrupt and politically desperate — are all too real."
Marcotte argues that Trump's "reaction to" the third assassination attempt against him "likely made his political situation worse."
:{:{"He immediately tried to exploit the shooting to tout the need for his garish White House ballroom, an indulgence Americans already disapprove by a two-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll," the Salon journalist observes. "Trump's self-indulgence will only look worse as gas and grocery prices continue to soar for everyday Americans.}:
Republican demands that Americans foot a $1 billion bill for Trump's tacky ballroom have only made it easier for voters to channel their frustrations into this shooting conspiracy theory…. Trump's addiction to conspiracy theories gave him a way to connect with voters who shared similar paranoia and hostility to the reality-based world. But the same mindset is now giving a small but significant number the story they need to turn their backs on the president."}:
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Conspiracy theories have been a part of right-wing politics for many years, but in the past, some prominent conservatives vehemently spoke out against them. National Review founder William F. Buckley, during the 1960s and 1970s, famously condemned the John Birch Society — arguing that their conspiracy theories were bad for the conservative movement.
But during the Donald Trump era, conspiracy theories regularly appear in many right-wing media outlets — including the repeatedly debunked claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
In an article published by on April 27, The New Republic's Michael Tomasky examines the prominent role that conspiracy theories now play in U.S. politics.
"There have been conspiracy theories about presidential assassinations, certainly the successful ones, since forever," Tomasky explains. "John Wilkes Booth, as we know, was part of a conspiracy, a small circle of men and women; but there were some who alleged a wider Confederate plot. It always has been and always will be the case that for some people, normal, factual explanations for large and cataclysmic events will never suffice…. It's always been true. But why does it seem so much worse today? Is it, in fact, worse? Yes, it is."
Tomasky notes that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 has long been the subject of conspiracy theories, and he points out that conspiracy theories come from both the left and the right — for example, the claim that 9/11 was an inside job.
"Both sides have played this game," Tomasky observes. "In some corners of the left, there were, for example, a few conspiracy theories around (President) George W. Bush and September 11 — it was an inside job, the Mossad did it, he knew about it. So, I don't believe and would never say that the left broadly construed is without fault here…. Then there were the conspiracy theories about Barack Obama. The birther theories are only the most obvious in this category…. Remember when (Trump) was going to produce proof that Obama was born in Kenya? He never got around to that, somehow."
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Alex Jones lashes out at comedian Tim Heidecker, who is reportedly set to be new creative director of Infowars
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 04/23/26
The Onion reportedly plans to license Infowars, with comedian Tim Heidecker as creative director. From a report in The New York Times on the future of Infowars:
The Onion plans to turn Infowars into a comedy site with satirical echoes of the fringe conspiracy theories that Mr. Jones is known for. Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially planned to parody Mr. Jones’s “whole modus operandi.”
Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker hopes to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy, he said.
“I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview. During a recent trip to Philadelphia, he traveled to the Liberty Bell to film a video in character as the new creative director of Infowars.
Video
From the April 23, 2026, edition of Infowars' The Alex Jones Show
ALEX JONES (HOST): The creative director that is being brought in from Adult Swim, they say to take over Infowars, which they haven't done yet, but they think the fix is in in this court hearing next Thursday, has put out all this pro-pedophilic, pro-murder of children, really hardcore satanism crap on Adult Swim a decade ago, and since then more.
...
I mean, they've been flipping the switches here, kind of like in 2001 where they're just turning off the HAL 9000. They're just going down the line, so I don't know if we'll even make it to next Thursday.
// MMA
04/23/26 2:16 PM EDT
04/22/26 3:43 PM EDT
04/20/26
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ONION SALE WENT THRU? 4 26 MMA
April 22, 2026, edition of Infowars' *The Alex Jones Show
ALEX JONES (HOST): So, they just say Alex is bullying the parents of dead kids, raised $300 million off while saying I'm raising money off them. Didn't talk about them for almost three years before they sued me. Said three years before I thought it happened, barely ever covered it. Realized it was a setup. The professors, the guys involved, they were working for them.
Oh, yeah. All a big setup. Because they killed those kids with professional shooters, and that's what they don't want coming out. It's in the police reports. There was a pile of kids in the in the bathroom in a pyramid with no blood.
//
07/27/22 3:20 PM EDT
07/23/22 12:44 PM EDT
11/17/16
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MMA
Election deniers push conspiracy theories about primaries in GOP-run Texas
QAnon figure Juan O. Savin: “People were just floored by what was going on” in Texas with the “massive cheating”
Written by Alex Kaplan
:{:{Published 04/20/26}:
Election deniers have been targeting this year’s primary and special elections in Texas, claiming there has been “massive” fraud and cheating.
Attorney Peter Ticktin, activist Linda Szynkowicz, QAnon influencer Wayne Willott, and others who promoted false claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential contest are now claiming on social media and on podcasts that in Texas, votes “got switched,” people used “ghost voting IDs,” and they found “cloned voters.”
For years, right-wing media and politicians have been pushing conspiracy theories about supposed election fraud across the country, and recent claims seem to be part of an apparent effort to undermine the 2026 midterm elections.
Election deniers are now targeting elections in GOP-run Texas}:
- On March 3, the Republican and Democratic parties in Texas held primary elections for various elected offices throughout the state. Among the notable primary wins were Republican Gov. Greg Abbott defeating challenger Pete “Doc” Chambers for the GOP gubernatorial nomination and Democratic state Rep. James Talarico besting U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination. Texas also held a special election in January for what The Texas Tribune reported was a “solidly red Texas Senate seat,” with Democrat Taylor Rehmet winning the seat in a “stunning special election upset.”
Republicans have full control of the Texas government, and a Republican-appointed secretary of state serves as the state's chief election officer.
- ## Election deniers claimed “massive fraud” happened during the recent Texas primary and special elections
- Multiple prominent election deniers have claimed that there was “massive fraud” and “massive cheating” that tainted the Texas primary and special elections and that they “should not be certified.” They pushed a variety of conspiracy theories, claiming votes “got switched,” that there were “ghost voting IDs,” and that they found “cloned voters”:
- During several podcast appearances, Peter Ticktin, an attorney and commentator with a history of promoting election fraud claims, said that “we better start investigating what happened in the Texas primaries.” He invoked a longstanding conspiracy theory that Venezuela is connected to supposed election fraud, saying voting machines somehow controlled by Venezuela switch votes and “this is how they have control of the outcome of the elections.” He also alleged that 21st Congressional District candidate Weston Martinez found “modified duplicates” in the voter rolls after the first day of voting during this year’s GOP primary and later found that the duplicates in the rolls had been “changed to other names” or “they got rid of them because he was on to it.” Ticktin continued, “One way or the other, these machines are now in play picking the candidates … which we are going to be voting for come November.”
A show host asked if the Texas gubernatorial primary was “an Antrim County situation,” referring to a Michigan county where some falsely claimed that machines changed votes in 2020, and asked if votes for Chambers and Abbott “got switched.”
“Our election system is entirely compromised,” Ticktin replied. “The same voter base, the same voter rolls, the same machines can operate on any election in the United States.”
- Fight Voter Fraud Inc. founder Linda Szynkowicz said on her streaming show that in Texas, “they were manipulating the votes as they were coming in the system.”
- Kris Jurski, whom NBC describes as “a Florida activist who has promoted election conspiracy theories,” suggested on social media that his tool to supposedly detect election fraud also found “cloned voters … in Texas’s latest election.”
- Wayne Willott, a QAnon influencer who goes by “Juan O. Savin,” said during a streaming conversation that “people were just floored by what was going on” in Texas with the “massive cheating.” Willott, who has tried to recruit election denial candidates for positions administering elections, suggested “a restart” for Texas’ primaries, pointing in a separate conversation to “massive fraud.”
- :{:{Video}:
Citation
From the March 18, 2026, edition of Nino's Corner, streamed on YouTube
- Harry Haury, whom the LA Times described as a “self-proclaimed cybersecurity expert” with “deep ties to the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement,” said during right-wing podcast Stern American’s“election integrity call” that Texas’ primaries were “a large mess,” with “hundreds of thousands of votes that are attributed to an individual, and then that individual is deleted from the record.”
He said the elections “appear[ed] to be tampered with,” and the state had “not produced an honest or transparent result,” and therefore it “should not be certified.”
- :{:{Video}:
Citation
From the March 18, 2026, edition of Stern American, streamed on Rumble
- On his podcast, election denier Joe Oltmann read a social media post from Chambers alleging fraud in his race and other races in the state, both Democratic and Republican, and Oltmann said that it was evidence of “election fraud” and that “everywhere you turn elections are being stolen.”
- John Case — an attorney for former Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted for allowing unauthorized access to county voting equipment over election fraud claims — claimed during another Stern American “election integrity call” that “Bexar County in the Texas primary” featured “some kind of illegal interference in the list of people who voted.” Case, whom Colorado's The Daily Sentinel described as an “election conspiracy theorist,” has previously claimed that there was a supposed witness who claimed “the software used on Dominion Voting Systems in Colorado has the same basic structure as the Smartmatic software that was used to rig elections in Venezuela.” According to Case, this witness “was a government official in Venezuela whose job was to create the war rooms and situation rooms that were used to monitor the election results and then, when the time was ripe, to inject fake votes into the system so that the government candidate would always win.”
- Additionally, John Eastman, a Claremont Institute senior fellow who crafted a plan for Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election results, claimed on Stern American that a January special election for a Texas state Senate seat featured “ghost voting IDs based on actual voter IDs.”
- ## Yes, this probably sounds very familiar
- Right-wing figures and social media users have cried fraud about other recent elections as well. That includes the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, where Republican Kari Lake lost to now-Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs; the 2021 New Jersey gubernatorial election, where then-Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli; and the 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial election, where now-Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill defeated Ciattarelli.
- ## Why do they keep claiming fraud?
- Some right-wing media figures are calling for new policies and efforts to prevent supposed election fraud ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The Trump administration has pushed the SAVE America Act, which would curtail voting access, and right-wing media claim Democrats oppose it because they are “cheating.”
Trump’s FBI also raided the Fulton County, Georgia, election center as part of a Justice Department probe of the 2020 election, and Trump released an executive order seeking to limit who is eligible for mail-in voting, drawing praise from election deniers. Some of these activists have also drafted and advocated for a “national emergency” executive order to allow a federal takeover of election processes.
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A new study featured in Political Psychology revealed that exposure to opposing political views on social media can paradoxically increase polarization by backfiring, as people double down on their beliefs when encountering disagreement. The research, based on a field experiment with Democrats and Republicans on Twitter, shows that financial incentives to follow bots sharing counter-attitudinal content still led to the reinforcement of partisan attitudes rather than moderation.
Eric Dolan at PsyPost cited the study, noting that identifying those who believe in conspiracy theories can also predict whether an individual endorses specific political rumors, but primarily when those rumors attack their political rivals.
Dolan explained that in previous research, there were two separate ways to predict such beliefs. One is "conspiracy thinking" while the other is belief in their own political wing.
"They usually accept theories that blame their political rivals and reject theories that accuse their own side. The researchers designed this study to see if these two separate factors actually interact with one another," wrote Dolan.
Those who buy into conspiracy thinking have a stronger tendency towards belief when the conspiracy also aligns with the person's own political bias.
"People naturally want to protect the reputation of their own group while assuming the worst about their opponents. Because of this natural bias, the researchers expected that people who are highly prone to conspiratorial thinking would eagerly accept rumors about their rivals," said Dolan.
Study author Omer Yair explained that he has an interest in conspiracy theories within political sects.
“And over the last few years I have read many articles showing that both political preferences, such as party identification, and 'conspiracy thinking' (AKA conspiracy mentality), i.e., people’s tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, independently explain belief in partisan conspiracy theories," he said.
So, he began researching whether a combination of the two could help explain why partisan conspiracy theories became more popular.
"A short search in the literature found no empirical support for such an interaction, so we gathered data from several surveys and found consistent support for our interaction hypothesis," said Yair.
The researchers compared data from six studies, two of which were from the United States political system. It resulted in a sample size of nearly 11,000 participants.
There were 61 conspiracy theories that individuals were asked about, and approximately half were about politics, while 31 dealt with issues like aliens, etc...
The studies all examined a level of conspiracy thinking on a four-question scale. They were asked to rank their agreement with statements such as, "a group of unknown people secretly controls the country," or "major events are the result of hidden plots."
They then used the level of belief in specific theories, combining all of the data to test the relationship between the two.
"The researchers found that general conspiracy thinking strongly predicts belief in political conspiracy theories, but this relationship depends heavily on political alignment. When a theory accused a person’s political rivals of wrongdoing, their underlying tendency to believe in conspiracies strongly activated. In these situations, highly conspiratorial individuals were very likely to believe the rumor," summarized the report.
So, when a conspiracy theory challenges the person's own political party, they're less likely to believe it.
:{:{Yair said that there could be future research done that examines ideas in a more social context that looks specifically at race, gender or nationality.}:
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// boebert hillary hearings
maj report
4 26 gaetz ufo breeding
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colo state rep
Republican Colorado Rep. Scott Bottoms told parishioners at his church Sunday that the FBI was responsible for the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, 9News reports.
“I believe it's the FBI,” Bottoms, who had no evidence to back up his claim, said from the church pulpit, according to 9News. “I’m not talking about the Democratic Party. I’m talking about the people that are controlling our country. The people that have been controlling the FBI, controlling the State Department.”
Bottoms is the pastor at the Church of Briargate in Colorado Springs and is notorious for espousing Q-Anon conspiracy theories and extremist far-right rhetoric. He was elected to represent Colorado Springs in 2022.
Bottoms said Sunday the reason Trump survived the attack is because God protected the former president, 9News reports, and that there will not be an election in November unless Trump is dead. His claims were without any evidence.
“This is just the beginning,” Bottoms said. “They need that man dead.”
Bottoms previously sparked controversy by claiming the FBI facilitated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and by calling his fellow lawmakers “pedophiles,” according to Colorado Politics.
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3 26 CAVED WHEN BUSTED ON PIX TO BJ?
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AN 3 26
New video from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Epstein deposition hearing shows her mocking MAGA Rep. Lauren Boebert to her face for asking a question about a "totally made up" conspiracy theory.
Clinton was questioned in a closed-door hearing in upstate New York last week about her potential connections to the deceased sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, maintaining her stance that she had never met the man before, and had at best maintained a casual acquaintance with his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, also gave a closed-door testimony the following day.
On Monday, clips from Clinton's deposition began to circulate online, showing Boebert's line of questioning about the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory, and the former first lady's withering reaction. One particular clip, four minutes in length, was shared to X by New York Sun reporter Matt Rice.
"Pizzagate" originated amid Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, after conspiracy theorists became convinced that references to "pizza" in leaked emails from her campaign chair, Jon Podesta, were coded references. The spread of the theory led one believer to enter Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, with a loaded gun in search of a basement he thought was used to hide victims, though the property ended up having no basement to begin with.
Despite this conspiracy theory being widely debunked as a complete fabrication, Boebert nonetheless questioned Clinton last week as to whether or not she had seen anything in the newly released Epstein files related to it.
"Have you reviewed any 2025-2026 Epstein files that were released that you believe reference or relate to those specific 2016 claims regarding the Podesta emails, Comet Ping Pong, pizza used as code possibly?" Boebert asked.
After questioning about the nature of Boebert's question and the "wacky Pizzagate scandal" from the former secretary's legal team, Clinton responded: "Pizzagate was totally made up. It was an outrageous allegation that ended up hurting a number of people, that caused a deranged young man to show up with his assault rifle and shoot up a local pizzeria. I can't believe you're even referencing it."
Boebert pressed further with an awkwardly phrased follow-up question about any Epstein investigations post-2019 intersecting with "Pizzagate-style theories about Democrat figures," to which Clinton said, "I have no way of answering [that]." The congresswoman asked another question about Clinton clarifying any content from the Epstein files that may have been misinterpreted in a way that would revive the Pizzagate claims. She insisted that the line of questioning was "reasonable" as Clinton's legal team objected.
Throughout Boebert's series of questioning, Clinton repeatedly grinned and shook her head. Near the end of the video shared online, she appeared to mock Boebert's question.
"I mean really, I expected a lot of interesting questions today, but Pizzagate was not on my list," Clinton said.
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Despite being inundated with criticism, far-right podcaster Candace Owens is doubling down on her attacks on Turning Point USA's (TPUSA) Erika Kirk. Owens is suggesting, without evidence, that Erika Kirk was somehow involved in the fatal shooting of her late husband Charlie Kirk, who founded the MAGA youth organization.
The criticism is coming from both the left and the right. Conservative media figures like The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro (who Owens used to work for) and The National Review's Rich Lowry are calling her out, and liberals and progressives are saying that while they vehemently disagree with Erika Kirk's politics, Owens' YouTube video series "Bride of Charlie" (a play on "Bride of Frankenstein") is a mean-spirited smearing of a widow who lost her husband to gun violence.
Salon's Sophia Tesfaye, in an article published on March 4, argues that "Bride of Charlie" not only underscores Owens' willingness to promote unhinged conspiracy theories — it is also an indictment of right-wing media's business model.
"With Kirk's assassination at a Turning Point USA event in Utah last September, the MAGA movement faced a genuine tragedy," Tesfaye explains. "His widow, Erika Kirk, stepped in to lead the organization. But within weeks, before the grief had even begun to settle, Owens began publicly questioning the circumstances of Kirk's killing and spinning conspiracy theories on her podcast…. What started as insinuation soon metastasized into a serialized spectacle: 'Bride of Charlie,' a multi-episode YouTube series targeting Erika Kirk personally…. In the series, which is still ongoing, Owens hints that Kirk's murder was an inside job, suggests foreign agents may have been involved and implies that Erika Kirk has 'ulterior motives' in leading TPUSA."
Tesfaye notes that although "the conservative establishment has, belatedly, tried to fight back against Owens' accusations" against Erika Kirk, they "have largely failed to land a blow" — as the first episode of "Bride of Charlie" received "nearly 5 million views."
"The real reason right-wing media cannot stop Candace Owens is that they built her," Tesfaye emphasizes. "And, more importantly, they built the engine that fuels her: the machinery of conspiratorial media, which is immune to the tools that might once have contained it. For decades, conservative media has thrived on a business model that monetizes outrage and distrust. The more outrageous the claim, the greater the engagement. The more distrust sowed toward institutions — universities, media, elections, public health, the FBI — the more loyal the audience becomes."
Tesfaye continues, "In December, even as Owens was deep into Charlie Kirk assassination trutherism, Erika Kirk was urging TPUSA audiences to be tolerant of disagreeable views. By the time the right decided Owens had gone too far, she had already built a fully independent operation. The movement that once shielded Owens is now discovering that monsters raised on grievance do not recognize fences. The conservative movement no longer has credible gatekeepers."
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Do you believe in ghosts, mind reading and witches? If you do, you’re likely a kid — or maybe a right-wing authoritarian. New research published in The Journal of Social Psychology suggests that individuals who endorse certain right-wing political ideologies are more likely to believe in paranormal phenomena.
“There have long been speculations that esotericism and beliefs in the paranormal are related to right-wing beliefs,” said Alexander Jedinger, a senior researcher at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, speaking with PsyPost. “There is much research in history and cultural studies on this topic, and of course, there are a lot of references in popular culture to Nazi esotericism, exemplified in movies such as Indiana Jones and Hellboy. However, there was little quantitative evidence on these kinds of relationships.”
Past studies have hinted at a link between right-wing political views and a susceptibility to supernatural thinking, so Jedinger and his partners explored the relationship by examining specific aspects of right-wing ideology. Researchers singled out the trait recognized as “right-wing authoritarianism,” which describes a “preference for strict obedience to authority, conformity to traditional social norms, and hostility toward people who break those norms.”
They also wanted to see if the way people process information could account for any connection. People generally employ two types of thinking: intuitive thinking, which relies on fast gut feelings, and analytical thinking, which involves slow and deliberate reasoning.
“The scientists designed their study to test if this shared thinking style was the main bridge between political ideology and the paranormal.” reports PsyPost. Researchers recruited a sample of 1,139 adult participants and used an online survey with a scale for measuring participants’ willingness to accept paranormal beliefs, including phenomena like “mind reading, witchcraft, lucky charms, ghosts, and astrology.” After separated traditional religious beliefs from paranormal beliefs, they also measured political views by asking respondents to place themselves on a left-to-right political spectrum.
“Those who scored higher in right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation were more likely to endorse paranormal concepts,” PsyPost reports.
And it turned out that the willingness to believe in real witches isn’t necessarily connected to how prone you are to think “with your gut” over analysis. Kooky beliefs were more common among right-wing authoritarians, regardless of how much they relied on analytical thinking over “gut-thinking.”
“Instead, the results showed that right-wing ideology and cognitive styles independently contributed to paranormal beliefs,” PsyPost reports. “Accounting for analytical and intuitive thinking did not substantially weaken the connection between authoritarian or dominance-oriented views and belief in the supernatural.”
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USNWR
Unsubstantiated 'Chemtrail' Conspiracy Theories Lead to Legislation Proposed in US Statehouses
State legislatures are passing bills to ban weather modification and geoengineering based on decades-old “chemtrails” conspiracy theories, moving the fringe theory from online into actual public policy
|
June 8, 2025,
](https://www.usnews.com/)
Unsubstantiated 'Chemtrail' Conspiracy Theories Lead to Legislation Proposed in US Statehouses
Jeff Chiu
FILE - A plane flies over Oakland Alameda Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., April 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — As Louisiana Rep. Kimberly Landry Coates stood before her colleagues in the state’s Legislature she warned that the bill she was presenting might “seem strange” or even crazy.
Some lawmakers laughed with disbelief and others listened intently, as Coates described situations that are often noted in discussions of “chemtrails” — a decades-old conspiracy theory that posits the white lines left behind by aircraft in the sky are releasing chemicals for any number of reasons, some of them nefarious. As she urged lawmakers to ban the unsubstantiated practice, she told skeptics to “start looking up” at the sky.
“I’m really worried about what is going on above us and what is happening, and we as Louisiana citizens did not give anyone the right to do this above us,” the Republican said.
Louisiana is the latest state taking inspiration from a wide-ranging conspiratorial narrative, mixing it with facts, to create legislation. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a similar measure into law last year and one in Florida has passed both the House and the Senate. More than a dozen other states, from New York to Arizona, have introduced their own legislation.
Such bills being crafted is indicative of how misinformation is moving beyond the online world and into public policy. Elevating unsubstantiated theories or outright falsehoods into the legislative arena not only erodes democratic processes, according to experts, it provides credibility where there is none and takes away resources from actual issues that need to be addressed.
“Every bill like this is kind of symbolic, or is introduced to appease a very vocal group, but it can still cause real harm by signaling that these conspiracies deserve this level of legal attention,” said Donnell Probst, interim executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education.
Louisiana's bill, which is awaiting Republican Gov. Jeff Landry's signature, prohibits anyone from “intentionally" injecting, releasing, applying or dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere with the purpose of affecting the “temperature, weather, climate, or intensity of sunlight.” It also requires the Department of Environmental Quality to collect reports from anyone who believes they have observed such activities.
While some lawmakers have targeted real weather modification techniques that are not widespread or still in their infancy, others have pointed to dubious evidence to support legislation.
Discussion about weather control and banning “chemtrails” has been hoisted into the spotlight by high-profile political officials, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Recently, Marla Maples, the ex-wife of President Donald Trump, spoke in support of Florida's legislation. She said she was motivated to “start digging” after seeing a rise in Alzheimer’s.
Asked jokingly by a Democratic state senator if she knew anyone in the federal government who could help on the issue, Maples smiled and said, “I sure do.”
Chemtrails vs. contrails
Chemtrail conspiracy theories, which have been widely debunked and include a myriad of claims, are not new. The publication of a 1996 Air Force report on the possible future benefits of weather modification is often cited as an early driver of the narrative.
Some say that evidence of the claims is happening right before the publics' eyes, alleging that the white streaks stretching behind aircrafts reveal chemicals being spread in the air, for everything from climate manipulation to mind control.
Ken Leppert, an associate professor of atmospheric science at the University of Louisiana Monroe, said the streaks are actually primarily composed of water and that there is “no malicious intent behind” the thin clouds. He says the streaks are formed as exhaust is emitted from aircrafts, when the humidity is high and air temperature is low, and that ship engines produce the same phenomenon.
A fact sheet about contrails, published by multiple government agencies including NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency, explains that the streaks left behind by planes do not pose health risks to humans. However, the trails, which have been produced since the earliest days of jet aviation, do impact the cloudiness of Earth’s atmosphere and can therefore affect atmospheric temperature and climate.
Scientists have overwhelmingly agreed that data or evidence cited as proof of chemtrails “could be explained through other factors, including well-understood physics and chemistry associated with aircraft contrails and atmospheric aerosols,” according to a 2016 survey published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. In the survey of 77 chemists and geochemists, 76 said they were not aware of evidence proving the existence of a secret large-scale atmospheric program.
“It’s pure myth and conspiracy,” Leppert said.
Cloud seeding
While many of the arguments lawmakers have used to support the chemtrails narrative are not based in fact, others misrepresent actual scientific endeavors, such as cloud seeding; a process by which an artificial material — usually silver iodide — is used to induce precipitation or to clear fog.
“It’s maybe really weak control of the weather, but it’s not like we’re going to move this cloud here, move this hurricane here, or anything like that,” Leppert said.
Parker Cardwell, an employee of a California-based cloud seeding company called Rainmaker, testified before lawmakers in Louisiana and asked that an amendment be made to the legislation to avoid impacts to the industry.
The practice is an imprecise undertaking with mixed results that isn’t widely used, especially in Louisiana, which has significant natural rainfall. According to Louisiana's Department of Agriculture and Forestry, a cloud seeding permit or license has never been issued in the state.
Geoengineering
While presenting Louisiana's bill last week, Coates said her research found charts and graphics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on spraying the air with heavy metals to reflect sunlight back into space to cool the Earth.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022 directed the Office of Science and Technology Policy, with support from NOAA, to develop an initial governance framework and research plan related to solar radiation modification, or SRM. A resulting report, which Coates holds up in the House session, focuses on possible future actions and does not reflect decisions that had already been made.
SRM “refers to deliberate, large-scale actions intended to decrease global average surface temperatures by increasing the reflection of sunlight away from the Earth,” according to NOAA. It is a type of geoengineering. Research into the viability of many methods and potential unintended consequences is ongoing, but none have actually been deployed.
Taking focus
In recent years, misinformation and conspiratorial narratives have become more common during the debates and committee testimonies that are a part of Louisiana's lawmaking process.
And while legislators say Louisiana's new bill doesn't really have teeth, opponents say it still takes away time and focus from important work and more pressing topics.
State Rep. Denise Marcelle, a Democrat who opposed Louisiana’s bill, pointed to other issues ailing the state, which has some of the highest incarceration, poverty, crime, and maternal mortality rates.
“I just feel like we owe the people of Louisiana much more than to be talking about things that I don't see and that aren't real,” she said.
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END OF DAYS
Echoes of Conspiracy from Ruby Ridge to Today | Amanpour and Company
1,357 views Feb 12, 2026 #amanpourpbs
The 1992 Ruby Ridge siege was an incident that shocked the U.S. The 11-day armed standoff in the mountains of Idaho between federal agents and the Weaver family ended in three deaths. In his new book "End of Days," Chris Jennings argues that the episode — rooted in apocalyptic, racist and anti-government ideology — helped pave the way for today's conspiracy-driven politics. Jennings joins the show to discuss the legacy of the widely televised event and what it reveals about America today. Originally aired on February 12, 2026
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Solomon Peña, a New Mexico GOP candidate who lost a November election, was arrested as a key suspect in a series of drive-by shootings that specifically targeted Democratic lawmakers’ homes, The Associated Press reports.
Peña suggested that the election was “rigged” after he lost to incumbent state Rep. Miguel P. Garcia by approximately 3,600 votes.
NBC reported in November that many “Republicans fear democracy is in peril because they believe that elections are rigged against them” and that former president Donald Trump’s false claim of voter fraud have encouraged his supporters to “use force or intimidation” — hence the Jan. 6 insurrection. Peña has confirmed in a tweet that he was in Washington, D.C. on the day of the attack.
READ MORE:Law professor’s Jan. 6 takeaway: the 'threat of political violence' is 'far from over'
Later that month, Peña also tweeted a photo of himself wearing a "Make America Great Again" sweatshirt, with the caption "Trump just announced for 2024. I stand with him. I never conceded my HD 14 race. Now researching my options." Around the same time, the 39-year-old Albuquerque resident took it upon himself to show up at the homes of elected officials uninvited, in an attempt to prove that he won the election. Not too long after that, the shootings began on December 4.
Harold Medina, Albuquerque Police Chief called Peña a “mastermind” of a “politically motivated conspiracy” that resulted in the shootings, which occurred at the homes of Bernalillo County Commissioner Adriann Barboas, New Mexico Rep. Javier Martinez, Bernalillo County Commissioner Debbie O’Mally — whose home received “more than a dozen rounds” of bullets — and lastly, New Mexico Senator Linda Lopez, who confirmed that three bullets grazed her 10-year-old daughter’s room.
Peña, although the key suspect, is not the only one. The “failed Republican candidate” paid four other men cash to execute the shootings using stolen cars, although he, himself, did “pull the trigger” in one of the shootings.
A few hours after investigators detected gunfire rippling through Sen. Lopez’s neighborhood, an officer discovered bullet casings in a car driven by Jose Trujillo and registered under Peña’s name. The car contained over 800 fentanyl pills and two firearms.
The New Mexico GOP responded to Peña’s arrest in a statement, saying, “If Peña is found guilty, he must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
More arrests and charges are on the horizon, according to police, and the investigation remains ongoing.
READ MORE:'Not just an aberration': Hillary Clinton blasts the GOP's embrace of calls for political violence
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RWW 2 26
- Mike Rothchild @ Talking Points Memo: Donald Trump Became President By Appealing to Conspiracy Theorists — Now He’s Driving Them Away
Donald Trump may not have been the first president to believe in conspiracy theories, but he was definitely the first candidate whose election was fueled by pandering to those who do.
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NOTE HE NO ~ WACKO
February 4, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Frank, you called this defund the police 2.0. What do you mean by that?
FRANK GAFFNEY (GUEST): Well, as you said earlier, Steve, in 2020 the pretext of the Floyd death was used to mount violent attacks on not just government property and private property but law enforcement personnel. And the result of all of that was this huge effort to blame the police for the problem and say they needed to be defunded.
Well, if that doesn't sound like déjà vu all over again at the moment, I don't know what this is. The law enforcement personnel who are doing their assigned missions as well as they can under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, to say nothing of life threatening circumstances in some cases, are now being told we need to defund them effectively. I mean, whether it's disarming them or simply dismantling any protection that they have from being doxxed and thereby having not only their own lives put at risk but their families.
I mean, the question has to be asked, Steve. Not only is this, you know, defund the police 2.0, who are we thinking are gonna do these jobs under these circumstances? It is just as was the first go round. Predictably the case that you will see people bailing out of ICE, people refusing to work under these job conditions, people making the eminently sensible decision that if they — we don't have their back, they're out of there. And then where are we?
And I just have to say, Steve, I did a commentary this morning, I think you're referring to it, about this being a moment when actually we need ICE more than ever. And it's not just because of the, the so-called worst of the worst, the gang bangers and the drug cartels and this, I'm worried sick about what we are told is multiple divisions worth of Chinese soldiers who were brought in across Joe Biden's open borders.
And what Sam Faddis has just written up at AND magazine, one of his stupendous pieces informed by his own experience in his last duty station at the Central Intelligence Agency where he was responsible for countering weapons of mass destruction terrorism. And he's warning about the second biowarfare laboratory by the same guy who had the first one and possibly they think there may be 20 more of these things.
You put those Chinese soldiers in positions to use bioweapons that, according to Sam, maybe have a mortality rate of 60 to 90%. You're talking about mass destruction of the United States, the population, and that's what the blood of — will be on the hands of these Democrats and some Republicans who are trying to get rid of ICE. We need them more than ever now.
BANNON: They don't care, they'd rather keep the 20 million, that's how they keep power.
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1 26 tulsi ed martin doj 3 grab ga ballots kraken sidney
01/30/26
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rww 1 26
- Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti @ The New York Times: How Trump’s 2020 Election Claims Have Been Debunked Again and Again
The Trump administration has recently escalated its efforts to prove widespread voter fraud in 2020. Election officials and top Republicans have repeatedly said these claims are baseless.
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aha not me LA fires conspr a way of dealing w fear/ world being out of control
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MAGA influencers are suggesting that the United States overthrew Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in retaliation for Venezuela, via election technology companies, purportedly rigging the 2020 U.S. election against President Donald Trump — a false conspiracy theory that the president appeared to endorse following Saturday’s military strikes.
Benny Johnson, a MAGA slop artist with close ties to the Trump administration, claimed on Sunday that “Nicolás Maduro might be Trump's final revenge for the election theft of 2020.”
“Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems were the voting systems being used at this time [in 2020] and in these states and all around the world,” he said. “They are Venezuelan by design and by systems, storage facilities and through their actual technology. These systems, I have on extremely good authority, can and do rig elections around the world.”
Johnson claimed to have a source who says that Maduro “told him directly that he has direct hard evidence of the election of 2020 being rigged, that he knows exactly how it was done, that they had a hand in it, but it wasn't really Venezuela running the op. It was probably more likely China. And that he is in possession of all of that evidence.”
Smartmatic and Dominion have sued several right-wing outlets and activists that promoted conspiracy theories tying the companies to the purported 2020 election theft. Fox News, which currently faces a $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic, ultimately settled a similar suit from Dominion for a record $787.5 million in 2023; filings in the case show that Fox executives and stars privately acknowledged that the election had not been tainted by large-scale fraud, even as the network broadcast false claims tying Dominion to Venezuela and suggesting it had rigged the 2020 vote.
But both companies may be less willing or able to defend themselves as these conspiracy theories reignite. Dominion settled several other suits against Trump allies during its October 2025 purchase by (and at the reported behest of) Liberty Vote, an election technology company helmed by a former Republican official with ties to Trump Justice Department official Ed Martin. The same month, the DOJ indicted Smartmatic for allegedly bribing a Philippines official.
Trump has repeatedly referenced the purported role Venezuela played in his yearslong derangement over the 2020 election he falsely claims was stolen from him — most recently in the early hours of Monday morning.
Amid a stream of posts and reposts on his Truth Social platform suggesting that the 2020 election had been rigged in Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, the president highlighted QAnon influencer Chad Vivas’ claim that “the CIA outsources election rigging technology like Smartmatic and Dominion from Venezuela.” Vivas, known online as “KagDrogo,” suggested it was not “coincidence” that Trump had been promoting claims “about Dominion voting machine fraud” right after Maduro’s capture.
Several right-wing accounts with large followings highlighted Trump’s posts as “confirming” a connection between the U.S. attack on Venezuela and the purportedly rigged 2020 U.S. election.
While Fox hosts largely stayed away from conspiracy theories about election technology companies following the lawsuits, hardcore election deniers like former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell remained fixated on Dominion. In the fall of 2025 — as the Trump administration escalated its pressure on Maduro, surged U.S. Navy ships into the Caribbean Sea, and destroyed boats it alleged were carrying drugs while murdering those onboard — the purported Venezuela connection took on new life.
“There’s never been as necessary a war since the Civil War, that we go down and take care of Venezuela,” Byrne told host Emerald Robinson in an October 7, 2025, appearance on her show on Lindell’s LindellTV network. “It’s more important than World War I or World War II to the viability of the United States. The U.S. was overthrown, and Venezuela’s technology was part of it.”
Allegations of a Venezuelan role in the purported theft of the 2020 U.S. election reportedly jumped from the fever swamp to the hyper-partisan Trump Justice Department. On November 21, 2025, The Guardian reported U.S. attorney for Puerto Rico Stephen Muldrow, “a staunch Republican and Trump supporter,” had been briefed on “the old voting conspiracy and the allegations that Venezuela helped rig elections worldwide” by former CIA officer Gary Berntsen (who claims to have first convinced Trumpist lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani that the 2020 election was stolen) and Venezuelan expatriate Martin Rodil.
Berntsen and author Ralph Pezzullo rehashed the allegations in an interview with far-right podcaster Lara Logan which
that same day. And on November 23, 2025, Trump himself reposted Logan’s post about that interview, commenting, “We must focus all of our energy and might on ELECTION FRAUD!!”
With Trump himself apparently convinced by the conspiracy theory, it seems plausible that the federal government will start putting the screws to Maduro, who appeared in a New York courtroom on Monday alongside his wife to plead not guilty to charges of drug trafficking, to get him to confirm it.
Benny Johnson is already telling his viewers that Maduro will “sing like a canary” about his purported accomplices and “how they stole the election.”
“Who will he give up?” Johnson asked Sunday. “Soros? China? Left-wing NGOs? Left-wing billionaires?”
“He'll sing,” Johnson added ominously. “He'll tell them everything. They got his wife. This is why they took him alive. I learned all this from my conversation, and it really checks out, quite frankly. It really checks out.”
MMA
//
11/25/25 9:58 AM EST
01/21/21 1:40 PM EST
12/01/25
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an 12 25 another reboot see hugo
Next year will be the ten-year anniversary of the so-called "Pizzagate" conspiracy, and one Republican Senator is trying to reignite the lie that inspired at least one gunman.
"Pizzagate" was the conspiracy that claimed Hillary Clinton was involved in a child trafficking ring that was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. The pizza place in question doesn't have a basement, nor did it have any connections to trafficking or trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The Huffington Post's Yashar Ali noticed that Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) reposted a video from "a conspiracy theorist who regularly spreads neo-Nazi propaganda."
The video he reposted came from Ian Carroll, who uploaded it in Jan. 2024. He challenged the claim that reports and fact-checks had officially debunked the "Pizzagate" conspiracy. Clicking on links, he called it "nepotism circles" of news links from "left of center" sites.
Carroll followed the path from Bill Gates giving funding to a fact-checker to Gates taking a photo with Epstein, a sex offender.
"The 'Pizzagate' conspiracy came out way before the Epstein revelations came out," Carroll claimed.
In fact, "Pizzagate" was a 2016 election conspiracy. Epstein was first arrested in Florida in 2006, following complaints that first began in Nov. 2004, the Washington Post reported, citing court documents.
Carroll then makes the leap that Epstein's trafficking of young girls make the conspiracy all the more likely.
"Am I, like, way out of line to say that Epstein is pretty solid evidence that there might be some child trafficking going on with elites?" Carroll asked. "Right? Like, is that too far out there?"
Lee reposted the video nearly two years after the initial video went live, touting those who are merely asking questions.
"What comes to mind first when you hear that mainstream-news media sources have 'debunked' a particular 'conspiracy theory'? I don’t know this guy, but he asks some legitimate questions. Watch the video and see for yourself," Lee wrote
The meme "I'm just asking questions" mocks conspiracy theorists who use the "pseudoskeptical" concept to distort claims under the guise of questions, author and researcher Tim Wise wrote in 2022.
Ali noted that Lee's promotion of Carroll's video perpetuates this false narrative.
"Carroll is a conspiracy theorist who regularly spreads neo-Nazi propaganda. The video Senator Lee is promoting is filled with thoroughly debunked nonsense about 'Pizzagate' and also repeats various lies about public figures. In the past, Carroll has spread neo-Nazi propaganda, including claims about the Rothschilds being involved in the Scofield Study Bible, among other dangerous conspiracies that target Jews," wrote Ali.
The gunman who went to the pizzeria in 2016 was ultimately released from prison after serving four years. Police have since killed the gunman in an unrelated incident.
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return of hugo chavez ghost!
MMA
12/18/25
December 17, 2025, edition of The Benny Show, posted to YouTube
BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): So that's Tucker saying we are going to war tonight. That's what he's saying.
Now the administration has been ramping up a war on the narco-state Venezuela. I didn't vote for a new war. I don't want a new forever war. However, Venezuela is a very bad actor.
As we have said, the number one precursor to, well, punishing Venezuela would be the fact that they rig our elections. That is a matter of fact. I have that from the highest possible sources that Venezuela runs election-rigging operations in our country and in others through their electronic voting machines. I'm telling you, these are extremely serious people who have told me that because they've done the investigations themselves, and they were on Trump's team that hacked the election in 2024.
So did President Trump — is President Trump going to announce that he is going to war with Venezuela tonight? They've obviously been ratcheting up their activity in and around Venezuela, closing down the airspace, seizing tankers. I don't think that America has really, quite frankly, the stomach or appetite for a new war. It was bad enough, the bombing of Iran. And so, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to pray that that doesn't happen. I don't think this is the time for that. What do you think? I mean, I was like — I like — I'm not — I don't think that anybody in MAGA voted for new forever wars or regime change. Nonetheless, Venezuela is a very, very bad actor. You can see, sort of, the drums of war approaching. So we'll hope that there are ways to do this where it doesn't actually lead to boots on the ground. Nonetheless, it is important for us to dominate our own hemisphere, for us to not have bad actors that are poisoning Americans, rigging our elections, and engaging in terrorism across our borders. So this, ladies and gentlemen, is a positive — the collapse of the Venezuelan regime, just I don't want to do it with boots on the ground. Plus I hate communists.
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Who’s afraid of Candace Owens?
A movement built to support Donald Trump can’t cordon off conspiracy theories
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 12/11/25
Long-simmering feuds among right-wing influencers reached a boiling point this week when Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika used an appearance on Fox News to denounce people she said were “making hundreds of thousands of dollars” by pushing conspiracy theories about her husband’s killing. Her plea for those individuals “to stop,” obviously intended for her husband's former colleague, the popular streamer Candace Owens, triggered an outpouring of criticism on the right against “extremists” promoting “hateful conspiracy theories” who had somehow been allowed into the movement.
But in a sign of the durable position such conspiracy theorists hold within the movement — and the immense demand for their work — many of the high-level pundits trying to lay down guardrails did not mention by name either Owens or her primary ally in the MAGA schism, Tucker Carlson.
“The Right’s media apparatus is how the Right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts,” The Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo said in one such salvo. “If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a Third World click farm.”
Can you imagine?
It is patently absurd to claim that right-wing media figures injecting deranged lies into their audience is somehow a new phenomenon. The right is dominated by President Donald Trump, the poster child for “conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts.” And Rufo’s ilk were happy to foster such insanity as long as it was pointed at the left in the service of electing Republicans.
But now the same tools are being turned inward, against other right-wingers, and while they’re furious that this is happening, the apparatus they helped build is so powerful that they are unable to name their foes.
A fight over Charlie Kirk’s legacy — and the Jews
Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel caused a split in a right-wing commentariat otherwise united around Trump. One side includes conservative Jews like Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer, who supported Israel’s subsequent brutal campaign in Gaza and traffic in anti-Muslim invective. On the other side are “America First” figures like Owens and Carlson who both opposed the campaign and used it as an opportunity to revive noxious antisemitic conspiracism. The divide has repeatedly made headlines, particularly in November when Carlson gave a friendly interview to Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist streamer who regularly rails against “the Jews,” who he has claimed “are destroying this country.”
Owens has been claiming since Charlie Kirk’s tragic killing in September that at the time of his death, he was coming around to her view of Israel. Based on that premise (which Kirk allies deny), she has speculated that Kirk may have been assassinated by pro-Israel henchmen worried that he was turning on them, perhaps with help from elements within TPUSA and the U.S. military. These sorts of wild claims are typical of Owens’ oeuvre: She is currently being sued for claiming that the first lady of France is secretly a transgender woman, and has told her followers that she has been targeted for death by an assassination squad composed of French law enforcement and “at least one Israeli.” Her claims have been denounced by the likes of Shapiro and Loomer, but cheered on by Carlson and fellow traveler Alex Jones.
Erika Kirk appeared on Fox’s Outnumbered on Wednesday to address in part what host Harris Faulker described as “hate” and “conspiracies” in the wake of her husband’s death.
“Come after me, call me names, I don't care,” she said. “Call me what you want, go down that rabbit hole, whatever. But…when you go after the people that I love and you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars every single episode going after the people that I love because somehow they're in on this? No.”
“My message to them is to stop — to stop,” she concluded.
Neither Erika Kirk nor Faulkner mentioned Owens’ name. But Owens immediately recognized that the segment had been “about me.” And rather than stopping at the widow’s request, she doubled down.
The Fox segment encouraged other right-wing pundits who typically avoid weighing in on intramovement controversies to speak out — albeit without mentioning who they were talking about.
Fox star Sean Hannity used his radio show on Wednesday to call out online commentators for “saying the most incendiary, outrageous, bizarre, conspiratorial, in some cases, outright racist, white nationalist, virulent antisemitism, and they make money off the, quote, clicks that they can then monetize because, you know, people like the shock value of it.” After praising Erika Kirk’s Fox appearance, he lashed out at “people with no evidence spreading the most vile, hateful conspiracy theories about Charlie's assassination,” calling them “grifters” who are “not MAGA.”
The hosts of Fox & Friends likewise aired Erika Kirk’s remarks and criticized unnamed persons pushing conspiracy theories about her husband’s death on Thursday. “People are making money. They have unsubstantiated theories and are running with it,” Brian Kilmeade said.
MAGA slop king Benny Johnson also posted the video of Erika Kirk going “absolutely SCORCHED EARTH against evil people monetizing Charlie Kirk's death and attacking her family and the families of those close to Charlie and TPUSA,” adding: “Thank God we are finally here. The Demons are Screaming.” He has not mentioned Owens by name on X since posting in April 2024 about a potential Owens/Shapiro debate over antisemitism.
For Fox contributor Hugh Hewitt, meanwhile, this is a tempest in a teapot. Responding to a discussion started by Rufo’s post on Wednesday, he claimed that such (unnamed, of course) “grifters” only have the “illusion of influence,” while “center-right to conservative media is flourishing.” Citing podcasts with relatively small audiences and Fox’s Special Report, “the most watched news show by serious people in the country,” he commented, “A handful of extremists cannot pollute the sea of offerings but it’s still best just to ignore them.”
It is certainly possible in a fractured media environment for a Republican apparatchik with intellectual pretensions to find some voices who will make him feel good about the choices he’s made. But Owens and Carlson both host podcasts on Spotify’s top-10 list, and the latter spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention after shepherding the selection of JD Vance as the next vice president.
The guardrails are gone and all the conspiracy theorists are here
The MAGA movement that everyone on both sides of the divide supported during the 2024 presidential election worships a notorious fabulist who emerged in GOP politics thanks to his role as the nation’s chief birther, reshaped his party around the twin lies that he actually won the 2020 election and that the ensuing January 6 riots by his supporters were righteous, and is constantly lifting up the most noxious online slop imaginable.
Trump’s emergence speaks to both the willingness of mainstream right-wing institutions to accept a conspiracy theorist at the highest level of power, and the eagerness of the right-wing audience to buy the sort of lies he was selling. And his ascension has made it virtually impossible for the resulting movement to draw lines and fully cut loose people who promote deranged falsehoods and bigotries.
Owens and Carlson became right-wing stars by promoting the same types of feverish claims while climbing established institutional pathways. New York magazine detailed Owens’ conspiratorial habits of thinking all the way back in 2016, before her tenure at TPUSA, her nearly 200 appearances on Fox weekday shows over a five year span, or her time as Shapiro’s colleague at The Daily Wire. And Carlson had spent years mainstreaming white nationalist talking points as a Fox host before the network finally showed him the door. The pair assembled loyal audiences thanks to those right-wing institutions, which have found themselves able to take away their jobs but not able to stop viewers from following them to their new spaces.
And Carlson and Owens profited not in spite of their conspiracy theories, but because they fit neatly within a right-wing echo chamber that seemed purpose-built for their generation and propagation. People like Rufo and Hannity were happy to play along with bullshit about Haitian immigrants eating pets or the Democrats assassinating a party staffer when they could use such claims for the benefit of Trump and the GOP. But now that the same habits of mind that made a swath of the right into QAnon adherents are turned inside the tent, they are deeply concerned.
Meanwhile, neither Trump nor Vance seem at all interested in trying to reestablish guardrails. Indeed, their administration is filled with conspiracy theorists seemingly picked for that very reason, indicative of a political movement that is marbled through with crackpots and extremists. And the worst is surely yet to come.
MMA
//
11/14/25 11:40 AM EST
03/22/24 3:27 PM EDT
11/21/23
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AN 12 25
The New Republic’s Jim Geraghty thinks MAGA has gone completely off the deep end with its latest conspiracy theory: that Charlie Kirk is not really dead, placing him alongside figures like Elvis Presley and Tupac Shakur in the pantheon of “still alive” myths.
Writing Monday, Geraghty said the conspiracy is coming from people known for insisting they are “just asking questions,” and added, “I wish I were making that up, but I am not.”
The Manhattan Institute released a report dividing the Republican Party into two groups, a small, "but still sizable faction" with policy beliefs that aren't all that conservative. In fact, they're actually progressive on multiple issues. The report revealed that a "significant" amount of those now believe that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Towers were an "inside job," the moon landing was fake, and stories of the Holocaust are "exaggerated" or never happened.
Far-right commentator Tim Pool welcomed "controversy-courting gadfly" Milo Yiannopoulos on the show where he questioned if Kirk's assassination was real.
“The astronomically inadequate explanations given, in my view, for the actions before, at, and after Charlie’s death and the behavior afterwards from both the federal government and Turning Point executives — you think nothing of his deeply, deeply sinister wife?" he continued.
Former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who was recently pardoned by President Donald Trump, was also on the show, and pressed Yiannopoulos on how Kirk's wife was "sinister."
"Have you seen the difference in the size of her hands with Charlie’s in their wedding pictures, and then compared it to him in his casket?" Yiannopoulos asked.
"Are you saying she’s a man?" Santos questioned.
"No, no. I'm saying that wasn't Charlie in there," Yiannopoulos claimed.
He went on to ask whether Kirk's body was somehow "lost" or "vanishingly slight."
Geraghty compared it to the conspiracy theories that question whether former President John F. Kennedy actually survived the Dallas shooting in 1963.
The columnist also cited a glowing *Wall Street Journal*profile on Pool from July in which they painted the podcaster, his guests "and those like him, represent the new wave of right-of-center voices. They’re the wise minds and leaders on the rise, shaping the discourse and guiding the national conversation."
Geraghty explained, "Poll results like that suggest that Trump has succeeded in attracting two sizable and significant groups to his political coalition: disaffected Democrats who rarely agree with the Republican Party on policy but like Trump’s personal style, and lunatics who doubt that the Holocaust or moon landing happened or that al-Qaeda is responsible for the 9/11 attacks."
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AN 12 25
President Donald Trump went on a bizarre Truth Social posting binge Monday night, as pointed out by many media experts, including Vaughn Sterling, executive producer of "The Source With Kaitlan Collins" on CNN, who wondered "what was going on last night?"
CNN political reporter Aaron Blake posted one of the president's unhinged posts, noting, "Trump last night promoted a post that guaranteed Barack Obama will face a military tribunal."
Meidas Touch co-founder Ben Meiselas posted screenshots of Trump's Truth Social, saying, "Trump has made approximately 400 posts in the past hour which include posts like this."
One of those posts included an interview Meiselas did with former Attorney General Eric Holder and Holder’s call for reforming the Supreme Court.
"Trump demanded that Republicans abolish the filibuster based on what Holder was telling me," Meiselas writes in a Tuesday morning article titled, "Trump Attacks MeidasTouch in Midnight Mental Breakdown."
"Shortly after Trump made the post about MeidasTouch, there was a brief pause, and then he began making new posts every 10 seconds for a full hour, totaling about 400 posts," Meiselas explains.
"His posts included deranged claims that Michelle Obama 'controlled Biden’s autopen' and that Biden’s executive orders were really done by Michelle Obama. Trump posted an AI video claiming Nicolás Maduro surrendered to him and that Trump was now controlling Venezuela, and that Maduro admitted Tren de Aragua confessed [former President Joe] Biden was the leader of their cartel. Trump made posts saying Canada was involved in election rigging. He made bizarre posts about Obama’s weekly 'kill list.' I can go on and on, but you get the point," he adds.
"Trump has posted hundreds of times in the past few hours. It’s a smorgasbord of propaganda e.g. 2020 election lies, blaming Pelosi for J6, calling Democrats seditionists, raging about illegals and Somalis, Biden and the autopen, the Obamas, Ilhan Omar [and] Tim Walz. Total insanity," wrote Andrew—#IAmTheResistance on X.
Liberal influencer Harry Sisson posted a few of Trump's rants on his X account, saying, "These are just some of the over 150 posts Trump put out on Truth Social last night in the span of an hour. Completely insane conspiracy theories. He was clearly having a mental decline episode and was posting whatever came to mind. It’s going to get worse."
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AN 12 25
Slate reports videogames stuff a lot of entertainment into one sandbox, and some of them augment their storylines with every kind of conspiracy imaginable.
The two-decade-old Assassin’s Creed games are peppered with “almost every kind of conspiracy theory you can think of,” reports Joshua Rivera. “In the fiction of Assassin’s Creed, humanity is descended from ancient aliens, and this knowledge is suppressed throughout history; the tide of world events is influenced by a shadow war between two secret societies; the media exists to manipulate the public. This makes for an exciting series of video games with a near-limitless scope. It also echoes uncomfortable real-world conspiracy theories that have proven consequential in our lifetime.”
But how seriously do players take conspiracies that try to rope aliens in with an over-controlling order of the Knights Templar and a “bloodthirsty” Pope Alexander VI — a pope more known for nepotism, unexciting papal decrees and for his reputation as a patron of the arts? Media critic and scholar Cameron Kunzelman tells Slate no more than any other media source.
“Conspiracy exists as a crime that you can be charged with, because conspiracies do exist!” said Kunzelman. “There are groups of people who make decisions together that can impact other people, and they can do that secretly. Seemingly lots of things that are involved in what’s being released right now in the Epstein files are what we would call dyed-in-the-wool, true conspiracy. From human trafficking to much more banal, but just as bad, practices of money moving around and political meetings.”
But Kunzelman said today a wide variety of conspiracies are getting “mashed together” into big ugly “metaconspiracies.”
“Where conspiratorial movements at one time were seen as discrete from one another, now they kind of attach to each other and they get folded into QAnon,” said Kunzelman, whose new book “Everything is Permitted” claims that this massive folding of conspiracies mirrors how entertainment franchises are now built.
But, like zombies and other things that should not exist, they are perpetual motion machines that sometimes keep churning away long after their creators are dead and gone, using the engine of capital “to keep themselves revolving and moving,” said Kunzelman.
But Kunzelman’s book points out that algorithms on things like YouTube and other sites shunt viewers into “harder stuff,” that even our basic entertainment patterns make us minor conspiracy theorists.
“Every part of our lives where we engage with the internet is about putting us in a ditch that leads to another ditch that leads to another ditch,” Kunselman told Slate. “And unfortunately, the scale of that, the allure of that, often leads into things that will harm us in some way. It’ll remove us from our actual communities. It will put us into kind of epistemic places that are only engaged with their own ideas. … whatever happens to you is whatever happens to you.”
Oddly, Kunzelman is one video game enthusiast who thinks platforms that shunt audiences down a rabbit hole need more policing, arguing that we don’t even build open roads without some guardrails.
“I think being a very influential conspiracy-theorist TikTokker is probably on the whole more dangerous than being a drunk driver for an afternoon,” said Kunzelman. “I think it’s harming more people in serious and real ways. But we don’t take it seriously at all. It’s a bipartisan belief that these industries should not be constrained by the law, and by any concern for other human beings. I think that’s bad."
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MMA // FALSE FLAG?
November 24, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Carl Higbie Frontline
CARL HIGBIE (HOST): Folks, don't doubt me on this one. I literally did this in other countries.
But this is just the current lever being pulled. They've been prepping this for 10 years. They've been trying to cast Donald Trump as crazy, unconstitutional or whatever else, trying to create the vulnerability to crack his support. And none of it's true. Here from the manual quote, a vulnerability — it's critical when its exploitation will significantly influence the threat's ability, the threat being Trump — ability to conduct support or operations; operations in this case, meaning carefully convinced young service members that striking a drug boat in international waters might be an illegal order without saying it, because it's not.
Oh, Carl, the military can't — the CIA can't actually be using a psy-ops campaign on the American people. You bet they can.
You ever heard of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948? This actually prohibited the US government from disseminating government-funded propaganda or psychological operations materials on American citizens. Well, the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which was incorporated into the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, signed by president, then Barack Obama, changed that. Specifically, section 1078 — got the receipts, folks. The primary goal was to remove limits to the United States government's ability to counter foreign propaganda. This basically showed the government the ability to influence US public opinion. I mean, don't even get me started on the Patriot Act and how it allowed it to spy on all Americans, but whatever.
So think about this.
If your opinion has gone negative of Trump, especially in the last few weeks, folks, you are likely a victim of a massive psy-ops.
:{:{Trump hasn't changed in the last three weeks. Your opinion might have because of the psy-ops funneled through all these liberal medias because they're the easiest to convince to toe this line because they hate Donald Trump. That's their vulnerability that I just told you about to exploit by people like these six Democrats. They did this with Russian collusion. Hillary Clinton had them open an investigation to legitimize just the claim of it. And after $50 million dollars, they found nothing. They knew there never was anything, that wasn't the point. }:
The point was to convince half the country before an election it was, though. Hunter Biden's laptop, with the 51 former officials saying that it's Russian disinformation. With the Trump very fine people comment where they literally tried to erase the other half of his sentence that said, quote, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis. They should be condemned totally. Covid, oh, and the power grab that followed that as a response. That was a test to see how far they could go and what they could get away with. These are all psy-ops on the American people, straight out — literally verbatim out of the Army field manual.}:
This illegal order campaign that they're running, no different. That is why they need to recall these people to active duty and court martial them for sedition, because the US government right now, via those six Democrats, is treating American citizens like our own enemy combatants.
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an tc 11 25
In recent weeks, Donald Trump’s supporters have begun to align around the idea that a Democrat-led “grand conspiracy” – potentially involving former president Barack Obama – has been plotting against the US president since 2016. The narrative is that the 2016 Russia investigation, which resulted in the Mueller inquiry was part of this deep-state opposition to Trump, as was the investigation into the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.
The focus of the fightback by Trump’s supporters is in Miami, where a Trump-appointed US attorney, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, has begun to issue subpoenas to a wide range of former officials.
This has included former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, former FBI attorney Lisa Page and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, all of whom were involved in the federal investigation into alleged links between Russian intelligence and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The way the so-called conspiracy is unfolding will feel familiar to anyone who has watched US politics closely in the past decade. There’s been a constant stream of allegations and counter-allegations. But the narrative from the Trump camp is that the powerful “deep state” forces have been arrayed against the president. The “two-tier” justice system that has persecuted Trump can only be rebalanced by pursuing those who investigated him in 2017 and 2021.
The Grand Conspiracy contains similarities with other prominent conspiracy theories and how they spread. The QAnon movement, whose most famous claim is of a global paedophile ring run out of a Washington pizza parlour involving senior Democrats, is one where disparate claims are sporadically and partially evidenced. The political potency of these claims does not sit in the individual pieces of evidence but in the overarching story.
The story is that hidden government and proxy networks manipulate the truth and judicial outcomes and that only through pressure from “truthers” (what many people in the US who believe conspiracy theories call themselves) will wrongdoers be brought to account. Once these ideas are popularised, they take on a momentum and a direction that is difficult to control.
Campaign of ‘lawfare’
Soon after his inauguration, Trump set up a “weaponization working group” within the Department of Justice. Its director, Ed Martin, said in May that he would expose and discredit people he believes to be guilty, even if the evidence wasn’t sufficient to charge them: “If they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.”
In the US the norm has been to “charge crimes, not people”, so this modification fundamentally changes the focus of prosecutors.
Former FBI director James Comey responds to his indictment by grand jury in September.
The recent subpoenas in Florida show this principle at work, effectively making legal process into the punishment. Even without full court hearings on specific charges, being forced to provide testimony or documents creates suspicion around those who are targeted. Criticism from legal officials that this is a “indict first, investigate second” method suggests that this is a break from historical norms.
Lawfare, defined as “legal action undertaken as part of a hostile campaign”, doesn’t require a successful prosecution. It merely requires enough investigative activity to solidify a narrative of suspected guilt and enough costs and pressure to seriously inconvenience those affected by it. In the new era of digital media, it’s enough to degrade the standing of a political opponent.
In that way, political retaliation has become a prosecuting objective. This is clear from what the US president has indicated in his frequent posts on his social media platforms for his enemies, such as former FBI director James Comey, who investigated his alleged links to Russia, or Adam Schiff, the senator who led his impeachment in 2019.
Hardball politics or authoritarianism?
Political scientists argue that authoritarianism is something that happens little by little. Some of these steps involve using state power to target political opponents, degrading checks and balances and making loyalty a legal requirement.
There are reasons to believe that the US seems to be tracking this trajectory currently, certainly when it comes to using the Justice Department to harass the president’s political enemies and pushing back against court judgments while attacking the judges that have issued them.
Further slides towards authoritarianism are possible because of the political potency of contemporary conspiracy movements. The right-wing QAnon movement, for example, has been exceptionally agile. It has offered its followers identity, community spaces and a logic that encourages active participation, exhorting believers to “do your own research”, for example.
In the wake of the near daily addition of material from the investigations into the allegations that the late financier, Jeffrey Epstein, ran a sex trafficking ring, involving some influential US citizens, many American citizens have concluded as a general truth that their elites do hide things. This makes it far simpler for broader conspiracies to gain traction and more difficult for politicians and journalists to work out what is conspiracy and what is evidence. This is creating a problematic feedback loop – hints of wrongdoing fuel public suspicion, and public suspicion fuels the idea of a further need for investigation.
But to suggest that anyone has control over this would be wrong. These movements can just as easily consume those seen as supporters as they do those seen as enemies. Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s determination to release the full and unredacted Epstein files could well produce negative outcomes for some Maga supporters, including prominent ones.
So, the transformation of legal process into public spectacle in America is suggestive of a drift towards authoritarianism. America’s famous “constitutional guardrails” of separation of powers, independent courts, juries and counsels will be pivotal in preventing this. They will need to stand firm.
The grand conspiracy theory might be more about seeking to isolate, and financially and emotionally exhaust opponents, while at the same time destroying America’s system of checks and balances. It might work.
Robert Dover, Professor of Intelligence and National Security & Dean of Faculty, *University of Hull
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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MMA
October 31, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Will Cain Show
WILL CAIN (HOST): I hear your affirmative case and I don’t deny your affirmative case. I don’t come to you today — this is not a debate and I would not even classify myself as a skeptic. But I do know that skeptics remain. 25% of our viewers right now remain skeptical, so I wanted to have you address some of those arguments that are the sources of the skepticism.
...
EILEEN COLLINS (GUEST): And by the way, we couldn't have landed on the moon without computers, so we had to have a certain amount of technology. And I’m going to tell you that, you know, I lived through that, I’m very proud of the fact that we had men that were strong, that were risk takers, that were willing to do something that — they went out into an area where there's no air, there's — no one had ever been to the moon before, and now they're taking a tremendous risk to their lives. And years, decades, 50 years later we say didn’t happen? I think that's really an insult to the people that made the Apollo program happen.
CAIN: I totally understand that argument, Eileen, but the point of our conversation is actually to address some of that skepticism and see if it doesn’t hold weight, and the affirmative argument you’re making is one that I find compelling as well. These men were heroes. However, the points — points are still made and they're worth addressing as is always the case in anyone who has a counter argument. It's not the dismissal of the counter argument, it's the response to the counter argument that is powerful.
...
One more thing. Stanley Kubrick — this video's gone around for some time. Stanley Kubrick, the noted filmmaker, he has a video out there that he says he was part of this. He says he helped fake the moon landing. What do you say to Stanley Kubrick?
COLLINS: I had not heard about that but I would like to understand why he would say that the moon landing was faked. I mean, Stanley Kubrick, he made several movies on the space program, "2001: A Space Odyssey," space stations, talked a lot about artificial intelligence and a variety of technologies up in space. So I would say that he more than anyone would know we had the technology and the ability to go to the moon.
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From the October 28, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Carl Higbie Frontline
:{:{CARL HIGBIE (HOST): Yeah, I think every one of those pardons and commutations should be considered void. Just as we said, for the last four years, we were called crazy that there might be even the possibility of a shadow government operating independent of the president — I mean, who appeared to be a vegetable at the time — and all these people said that these investigations were partisan and they were useless and they were a waste of taxpayer — it turns out a so-called conspiracy theorists were right again. These investigations are 100% necessary because why would you wish pardons to people if you didn't think they needed something to be pardoned for?}:
The January 6 committee, at a bare minimum, they deleted the evidence, which is a crime. Worst case scenario, they covered up for the FBI, embedding 274 undercover agents in assets and the crowd that day. Who knows if they were the ones who broke in first, which would make it entrapment, like the FBI did to Gretchen Whitmer's kidnapping case that got thrown out. Covered it up, obviously. They lied about it and then used those investigations to impeach Donald Trump to try to prevent him from running again so that he would never find out about the coup the deep state ran, undermining his entire first presidency.}:
Either way, people should probably go to jail. Doctor Fauci should be buried under the jail for conspiracy against rights. The architect of completely fabricated medical data to remove constitutional rights, like the right to peaceably assemble for, I don't know, church. Oh, and force you to inject an experimental vaccine. Then you got General Mark Milley. Remember, he had discussions with the Chinese counterpart saying that he would warn China if the president was planning any military action. That's like treason to me. Under 18 U.S. Code 2381, reinforcing Article three, Section three of the Constitution. He can be sentenced to death for that. I bet Milley's freaking out right now. And he should be.
:{:{Now, here's a constitutional crisis that this may have actually created, though. Obviously the DOJ should investigate this to the fullest extent of the law. But when these people get hauled in for questioning under oath, how does that go? Because this is unique. Once you've accepted a pardon, you don't have a Fifth Amendment right anymore because that's the right to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination. }:
But if you've accepted that pardon, apparently you can't be incriminated. So what happens if these people — I mean, they have to talk at that point. So what happens if these people disclose information that incriminates themselves in being complicit with a fraudulent pardon? How about did Hunter sell any of those pardons to anyone? Want to ask him that? This has literally never been litigated before. Ever. And the reason it's never been litigated is because no White House was ever arrogant enough to conduct such a fast and loose autopen use procedure.}:
mma
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09/26/23 12:40 PM EDT
10/14/24 3:01 PM EDT
10/23/24
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10/20/2025
by
- Jazmin Tolliver @ HuffPost: Trump Literally Takes A S**t On ‘No Kings’ Protesters In Wild AI Video
Trump took his taunting a step further with weird artificial intelligence videos that took a swipe at his opponents.
- Jonathan Edwards and Dan Diamond @ The Washington Post: White House begins demolishing East Wing facade to build Trump’s ballroom
The president had claimed construction of the $250 million ballroom wouldn’t ‘interfere’ with the existing White House structure.
- Tommy Christopher @ Mediaite: Trump Frees Imprisoned Ex-Congressman In Bombshell Friday Night Commutation
President Donald Trump freed former Congressman George Santos (R-NY) in a stunning Friday night order he announced on Truth Social.
- Hatewatch: Stew Peters promotes antisemitism through Holocaust denial and conspiratorial propaganda
Stew Peters is a far-right conspiracy theorist, propagandist and radio host whose program The Stew Peters Show has become a central hub for antisemitic and conspiratorial content.
- Daniel Lippman @ Politico: Trump nominee says he has a ‘Nazi streak,’ bashes MLK Jr. Day, according to texts
Paul Ingrassia’s bid to lead a whistleblower agency is set for a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday.
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AN 10 25
During a Cabinet meeting Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asserted that “children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, and it’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol.”
President Donald Trump added: “There’s a tremendous amount of proof or evidence. I would say as a non‑doctor, but I’ve studied this a long time.”
A clip from the meeting spread rapidly on social media, with many users reacting to their remarks with disbelief, ridicule and alarm.
Medical authorities have sharply criticized the administration for overstepping scientific validity, warning that simplified claims may mislead patients and cause confusion.
Earlier, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued a statement challenging the secretary's claim and said there is no clear evidence that prudent use of acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) during pregnancy causes autism.
RFK Jr.'s Thursday remarks were criticized by some as "antisemitic."
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) wrote on the social platform X: "This is an antisemitic remark. I call on all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to clearly denounce it."
Matt Bennett, EVP for Public Affairs at Third Way,wrote: "'Circumcision causes autism because of Tylenol' is the weirdest MadLib in the history of presidential cabinet meetings."
Journalist Carla Marinucci wrote: "Did @RobertKennedyJr just suggest 'children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism' presumably because of Tylenol? Again, throwing out wild unsupported theories — irresponsible."
Political organizer Melissa Byrne wrote on X: "Some direct anti-semitism in the Cabinet Room."
Writer Noah Rothman reacted to the news and wrote: "What a sentence."
Author Eric Michael Garcia, who wrote the book We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation,reacted to the remarks and saidin a post on X: "DO I NEED TO WRITE ANOTHER PAPERBACK EDITION OF MY BOOK?"
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PROJECTION
MMA
October 7, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five
JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): It's a lot of conspiracy theories with the left. They're constantly hooked on these conspiracy theories like the COVID came from a wet market. I mean, they take Chinese propaganda and then they just regurgitate it on national television or that Trump is some sort of Russian puppet. They did that for two years. These people are like not in touch with reality at all. And this is coming from me. I like conspiracy theories. I seek them out and they're usually right. And they're usually -- the dumb ones are coming from the left.
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MMA
Why the right-wing media apparatus is suddenly yelling about Jack Smith supposedly spying on GOP senators
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 10/07/25
Republicans and their right-wing media allies yesterday spun out frothy allegations about former special counsel Jack Smith purportedly “spying on Republican senators” in order to forestall tough questions about the state of the Justice Department. But their dark conspiracy theory immediately collapses under scrutiny.
Attorney General Pam Bondi was slated to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday for what seemed fated to be a grueling hearing. Potential avenues for congressional oversight could include the unprecedented weaponization of her department as an extension of President Donald Trump’s will; the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein saga, including the location of the Epstein “client list” she once claimed to possess and a potential presidential pardon for the notorious sex offender’s chief accomplice; and the legal authority for the deployment of the U.S. military on American streets.
But FBI Director Kash Patel, his deputy Dan Bongino, and the stenographers at Fox News were happy to try to help her out of that tough spot. On the afternoon before the hearing, Fox News Digital reported that “former Special Counsel Jack Smith was allegedly tracking the private communications and phone calls of nearly a dozen Republican Senators as part of his investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots.” The October 6 article was based on a document “recently discovered by FBI Director Kash Patel and exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital,” which states that an FBI special agent “‘conducted preliminary toll analysis’ on the toll records associated with” eight senators and one member of the House as part of Smith’s probe, which at the time was called Arctic Frost. The story also included quotes from Bongino, whom the report said would be meeting with the affected members of Congress that day.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, subsequently posted the document on social media, saying that it “shows the Biden FBI spied on 8 of my Republican Senate colleagues.” He added, “BIDEN FBI WEAPONIZATION = WORSE THAN WATERGATE.”
Their allegations were quickly promoted by MAGA media outlets and on Tuesday morning were highlighted by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee as they sought to shield Bondi from criticism.
But legal reporters explained that there’s not much to the story — the FBI needed to review the toll records of senators in order to establish who Trump and his alleged co-conspirators were trying to contact before and during the January 6 insurrection.
Smith’s final report cites such toll records in a footnote for its statement that “at around the same time as he issued his 6:01 p.m. Tweet [telling his supporters occupying the U.S. Capitol to leave], Mr. Trump tried to reach two U.S. Senators, and he also directed Co-Conspirator 1 to call Members of Congress and attempt to enlist them to further delay the certification” of the electoral votes, as MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported.
“It actually seems sort of obvious that if you’re investigating a former president of the United States for trying to subvert an election, you’d probe some of contacts he and alleged co-conspirators had with people he was trying to enlist/pressure to overturn the results,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted.
“In other words, if you start from the premise that the entire probe was political, then seeking lawmakers’ toll records would be inherently bad,” Cheney added. “But if you view the probe as righteous or justified, then it’s not hard to see why those records would be pertinent.”
You won’t have trouble guessing which side the MAGAsphere came down on. Trump gave clemency to all the January 6 defendants, including those convicted of assaulting police and seditious conspiracy, still falsely claims to have won the 2020 election, and clearly believes that the only thing wrong with his election subversion plot was that it was unsuccessful. On Monday, his loyal propagandists at Fox and Newsmax leaped into action to promote the purported FBI bombshell.
On Fox, Newsmax, “stunning” story shows Smith conducted an “enemies list investigation,” is “going to go to jail
Just minutes after Fox News Digital published its story, Fox host Will Cain declared it “pretty stunning.” He went on to claim that Democrats had engaged in “projection when it comes to authoritarianism. But if this doesn't fit the bill, this doesn't fit the definition, what is the definition of authoritarianism?”
His guest, Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX), replied, “This is the quintessential definition of it.”
Later that night, Fox host Jesse Watters claimed that the story shows that “Biden's FBI was spying on Republican senators.”
His prime-time colleague Sean Hannity hosted right-wing journalist John Solomon, who declared that “Arctic Frost is starting to look like an enemies list investigation” and “a really troubling diagram of how the deep state was working under Joe Biden. The FBI, the DOJ working hand and glove to spy, pry, into the lives, the conversations, and the data of Republicans.”
Solomon went on — somehow maintaining a straight face — to accuse the FBI of potentially “intruding on a constitutionally protected event” because, in the time period for which the bureau sought the toll records, Congress had been certifying the election (except when they were evacuated in the face of a violent mob of Trumpists).
Video
Citation
From the October 6, 2025, edition of Fox News' Hannity
The rhetoric was similarly over-the-top in the prime-time hours of Fox competitor Newsmax.
“Jack Smith, bad guy, and I think he's just been busted in something really bad,” host Greg Kelly said at the top of his segment on the report. He described the FBI’s actions as “illegal,” adding, “Jack Smith, I think you’re going to go to jail.”
Fellow host Rob Schmitt didn’t seem to understand what the story was actually about, even as he promoted it to his audience. He told Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), “You had your phone tapped by Jack Smith,” and asked the senator to “illustrate to us how big a deal this is.” Johnson gently corrected Schmitt, saying that investigators had only obtained “metadata,” before claiming that the report “should shock and outrage every American.”
(Newsmax quickly updated its chyron from “FBI: JACK SMITH TAPPED PHONES OF GOP SENATORS” to “FBI: JACK SMITH SNOOPED ON GOP PHONES.”)
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an 9 25
President Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to endorse the idea of “medbeds,” devices long circulated in conspiracy circles that supposedly heal illnesses, reverse aging, or regenerate limbs.
The president’s endorsement came via a video posted to his Truth Social platform, in which an AI-generated version of Trump could be heard saying that “medbed hospitals” would be part of a new health care system in the United States. The video framed the concept as a significant innovation in medical treatment.
“Medbeds” refer to a pseudoscientific theory that a kind of medical bed exists which can diagnose, heal, or reverse disease, aging, or injury in miraculous ways. The concept has gained traction in online communities aligned with QAnon and other fringe groups.
Despite Trump’s presentation, no credible scientific evidence or peer‑reviewed research confirms that any device with the purported medbed capabilities exists. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory bodies do not recognize any device capable of such broad, instantaneous healing.
The video posted by Trump led to strong reactions on social media, including from fact-checkers.
Political analyst Arieh Kovler wrote on the social platform X: "It's not funny; the MedBed stuff is terribly sad. So many people who are dying or watching a loved one fade away, excited that Trump will finally release all the hidden cures and save them in time. Hang around QAnon-type spaces and you'll see them posting. It's heartbreaking."
Dr. Christine Sarteschi, a criminology professor, wrote: "This has to be a joke. Please say it's a joke."
Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur wrote: "I did not know this one but MAGA is about five good years from being described as a mental illness."
Reporter Jack Jenkins wrote: "Wait: so the President of the United States shared a video of a fake news report, rooted in a conspiracy theory, that features an AI-generated version of himself promoting a policy that…doesn’t exist?"
Writer Scott Santens said: "This conspiracy belief picked up steam in 2020 via QAnon and spread through his base. It's easier to believe this shit when society doesn't provide universal healthcare—even in a pandemic—and you live on the edge of medical bankruptcy or death. Now he's feeding their false hope."
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AN 9 25
In their quest for retribution for the slaying of far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk, MAGA is "dragging their allies in government down a rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories," according to an Axiosreport.
Following the FBI's failure to connect Kirk's killer to any left-wing movement or ideology, MAGA, says Axios, is "hungry for a crackdown."
The problem is, Axios says, "its enemy is ill-defined, and its definition of success is wholly unclear. A lack of answers from the Trump administration could leave vast swathes of the base deeply disappointed."
In their desperation for someone or something to point their fingers at, "theories about sprawling 'leftist' networks, accomplices at the scene of Kirk's slaying in Utah, or overseas involvement are being treated as live leads — even in the absence of hard evidence," Axios explains.
One of those conspiracy theories is that Kirk's alleged assassin Tyler Robinson didn't act alone, despite any evidence of any accomplice(s). Another focuses on Robinson'stext messages with his roommate and alleged partner and friends, which conspiracy theorists allege were staged to clear others of any connection to knowledge of the shooting before it happened.
Experts told NBC News that "the Trump administration appears to be using Kirk’s assassination as an excuse to crack down on left-wing people and groups."
"You've got to get to the bottom of these groups, you've got to get to the bottom of antifa, you've got to see if there's any connections to Butler," said "War Room" host and President Donald Trump's first term chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, referring to the 2024 assassination attempt Trump in Pennsylvania.'
"We've got a whole lot of work to do, and no, I'm not buying the script that was in thetext messages," he added.
Axios says that Trump's recent crackdown on the nonexistent antifa — a portmanteau for "Anti Fascist" — is also driving the conspiracy theories, despite the fact that experts say Robinson was anything but an anti-fascist even if he did write "Hey fascist! Catch!" on a bullet casing.
"Robinson is not a central-casting, rabble-rousing, far-left activist. He sounds about as far as you can get from antifa. He drove a Dodge Challenger, for goodness' sake,"quippedthe Daily Beast's David Gardner in an op-ed.
Another suggestion Axios calls "baseless" is that Israel was involved in Kirk's killing, leading to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to release adebunking it, calling it a "monstrous lie." VID]
"Conspiracy theories are an inevitable part of any assassination," Axios says. "But with MAGA's grip on the Trump administration, unproven speculation is being elevated into official policy."
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vaxx big pharma 9 25 watters
rfk looks bad in senate hearings 9 25 on msnbc yt anyway
mma
How right-wing media sow distrust and confusion around vaccines and science
As Florida ends school vaccine requirements and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership comes under fire, the right has repackaged anti-science talking points as well-meaning skepticism
Written by Gideon Taaffe, Isabella Sherk, Jack Wheatley & Jack Winstanley
Published 09/18/25
Amid the rise of the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement, right-wing media figures have employed a variety of tactics that sow doubt and confusion around vaccine efficacy and science more broadly. These efforts to capitalize on existing distrust of public health institutions and pharmaceutical companies have gained renewed momentum following Florida’s elimination of vaccine requirements for schools and comments made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a contentious Senate hearing.
MAHA acolytes have challenged well-studied topics by “just asking questions,” described vaccination requirements as impediments to freedom and parental choice, and exploited post-pandemic mistrust of public health infrastructure and pharmaceutical companies.
The MAHA movement is fueling mistrust in medicine amid a CDC leadership shake-up and Florida's elimination of vaccine requirements
- In early September, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced the state is working to eliminate all vaccine requirements for children in public schools, an announcement which quickly came under fire by doctors and public health experts. In his statement to the public, Ladapo said of vaccines, “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.” The American Medical Association released a statement opposing the move, stating: “This unprecedented rollback would undermine decades of public health progress and place children and communities at increased risk for diseases such as measles, mumps, polio, and chickenpox resulting in serious illness, disability, and even death.” NBC News, [9/3/25; The American Medical Association, 9/3/25]
- After the firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced scrutiny from both sides of the aisle at a contentious Senate hearing where many called for his resignation.Monarez’s firing spurred other top CDC officials to step down and caution the public over the state of the organization’s scientific independence. This, along with criticism for canceling $500 million in funding for mRNA research that produced the lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine, contributed to a dramatic hearing where senators sparred with Kennedy. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who voted for Kennedy’s confirmation, said the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation that only people at high risk for complications and those over 65 need the vaccine effectively denies people access to the shot. NPR, [9/4/25; BBC News, 8/5/25; CBS News,8/28/25]
- At a September 17 Senate hearing, Monarez testified that Kennedy had told her “that the ‘childhood vaccine schedule would be changing starting in September’ and that she ‘needed to be on board with it.’” According to NPR, Monarez told the senators that Kennedy “just wanted blanket approval” adding, “Even under pressure, I could not replace evidence with ideology.” NPR, [9/17/25]
- The New York Times used AI to analyze 38 MAHA figures and organizations featured in around 12,000 videos and podcasts, concluding that these influencers amplify frustration with the health care system to reel viewers in “using wellness content as a trojan horse for conspiracy theories.” The Times noted that some of these figures are using these platforms to sell a product rather than to meaningfully address public health problems like poverty or lack of access to nutritious food and health care. One interviewee who got pulled down the MAHA rabbit hole said, “I thought if my daughter got vaccinated, she would die in her sleep that night.” The New York Times, [9/9/25]
- ## Tactic 1: “Just asking questions” about established science as a means to sow doubt
- Right-wing media figures have presented uninformed, speculative questions about the safety of vaccines as legitimate criticism of the science, saying there’s nothing wrong with “wanting to ask questions” and often presenting their own queries as evidence that established bodies of research should be approached skeptically. In an essay for Big Think, Warren Berger argued that people falsely equate “questioning with critical thinking” and added that conspiracy theorists “act as if their uninformed, speculative questions demand that someone else provide answers.” Kelly Weirich, professor of philosophy at Pierce College, also stated that “while questions technically don’t make claims, they do affirm claims in a subtler way through the assumptions embedded in them.” University of Dayton lecturer Megan Donelson noted that the right’s tactic of “just asking questions” in this way “serves to undermine public trust in science and medicine.”
- Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones attacked Democrats questioning Kennedy, saying, “I guess the most frustrating thing about the entire hearing is there seems to be zero curiosity on why we're such a sick nation.” Jones continued, “I do have some genuine curiosity about the science about each vaccine. And it didn't seem like they were trying to get to the bottom of that or even hear him out.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/5/25]
- Fox & Friendsco-host Brian Kilmeade asked, “When do you give the vaccines? Are you giving them all at once? Does that play into autism?” He claimed that in a few weeks, Kennedy “will announce the cause of autism, or the likely cause, which I think is extremely beneficial for us.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/5/25]
- Jones later said that “there is something wrong with some of the vaccines,” adding that “not all of them are bad, but there are questions that Americans have about it.” He continued, “They should be able to give us answers. But we're not conducting our own studies. We depend on foreign people to do the studies, and there’s questions there.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/8/25]
- OnThe Five, co-host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery claimed, “I disagree with him [Kennedy] on a lot of stuff but at least he makes me think about vaccines.” She added, “I think that is the best thing we can do as a society. And have these honest discussions about how we look and what we are putting in our bodies, and the solutions we are giving our children when we are failing them — when all of these institutions are failing them.” Fox News, *The Five*, [9/4/25]
- Fox host and former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said she doesn’t agree with everything Kennedy says but likes his “healthy skepticism for the science, wanting to ask questions about your children, what we are putting in their bodies.” Fox News, *The Five*, [9/5/25]
- Fox News’ Sean Hannity asked MAHA podcaster Gary Brecka, “Are we overprescribing generally as a society and overvaccinating?” Brecka responded, “We are the most over-medicalized nation in the world,” describing the U.S. as “the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden nation in the world.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [9/4/25]
- Newsmax host Rob Finnerty asked if it's possible that former President Joe Biden is “vaccine-injured” and suggested vaccination caused his cancer. Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [9/2/25]
- Fox News host Laura Ingraham noted that “Kennedy and others have raised questions about the number of new vaccines added to the recommended pediatric schedule.” Citing the supposedly “staggering” increase in recommended vaccinations, Ingraham argued that it “makes total sense” to change COVID vaccine approvals. Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [9/4/25]
- ## Tactic 2: Presenting vaccine requirements as impediments to freedom and parental choice
- Criticisms against public health policy surged at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and rhetoric equating vaccine mandates to government overreach has persisted within the right-wing media ecosystem. The Nations Health, an outlet of the American Public Health Association, has highlighted several recent examples of the “medical freedom movement” undermining public health by removing fluoride from tap water and promoting alternative medicines. Additionally, the new CDC recommendations will make it more difficult for those who wish to get vaccinated for COVID-19, as the vaccines may no longer be covered by insurance companies.
- On his radio show, Fox host Sean Hannity celebrated the Florida mandate rescission, which he claimed was “giving people freedom and giving people choice, which I think is great.” Premiere Radio Network, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [9/4/25]
- Hannity: “Masks may be coming back to California while the free state of Florida is moving to end draconian vaccine mandates for your children in school.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [9/4/25]
- Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson wrote that “vaccine mandates are wrong” and “Florida is absolutely right to remove them,” adding, “Parents should have the final say over kids’ health, not the government.” Twitter/X, [9/4/25]
- Dr. Simone Gold, an anti-vaccine activist and January 6 participant, celebrated the FDA’s move to end Emergency Use Authorization for the COVID-19 vaccine, stating, “Mandates are dead. Freedom wins.” Twitter/X, [8/27/25, ABC News, 6/12/22]
- Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt emphasized parental choice while talking about COVID vaccines, saying, “As a mom, I’m going to decide what my child gets.”Earhardt: “There were a handful of us that didn't want our kids to have the COVID vaccine. That was my choice as a mom, because we interviewed so many kids — the kid who played soccer out on Long Island, who fell and had a heart problem, can’t play anymore, and his parents thought it was because of the vaccine. I just heard so many stories like that, I made the decision for myself.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/5/25]
- ## Tactic 3: Exploiting distrust of public health organizations, experts, and pharmaceutical manufacturers
- The MAHA movement and Kennedy — who according to NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin “seems to assume bad intent among experts” and who has accused public health agencies of “deliberately manipulating the truth” — have seized on a wider sense of mistrust and confusion following the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a report from Politico, “An increasing number of families are projecting their attitudes toward the Covid-19 vaccine onto shots for measles, chickenpox, meningitis and other diseases,” and “parents who were hesitant to vaccinate their children before the pandemic have now been joined by people who think the government mishandled the crisis.” Now, despite evidence suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccine saved millions of lives, Kennedy and his MAHA acolytes are exploiting this distrust in public health institutions to appeal to a base that “felt angered by a lot of early pandemic policies” and “felt betrayed by the government.”
- Fox News contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier claimed, “The CDC lost all credibility throughout the COVID pandemic when they continued to universally recommend the COVID vaccine, even after the science changed.” She continued, “The problem here we have is that all of these vaccines are being lumped as though that they are created equally and they have the same benefit, and the reality is that's not true. So while removing all vaccine mandates for school-aged children is swinging that pendulum from one extreme to the other extreme, truly Americans — and especially our children — deserve more of a nuanced discussion about this.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/4/25]
- Right-wing podcaster Liz Wheeler wrote that fewer people now believe the government should “forcibly vaxx kids” because “70+ shots added to the schedule, an insane epidemic of autism, ADHD, cancer, neurological issues, & autoimmune diseases among CHILDREN.” She continued, “A generation of children have been hurt, and we all know it. If you think Bobby Kennedy doesn’t have America’s support, you’re crazy.” Twitter/X, [9/4/25]
- Wheeler reposted a video of Kennedy onFox & Friendsclaiming the CDC was hiding vaccine safety data from him. She wrote, “I wonder why?” Twitter/X, [9/7/25]
- The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles claimed the CDC “lost their credibility during COVID,” adding, “They lied to us about vaccines.” He continued, “They lied to us about the efficacy of the vaccine. They lied to us about the safety of the vaccine. They lied to us about everything regarding the vaccine.” The Daily Wire, *The Michael Knowles Show*, [9/2/25]
- Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty claimed, “Hundreds of millions of people were forced to get the vaccine” during the COVID pandemic, adding, “People have had adverse reactions to this vaccine we were told was safe that was forced upon us.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [9/4/25]
- TownHall writer Scott Morefield shared a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump in which he asked pharmaceutical companies to “justify the success of their various Covid Drugs,” adding, “This kind of spotlight on the efficacy of the mRNA jabs could cause the whole house of cards to come crashing down.” Morefield celebrated Trump’s post, stating, “I didn’t think Trump’s ego would ever allow him to do this, but he continues to pleasantly surprise me,” and ending with “Bravo!” Twitter/X, [9/1/25]
- Fox News host Jesse Watters questioned the vaccine recommendations for children, saying the “people at the CDC recommending it are at the CDC because the vaccine industry put them there,” and he accused senators of “blindly defending vaccine companies like it's their job.” Watters: “Why does a baby get 18 shots before they are 18 months old? It used to be eight — now it's 18. Why does a kid have 76 shots before they are old enough to vote? We never used to get that many, but the CDC recommends this. And the people at the CDC recommending it are at the CDC because the vaccine industry put them there. Maybe 76 is the right amount. Maybe it could be a little less or a lot less. We don't know. RFK is just trying to get a fresh set of eyes on it and look at the data. And senators are blindly defending vaccine companies like it's their job.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [9/4/25]
- Watters suggested that people advocating for vaccinations are doing so to keep getting “pharma cash.” Watters: “If Kennedy isn’t recommending healthy 18-year-olds get COVID boosters, then there's less pharma cash to spread around to the politicians. If a baby gets eight vaccines instead of 18, less cash to spread around to the politicians. If doctors tell patients to eat healthy and exercise instead of get the fat shot, less cash to the politicians. Same thing with sex changes, diabetes medication, and antidepressants. Did you know that the American Academy of Pediatrics, some of their biggest donors — vaccine makers? Take the COVID vaccine. Nothing they said about the COVID vaccine turned out to be true.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [9/4/25]
- Newsmax's Rob Schmitt described comments from senators questioning Kennedy as “enraged insults from politicians who have either been bribed to protect Big Pharma or those who have fully drunk their Kool-Aid.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight*, [9/4/25]
//
09/09/25 10:09 AM EDT
- ### Fox News championed anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. Now he’s killing research into next-generation vaccines.
08/11/25 9:56 AM EDT
07/09/25
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DEFUND LEFT SOROS PAID PROTESTERS
mma
On the killing of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and the right’s response
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 09/12/25
Charlie Kirk, a powerful right-wing activist, popular podcaster, and close friend and ally to President Donald Trump, was shot and killed while speaking at a college in Utah on Wednesday. Politicians of both parties and commentators across the spectrum, including myself, have responded with condemnations of the act as both the tragic murder of a young husband and father and an act of political violence that must be anathema if we hope to preserve our country as a liberal democracy.
Rational people on all sides of the political spectrum abhor political violence and want to ratchet down the temperature, but this requires an honest assessment of what is happening: There have been far too many cases of political violence in recent years, and the targets are not limited by party, ideology, or creed.
Yet within the right-wing media bubble, long before there was even a suspect in custody, commentators cited Kirk’s killing as proof the left is at war with them. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Thursday called out right-wing pundits who took Kirk’s death “as an opportunity to say we're at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this.” He added: “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you're a leader of a conservative movement.”
Tillis cited two commentators in particular, but such rhetoric has been a staple throughout the right-wing media ecosystem since news broke that Kirk had been shot. It is what right-wing audiences are hearing right now — and what they have been hearing, to one extent or another, for quite some time.
“They are at war with us!” Fox News star Jesse Watters said on The Five, his network’s most-watched show, shortly after Kirk’s passing was announced.
“Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us,” he continued. “And what are we gonna do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just gonna have to ask ourselves.”
“THIS IS WAR,” posted Libs of TikTok. “Civil war,” was Andrew Tate’s take. “This is war,” commented Ian Miles Cheong. “This is a war, this is a war, this is a war,” Alex Jones said on his livestream. According to Steve Bannon, “We are at war in this country.” “We’re not supposed to say this,” posted Shaun Maguire. “But the truth is we’re at War.”
Many on the right were Kirk’s friends and are mourning his death. Some of them may fear for their own safety. But the narrative they have constructed relies on ignoring the recent spate of attacks targeting Democrats, the gruesome contemporaneous response to those attacks from some of the most influential voices on the right, and the chorus of Democratic officials who have condemned Kirk’s assassination.
There is no war, no righteous, violent struggle between a “left” and a “right.” A man was killed. His killer deserves to be brought to justice. Turning that into a “war” can only make the situation worse.
Terrorists have targeted political leaders of both parties
It is not true, as Eric Trump and
both claimed in right-wing media interviews since Kirk’s slaying, that violence is “only going one way,” or, as right-wing radio host Dana Loesch put it on Watters’ prime-time show, that “it's not the right killing the left, it's the left killing the right.”
It seems both pointless and morally inappropriate to try to weigh attacks against one another to determine who has it “worse,” but it’s impossible to have a conversation if we can’t agree that political violence goes both ways.
The ideology of people who attack political figures doesn’t always map neatly onto a political party, in no small part because the assailant typically suffers from some form of mental illness. But Democrats have certainly been the targets of political violence in recent memory: In October 2022, a man broke into the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeking to kidnap her, and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul. In June, an assassin allegedly murdered a Democratic state legislator and her husband and wounded a second and his wife in Minnesota. Last month’s lethal attackon the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by someone who authorities say “wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines” should also be placed in this category.
It’s worth revisiting how right-wing media covered those domestic terror attacks, as it speaks to how its audience likely interprets them in an increasingly fragmented media landscape in which people can pick and choose news sources that confirm their biases.
After a man broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, MAGA influencers claimed based on effectively no evidence that the attacker, who turned out to be a deranged individual steeped in right-wing fever swamp conspiracy theories, had actually been let into the speaker’s house by her husband for the purposes of sex and subsequently attacked him as part of a lovers’ quarrel.
Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo of a pair of briefs and a hammer on a bed with the caption: “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”
For months afterwards, Fox hosts including Watters alluded to such wild claims on their nationally broadcast programs, undeterred by body camera footage from the scene of the attack or basic human dignity.
Prominent MAGA social media influencers likewise responded to the Minnesota shootings by spinning up a false profile of the killer — in reality a Trump supporter who railed against abortion and the LGBTQ community — as a far-left supporter of Gov. Tim Walz. Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich even suggested Walz might have orchestrated the attacks as political hits.
Fox’s right-wing propagandists, meanwhile, all but buried that story. There were no soul-searching reflections about political violence targeting the left on the programs of Watters, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or Greg Gutfeld — instead, discussion on those shows the week after the attacks was limited to correspondent reports and headline reads. The week after the CDC shooting, those programs didn’t cover it at all.
Looking further back, the leading lights of the right-wing media aggressively sought to minimize and sanitize the Trump mob’s assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, and they alternatively blamed “incivility” from the left for a Trumpist sending mail bombs to a host of left-wing and Democratic targets and suggested those attacks were a “false flag.” And that’s to say nothing of other attacks apparently fueled by right-wing extremism that targeted Jewish, Latino, and Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; and El Paso, Texas.
If you downplay right-wing violence against left-wing targets, it’s much easier to convince your viewers that the violence is all going in the other direction.
- ### MAGA wants “the Left” to be “crushed with the power of the state”
While the repeated declarations that they are at “war” with a murderous left are obviously corrosive, there have not been widespread direct calls for retaliatory violence from prominent right-wing media figures. But many are urging President Donald Trump, his administration, and congressional Republicans to respond with widespread political repression of the left and the Democratic Party.
“We can honor him [Kirk] and honor his memory and make it a living thing that we use this to take down the apparatus that's well-funded that is at the core of this anti-Americanism,” Steve Bannon said on his streaming show Friday. “It has to be a all-of-government approach. ... Let's go kick down some doors and perp walk some folks today.”
Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and streamer who has Trump’s ear and regularly gets federal officials fired for insufficient demonstrated fealty to the president, declared Wednesday, “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She later added: “All of the Leftist groups that pay for these radical protests need to be prosecuted. … More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”
MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich demanded “congressional hearings now” on Wednesday, which he said should include “every billionaire funding far left wing extremism,” naming George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman. He also called for “massive RICO investigations now” to scrutinize “every dollar” and tagged Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
Former GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters echoed Cernovich, adding, “Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments” violence, “or it will destroy us.”
Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, posted Wednesday that “the Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization” and “terrorist Democrats will not stop. … And until they are stopped—until every single nutjob inciting this madness and cheering it on is held accountable and removed from civil society—it will not stop.” His outlet published a piece which declared that Democrats “need to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are.”
“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo said. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
YouTuber Benny Johnson claimed that “the modern Democrat party is a terrorist organization” and that the left-wing movement must be “ripped root and stem from our American republic and thrown into the fire where it belongs.”
Some are even suggesting that because the threat to the right is so clear, if Republican leaders don’t respond with such steps, the result will be some on the right taking matters into their own hands.
Davis posted on Thursday that if congressional Republicans don’t take “proper action” to protect “a population being hunted for sport,” then the result would be “improper reaction,” which he described as “a response that cannot be contained once it is out.”
Likewise, Cernovich wrote: “I’m choosing my words mindfully, don’t twist them. This is a prediction, not a preference. If Congressional GOP and Trump don’t act swiftly and ferociously, there will be retaliatory actions due to lawful means not being used. This is always what happens. RICO these fucks now!”
Trump appears to be responding to these demands for political retribution.
- ### The elephant in the room
It is impossible to have a rational conversation about topics like lowering the political temperature and pushing back against the spread of political violence when the president of the United States is interested in those issues only as a cudgel against his political opponents.
On Wednesday evening, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal urged Trump, himself the victim of two assassination attempts, to take advantage of “an opportunity for leadership” by seeking to lower the tenor of political rhetoric.
Any other president would not need to hear such advice — but Trump’s previous responses to attacks on Democratic targets demonstrate his lack of interest in bringing the country together. He mocked the brutal assault against Pelosi, said following the Minnesota shooting that it would be a “waste of time” to call Gov. Tim Walz because he is “so whacked out,” and completely ignored the CDC attack.
In an Oval Office address a few hours after Kirk was killed, Trump characteristically ignored the Journal’s counsel. He offered a testament to Kirk’s life and promised that the shooter, who at that point had not been publicly identified or taken into custody, would be brought to justice.
But he also attributed blame far beyond the person who took Kirk’s life, saying that the “rhetoric” of “the radical left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” He went on to promise that his administration would go after the individuals and organizations he said “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” adding that “radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”
Trump did not name the targets of the action he promised to carry out. But a “straightforward reading of his rhetoric,” as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait noted, is that “the president of the United States is treating the political opposition as accessories to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack it.”
On Friday, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt pointed to “radicals” on both the right and left and asked the president, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”
Trump’s response made clear that he is uninterested in doing so. He excused “radicals on the right” as people who “don’t want to see crime,” saying, “They don't want these people coming in, we don't want you burning our shopping centers, we don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”
“The radicals on the left are the problem, and they are vicious and they are horrible and they are politically savvy,” he added, before running through a litany of grievances with his critics.
That message is echoing across MAGA media, a powerful information apparatus with a rare and unmediated grasp on its audience. It will fuel more vitriol, making it harder, not easier, to have honest conversations and reduce the threat of political violence in this country.
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MMA
9/11 conspiracy theorist Richard Gage says Ron Johnson will keynote his conference
08/22/25
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bunch on list to be invest 8 25 // ~ epstein?
an 8 25
Bulwark writer Will Sommer says President Donald Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr caught flack at a recent Fox News appearance, but the reason for his condemnation couldn’t be less flimsy.
“Why did Fox just bring on traitor Bill Barr? He should be in prison,” posted MAGAinfluencer Gunther Eagleman, while another Trump enthusiast wrote “Bill Barr is on Fox News instead of a prison cell."
Sommer said X accounts and YouTube commenters are demanding Fox ban Barr from its airwaves, and wish him a prison term for treason.
READ MORE: 'That's how this ends': George Conway reveals 'the only way' to stop Trump's 'gangsterism'
“Why the insistence that Barr has committed a criminal betrayal of the country? Naturally, it’s a conspiracy theory,” said Sommer.
“Huge swaths of the right-wing media audience have latched on to allegations that Barr schemed with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and conservative pundit Armstrong Williams to hatch the Georgia criminal case against Donald Trump and 18 other people,” Sommer writes.
The controversy stems from right-wing video producer Project Veritas publishing reports from sole source Patrícia Lélis, who Sommer describes as a ”Brazilian national fugitive wanted by the FBI and last known to be hiding out in Mexico.”
Lélis claims she learned of Barr’s scheme to orchestrate Trump’s prosecutions while working as Armstrong Williams’ employee. Sommer said it does not appear to matter that Merrick Garland — not Bill Barr — was attorney general at the time. Lélis alleges Barr secretly met with Jack Smith and Fani Willis to “hatch plans to bring a RICO case against Trump and more than a dozen other defendants.”
READ MORE: 'Duty to disobey': A stunning number of US troops know they can defy Trump's orders
Project Veritas published three videos focused on Lélis’s allegations, and Sommer said much of the American right have taken her claims “at face value.”
“They’ve been promoted by InfoWars chief Alex Jones, pundit Dinesh D’Souza, and Mario Nawfal, the ubiquitous X personality with more than 2 million followers,” writes Sommer. “Lélis has appeared on online politics streamer Real America’s Voice News, the home of prominent right-wing figures like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk.”
“White nationalist figure” Nick Fuentes cited his own appearance on Bill Barr’s alleged “enemies list” to boost his credibility against allegations that he’s a federal informant, said Sommer.
Lélis’ believers ignore that she accused a Brazilian politician of rape in 2015, only to have police drop the case and request her own arrest, said Sommer, or that police determined her “texts” accusing the son of Brazil’s then-president Jair Bolsonaro of threatening her were forgeries. Sommer also points out that Lélis likely stole the photo of a baby from a social media account and photoshopped her own face onto the mother’s to make Lélis look like a mom.
READ MORE: 'Not looking great out there': Analysts warn this unexpected indicator predicts Trump slump
Still, Sommer reports Project Veritas telling him they stand behind her claims, and they plan more releases from her in the future, despite Brazilians familiar with Lélis being “aghast” at the company treating her like a credible source.
“She is a diagnosed mythomaniac!” one wrote to Project Veritas on X. “For God’s sake.”
Read the full Bulwark report at this link.
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RWW 07/24/2025
by
Claiming to have a source close to high-level Trump administration figures, QAnon conspiracy theorist Scott McKay reports that Hillary Clinton was executed at Guantanamo in 2018, there were 5 or 6 different people playing the role of Joe Biden, and the "fake Obama" is going to be arrested soon. [VID]
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RWW
07/24/2025
by
- Mario Murillo claims that the Trump administration's bogus Obama/Russia conspiracy theory is God's judgment: "God is judging Barack Obama and he's judging Hillary Clinton and I believe it fits a biblical narrative."
- Eric Metaxas asserts that the conspiracy theory is "the most significant political scandal in our history."
- Ryan Helfenbein lays out the biblical "case for mass deportations": "When you import people from certain parts of the Third World, you're bringing in paganism."
- Joshua Haymes thinks that "at our Nation’s founding, it would’ve been unthinkable to elect someone to public office who was openly non-Christian": "Our founders were right."
- Finally, Jon Miller says that if you still support President Donald Trump, "you might be gay, and you might be Jewish with AIDS."
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MMA
July 21, 2025, edition of Stay Free with Russell Brand, streamed on Rumble
RUSSELL BRAND (HOST): It feels like you're saying to a degree — [UNINTELLIGIBLE] I don't even understand this. I can always feel his aura. But that Trump isn’t governing in the way that his mandate — Trump’s not governing in the way that he was elected to govern, whether that’s the, you know, Epstein list, whether that’s the ongoing wars, whether it’s the migrant crisis in spite of his successes at the borders. So aren’t we then starting to, and I recognize that the revelations around Barack Obama and that stuff is exciting, but we all kind of knew that anyway, and maybe it could be regarded as something of a distraction.
…
Even after the election of Trump part 2.0, which seemed like a significant, almost seismic event in American politics. The arrival of Tulsi Gabbard, Bobby Kennedy, all of this stuff. And I know we’re less than a year in. It seems like, maybe, you know, we’re still talking about the same stuff. Foreign aid that’s risible. Foreign aid that’s supporting wars. Relationship with Israel or Jordan — pick a country, pick an enemy, pick an ideological opposition. Waste. B.S. We’re talking about the same things. Media corruption. The same things are happening.
…
REP. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-GA): What’s happening right now is the Republican Party — and they didn’t want to, they more were dragged kicking and screaming into supporting Donald Trump. And now — but they’ve all come in and whether they really truly believe or not, they’re all wearing their MAGA hats and pretending to cheerlead behind him.
But here’s, here’s the warning for the Republican Party. If you can’t — you can’t go out and talk about deep state actors that committed treason and election fraud and rich, powerful, elite cabals if you’re not gonna hold these people accountable. The base is past it. They — That has been red meat that’s been dangled out for years now. I mean, since 2017, we’ve been hearing about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice and Samantha Powers and all these people — James Comey, you know, Brennan, like all these people. But yet if there’s never any accountability, the base is like, “tell me why I should care.” And that’s actually where it’s coming. That’s how, I mean, it’s a dangerous situation to continue to say “these are the bad guys” and then never hold them accountable. But the Republican Party doesn’t realize where they are in the big picture of things. They have an opportunity to actually correct the wrongs and actually to turn the ship around and get the right course going for America, actually care about the American people, turn your policies back to America first. Stop spending so much damn money.
//
Russell Brand calls Trump an “American prophet” who “America needed”
:{:{01/21/25}:
- ### Russell Brand's show on Rumble uncritically platforms right-wing figures and conspiracy theories
:{:{05/01/23}:
01/29/24
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AN THE CONV 725
The Justice Department asked a federal court on July 18, 2025, to unseal grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s case. The direction from President Donald Trump came after weeks of frustration among some far-right groups over his administration’s refusal to release the complete and unredacted “Epstein files.”
Epstein, a wealthy financier with high-profile connections, was arrested in 2019 on sex trafficking charges and later died by suicide in a Manhattan jail awaiting trial.
In early 2025, a federal court unsealed portions of the court documents. While names of some of the alleged clients and victims were released, many were redacted or withheld.
Epstein’s arrest and death became a central focus for QAnon followers, who saw them as proof of a hidden global elite engaged in child trafficking and protected by powerful institutions. The release – or withholding – of the Epstein files is often cited within QAnon movement circles as evidence of a broader cover-up by the so-called “deep state.”
Some followers of the MAGA – Make America Great Again – movement and the Republican Party believe in the false claim that the United States is secretly controlled by a cabal of elites who are pedophiles, sex traffickers and satanists.
Over time, what started as a baseless conspiracy on obscure platforms has migrated into the mainstream. It has influenced rhetoric and policy debates, and even reshaped the American political landscape. The foundational belief of many of the QAnon followers is that Trump is a heroic figure fighting the elite pedophile ring.
Trump’s attempts at downplaying or obstructing the very disclosures they believe would validate their worldview has led to confusion. To some, the delay in the release of the files feels like a betrayal, or even the possibility of his wrongdoing. Others are trying to reinterpret Trump’s actions through increasingly baseless conspiracy logic.
Trump has publicly dismissed demands for the full release of the Epstein Files as a “hoax.” He has also made false claims. On July 15, 2025, Trump said: “And I would say that, you know, these files were made up by Comey. They were made up by Obama.”
As a scholar who studies extremism, I know that the movement views Trump as a mythological figure and it interprets Trump’s actions to fit this overarching narrative – an elasticity which makes the movement both durable and dangerous.
From Pizzagate to QAnon
The QAnon movement began with the Pizzagate conspiracy theory in 2016, which falsely claimed that high-ranking Democrats were operating a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. The baseless theory gained enough online momentum that a man armed with an assault rifle stormed the restaurant, seeking to “free the children.”
In 2017, an anonymous figure called “Q” began posting cryptic messages on message boards like 4chan and 8kun. The baseless accusations of a global network of elites involved in controlling global institutions, including governments, businesses, and the media, as well as operating a child trafficking and ritual abuse, were central to the QAnon movement’s narrative.
The movement has recruited followers through language like “Save the Children,” to mobilize around issues of child trafficking.
Many QAnon adherents, particularly women, were drawn to the movement through such appeals to child protection. According to psychologists Sophia Moskalenko and Mia Bloom, this type of appeal taps into powerful emotional instincts, making conspiracy theories like QAnon more persuasive and harder to dislodge, even in the face of contradictory evidence.
QAnon movement’s rise
QAnon followers perceived Trump as a messianic figure working to expose this cabal in a climactic reckoning known as “The Storm” – a moment when mass arrests would finally bring justice.
They claimed that this moment would eventually bring about a “Great Awakening,” a reference to the religious revivalist movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. In this context the phrase described the supposed political and spiritual enlightenment that would follow “The Storm” – a moment of mass realization when people would “wake up” to the truth about the “deep state.”
In 2019, the FBI identified QAnon as a domestic terrorism threat, and major social media platforms began banning related content, but by then, QAnon had bled into mainstream conservative politics. Q-endorsing candidates, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, ran for and won elected office a year later.
Trump and QAnon
During Trump’s first administration – from 2017 to 2021 – the QAnon movement flourished. The posts from Q claimed to reveal insider knowledge of a secret war being waged by the president, often in coordination with the military, against the powerful elite.
Trump never explicitly endorsed the movement, but he did little to distance himself from it.
His administration also included figures, like former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who openly interacted with Q content online.
Trump’s rhetoric, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, gave new life to QAnon narratives. When he questioned the integrity of the electoral process, QAnon followers interpreted it as confirmation of the deep state’s meddling.
However, after Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race, QAnon followers revised their original prophecy to maintain belief in “The Storm” and “The Great Awakening.” Some claimed the defeat was part of a larger secret plan, with Biden’s presidency serving as a cover for exposing the deep state. Some believed Trump remained the true president behind the scenes, while others reframed the awakening as a spiritual rather than political event.
Indeed, by 2020, several congressional candidates openly embraced or showed sympathy for the QAnon movement. SEE REF
At various campaign rallies in 2022 and after Trump used the movement’s symbolism. On Truth Social, his social media platform, he retweeted Q-affiliated accounts, and praised QAnon supporters as “people who love our country.” That same year he reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin overlaid with the words “The Storm is Coming.”
After the 2020 elections
Trump’s departure from the White House in January 2021 created an existential crisis for the QAnon movement. Predictions that he would declare martial law or arrest Joe Biden and other Democrats on Inauguration Day failed to materialize. Q’s posts also stopped, leaving many followers adrift.
Some abandoned the theory. Others rationalized the failed predictions or embraced new conspiracy narratives, such as the belief that Trump was still secretly in charge or that the military would soon act to reinstate him.
Some QAnon communities merged with or were absorbed into broader anti-vaccine, anti-globalist, and Christian nationalist movements.
How big is the movement?
Estimating the number of QAnon believers is difficult because many individuals do not openly identify with the movement, and those who do often hold a range of loosely connected or partial beliefs rather than adhering to a consistent or uniform ideology. Not everyone who shares a Q meme or echoes a Q talking point identifies as being part of the movement.
That said, surveys by groups like the 2024 Public Religion Research Institute and the Associated Press have found that 15–20% of Americans believe in some of QAnon’s core claims, such as the existence of a secret group of Satan-worshipping elites controlling the government.
Among Republican voters, the number is often higher.
This does not mean all these people are hardcore QAnon adherents, but it does show how far the narrative, or parts of it, has seeped into mainstream thinking.
Epstein as evidence of ‘the cabal’
The Trump administration’s failure to disclose the information in Epstein files has fueled internal confusion, disillusionment and even radicalization within the movement.
For some QAnon believers, this failure was a turning point: if Trump – once seen as the hero in the conspiracy narrative – would not or could not reveal the truth, then the “deep state” must be more entrenched than imagined.
At the same time, frustrations have grown within MAGA and the QAnon movement’s spaces. Some see it as a failure to fulfill one of his most important promises: exposing elite pedophiles. Others believe the delay is strategic, another example of “the plan” requiring more patience.
The QAnon movement continues to evolve, even as its central figure hedges and hesitates, showing how potent myths can be in times of uncertainty. In my view, understanding why this belief continues to gain traction is essential for understanding the current state of American democracy.
Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, *University of Dayton
REF
By Marquise Francis, Yahoo News | January 19, 2020
On the eve of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the combative Georgia Republican known for her association with the fantastical, cultlike QAnon conspiracy theory, was back on Twitter after a 12-hour suspension, and back to making waves and rocking the precarious boat that Republicans find themselves in, having lost the White House and both chambers of Congress.
“I’ve said this all along, it’s people over politicians, not the other way around,” Greene tweeted late Monday night, just hours after her Twitter account was reinstated after it was suspended for violating the social media giant’s policies. “It’s the people of this country that matter. That’s why I’m asking everyone to join me as a Citizen Cosponsor to #ImpeachBiden.”
A rising star among the far-right wing of the party because of her brash, outspoken pro-gun, anti-abortion, stridently conservative views, Greene has most recently found herself at odds with Republican officials, who are alarmed by her record of conspiracy-mongering, bigoted rhetoric and last-stand efforts to undo the election results in her own state.
On Tuesday, Media Matters for America uncovered Facebook posts by Greene from 2018 in which she accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton of encouraging school shootings to push for gun control, calling the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in which 17 people were killed and 17 others injured, a staged “false flag” operation.
“I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control,” Greene wrote.
GOP colleagues have gone out of their way to denounce what one called her “cuckoo” ways.
“She’ll keep making fools out of herself, her constituents, and the Republican Party,” Republican Sen. Ben Sasse from Nebraska wrote in a recent op-ed for the Atlantic, describing Greene as “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”
“If the GOP is to have a future outside the fever dreams of internet trolls, we have to call out falsehoods and conspiracy theories unequivocally. We have to repudiate people who peddle those lies,” he added.
Last summer Republican officials panicked after videos uploaded to Greene’s Facebook account emerged that showed the then candidate making a series of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments. As thousands of Americans across the country were in the streets marching daily on behalf of racial justice in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, Greene was spewing hate. GOP officials attempted to distance themselves from her campaign.
“The comments made by Ms. Greene are disgusting and don’t reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great,” Republican House Minority Whip Steve Scalise said, throwing his support to Greene’s primary opponent, neurosurgeon John Cowan.
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Politico, through his spokesman, that the comments were “appalling” and he had “no tolerance for them.” But McCarthy stayed neutral in the race, choosing to let the primary play out. Greene and Cowan ended up in a runoff, which Greene won.
Some Republican lawmakers then were worried that not enough pushback by national GOP leaders on Greene’s actions would create a firestorm that would not be so easily put out in the months to come.
“This is the kind of race and kind of situation where you need those groups,” said Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., who also supported Greene’s primary opponent. (Her Democratic opponent, who faced long odds in the overwhelmingly Republican district, withdrew before the Nov. 3 general election.) “So often, they only get involved when they have someone that they are trying to get in. But I think it’s just as important they get involved when there’s someone they’re trying to get out.”
Today they’re seeing their fears play out.
Greene, who became the first open supporter of QAnon elected to Congress in November, now uses her growing social media following and access to conservative media organizations like Newsmax and OANN to spread lies and push political propaganda. She plans to file an article of impeachment for Biden on his first full day in office because of “abuse of power,” citing Biden’s alleged family business connections with China and Ukraine, but she has not offered evidence of wrongdoing.
Greene has been somewhat of a loose cannon in recent weeks on Twitter, spreading lies about election integrity in her state and pushing for “all Americans” to “mobilize and make your voices heard in opposition to these attacks on our liberties” in a now deleted tweet archived by ProPublica.
She’s even come down on fellow Republican officials.
“Morons like you are responsible for losing GA’s 2 Republican Senate seats,” Greene tweeted in response to Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling’s assertion that she, former Rep. Doug Collins and President Trump were responsible for the substantial drop-off in Republican voter turnout in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. “You ran a Nov 3rd election that was stolen bc you idiots at the SOS mailed out millions of absentee ballots to any one and everyone while GA was an open state.”
On Sunday, Twitter suspended Greene’s account for 12 hours “for multiple violations of our civic integrity policy,” according to a Twitter spokesperson, which included lying about the elections’ validity.
But Greene’s status among hard-core conservative voters in the party seems secure for the time being. She has gained popularity as a vocal supporter of Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election, and has risen to borderline conservative stardom by openly supporting QAnon, a baseless theory that Trump is fighting a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. The FBI has deemed the conspiracy theory a domestic terrorism threat.
In recent months she’s tried to distance herself from QAnon, but in an earlier video posted to YouTube, which she has since made private, Greene expressed her admiration for the theory. “Q is a patriot,” she said. “He is someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump.”
Yahoo News reached out to Greene for comment, but she has not responded to the request.
Following the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter increased its efforts to purge misinformation and incitements to violence from its site. Last week it deleted more than 70,000 accounts that were used to share QAnon conspiracy theories.
But critics want more accountability.
A MoveOn petition to “Remove Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene” from Congress had garnered more than 40,000 signatures as of Tuesday afternoon.
Boebert is a freshman Republican lawmaker from Colorado who holds many of the same views as Greene, and has also dabbled in QAnon conspiracies. Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, said Monday that he and Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., had both seen Boebert giving a tour of the Capitol to a “large” group ahead of the riot. Boebert denies this.
The petition accuses Greene and Boebert of “dereliction of duty” and “collusion” in the Capitol riot and occupation, which is under investigation by the House.
Some progressive activists are calling for Greene to be held accountable for spreading lies about election fraud.
“Leave aside the results of this latest big lie, that the president and his enablers won an election, leading to an assault of our Capitol. … It’s extremely troubling and dangerous for the underpinnings of our democracy, [which] relies on the way we elect our leaders, and a peaceful transfer of power,” Robert Brandon, president and CEO of Fair Elections Center, a national, nonpartisan voting rights organization, told Yahoo News. “Certainly if there are folks who contributed to that, they should be held accountable.”
In a year that saw record voter turnout, Brandon warns about a rollback in voting rights in the coming months as a result.
“Voter fraud has been talked about for 20 years, but normally as a way to disenfranchise voters,” he added. “We just saw a loosening up of voting options, whether it be mail-in voting or early voting in this year’s elections, and I think we will have an attack on that, starting in states like Georgia.”
University of New Haven associate professor of national security and political science Matthew Schmidt believes Greene’s rhetoric heightens the danger from right-wing extremists.
“The No. 1 national security threat has been domestic extremist groups,” Schmidt told Yahoo News. “It’s not ISIS, it’s not al-Qaida, it’s not Russia, it’s not China. It’s white supremacists and whoever else is attaching themselves onto QAnon. Reps like Marjorie Greene incite these groups. When she repeats these conspiracy theories that have no basis, she gives them validity because she’s an elected official. It’s incredibly dangerous … and has a long-term effect because this information is used to pass down to other generations that people with differing views are wrong and this is how you can act in response.”
Schmidt added that Congress ultimately has the power to hold Greene and others accountable for things they do and say, but acknowledged that it’s a slippery slope to push to limit any form of free speech.
“[The issue] is that this is the intersection of free speech and culpability of a criminal process,” Schmidt said. “Right now you don’t see enough evidence that she has incited a specific act, but … Congress has the capability to set its own rules and its ethics violations. There could be a way Congress could censor its members … using rules violations.”
But Republicans now have to ask themselves: Have they created a monster they can’t control? Greene has already announced her intention to file an article of impeachment against Biden on his first day in office, a stunt certain to get more attention than votes, but which can only enhance the impression of congressional Republicans as being more interested in showboating than in governing — and complicating McCarthy’s hopes of winning a majority in 2022 and becoming speaker of the House.
Republican leaders have faced this situation before — just last year, in fact, when, after years of tolerating the barely concealed racism and bigotry of Rep. Steve King of Iowa, they decided he went too far in an interview in which he questioned what was offensive about the phrase and concept of “white supremacist.”
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From the July 10, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The Briefing with Jen Psaki
In Florida, it seems that one government official isn’t just nodding to the conspiracy theory; he appears to be embracing it. On July 14, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier wrote a letter to all public airports in the state warning them that “injecting our atmosphere” with chemicals for the purpose of influencing the weather is banned and that “violators of this law are guilty of third degree felonies and fines as high as $100,000.” In the letter, he also suggests “weather modification could have played a role” in the Texas floods, and specifically mentions cloud seeding.
These wild claims didn’t come out of thin air. Conspiracy theorists have repeatedly alleged that the government and private companies are creating extreme weather through cloud seeding, a type of geoengineering used to combat drought and enhance precipitation. Some have also claimed that weather monitoring systems are “weather weapons,” and that condensation trails from planes are actually dangerous chemicals.
Proponents of these conspiracy theories include Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has claimed that geoengineering is “probably as dangerous to us as climate change itself” and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who proposed a bill that “prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperate, climate, or sunlight intensity.”
On a July 12 segment of CNN This Morning Weekend, host Victor Blackwell asked Monica Medina, the former principal deputy administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to react to the congresswoman’s claims about weather manipulation and to the EPA’s new webpages. Medina said, “There is nothing about this storm that was controlled by scientific experiments regarding geoengineering. … This kind of disinformation leads people to think that every part of the warning system can’t be trusted at a moment when they have to move quickly."
Video
Citation
From the July 12, 2025, edition of CNN This Morning Weekend
Psaki echoed Medina, pointing out, “There is zero, zero evidence that cloud seeding had anything to do with the Texas floods, and scientists emphasize that this relatively young technology simply cannot produce the kind of rainfall that caused the Texas flooding.”
Indeed, scientists have explained that what conspiracy theorists refer to as “chemtrails” are actually harmless trails of condensation or contrails, and that it’s “extremely unlikely” that cloud seeding could result in a large-scale disaster like the one in Texas.
Despite Zeldin’s confusing messaging, the EPA’s new webpage confirms what we already knew about contrails and says that “EPA is not aware of any scientific evidence that supports any claim that any nefarious activities are taking place.”
Nonetheless, “nod[s] to conspiracy theorists” can have real world consequences. Psaki explained how “in Oklahoma, far-right extremists took credit for damaging a local news station's weather radar, falsely claiming that the technology used to track weather events was actually some kind of weather weapon.”
The station that was attacked linked the event to “rhetoric” from the anti-government group Veterans on Patrol, which also caused chaos during the response to Hurricane Helene last fall.
Conspiracy theories distract from legitimate questions about FEMA’s response in Texas
Psaki contextualized the focus on conspiracy theories by digging into the real issue at play, which is how recent cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency may have hindered the response to the floods.
She covered several contentious findings, including a CNN report that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem created an emergency funding bottleneck by ruling that all expenses over $100,000 have to be directly approved by her.
Psaki also mentioned a Talking Points Memo reportthat Noem canceled “a $3 million grant for improving communications between national and local authorities during natural disasters” even as rescue efforts in Texas were ongoing.
Fox News has pushed back against this type of reporting, lambasting Democrats and the media for connecting the disaster to the Trump administration's policies. But the network not only politicized extreme weather tragedies under former President Joe Biden, in the case of Hurricane Helene, also pushed harmful misinformation that hindered relief operations.
Many factors likely contributed to the tragic impacts of the Texas flood, including decisions made by state lawmakers and local officials, as well as a failure to adequately consider flood maps when building infrastructure. But as Psaki observed at the end of the segment, “This is not how a functioning government responds to crises or prepares to respond to crises, that's for sure.”
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AN 7 25
During the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump not only rallied his hardcore MAGA base — he also reached out to independents and Trump-curious members of the Manosphere. And that included interviews with Manosphere-friendly podcasters like Joe Rogan.
But according to Never Trump conservative Matt Lewis, the controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation may hurt Trump's popularity with the Manosphere.
Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino is accusing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi of an Epstein cover-up and is threatening to resign from his position if Bondi doesn't resign from hers. Trump, however, is sticking by Bondi and urging his supporters to move on from Epstein.
READ MORE: 'I'm done with this': Retiring GOP senator uses profanity in veiled threat to Trump
During a mid-July appearance on "The Jim Acosta Show," Lewis (a columnist for The Hill) told former CNN host Acosta, "Look, I think what's really dangerous for Donald Trump here are the last part of the coalition that kind of came together in 2024 — call them the Manosphere, right? You've got this guy, Andrew Schulz, you've got Joe Rogan, you got Theo Vonn; they were really important for bringing kind of apathetic, non-political people into the Trump fold. I don't think they're partisan hacks."
Acosta agreed with Acosta's analysis, saying, "They liked — they were attracted to Donald Trump by his frat boy antics and his locker room talk…. You're absolutely right. The Manosphere is like… Dude, dude, where's my conspiracy theory?"
Lewis laughed, joking, "I think you just got the title for this YouTube show." And he reiterated his point that Rogan and other Manosphere podcasters are not staunch partisans.
"Absolutely, I think there's a danger that they peel off because they were not, you know, dyed- in-the-wool Republicans," Lewis told Acosta. "And I think, you were talking about how they liked they liked Trump's demeanor. They were also just turned off by the left, you know — by kind of the woke left that told them you can't use this language. You can't call people the R-word. But they're not hacks, you know, and I think they're gonna push back on this one."
READ MORE:'Backfiring badly': A Trump 'ploy' is making things worse for far-right ally
*Watch the full video at this Mediaite link.
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'Veterans on Patrol': Inside MAGA's new assault on reality and bizarre conspiracy theory
Thom Hartmann July 12, 2025
In Oklahoma, a domestic militia calling itself “Veterans on Patrol” is systematically targeting weather radars. Their leader, Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, claims the military is controlling the weather through Doppler radar systems and that these machines are part of a divine affront — a “weather weapon” — that is “mocking God Himself.”
He’s encouraging his followers to sabotage these radars under an operation he calls “Leaning Tower.” This isn’t just fringe paranoia: it’s part of a growing anti-reality insurgency that threatens our democracy itself.
Let’s be blunt: this is insanity. Not just in its content, but in its consequences. And yet, it’s not isolated. It’s one of many conspiracy-fueled campaigns that now animate parts of American life, often backed by violence or intimidation. From QAnon to flat-earth nonsense to vaccine “skeptics” now within the Food and Drug Administration, we’re watching a dangerous erosion of truth, a collapse of shared facts, and an outright assault on the institutions that protect life and liberty.
What’s happening here isn’t just about weather radars: it’s about reality itself.
When people are told not to believe their own eyes, not to trust scientists, doctors, journalists, or even the National Weather Service, society begins to crack. And the people exploiting those cracks — including some of the Trump administration’s most senior officials (see: Bob Kennedy and Stephen Miller, among others) — know exactly what they’re doing.
Veterans on Patrol isn’t just anti-science or anti-government; it’s anti-democracy. It joins a growing list of extremist groups peddling lies and hatred: anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, antisemitic, misogynist, anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim. It wraps its destruction in the flag and cloaks its violence in religion. And when Meyer boasts about being responsible for “a lot more than” taking down a radar, we’d be fools not to take him seriously. Oklahoma, after all, remembers Timothy McVeigh.
This latest attack rendered a critical radar system “instantly obsolete,” according to meteorologist David Payne. That radar was designed to save lives, particularly in tornado-prone Oklahoma. When it’s destroyed, people will die. Period. This is not free speech: this is domestic terrorism.
But here’s the deeper issue: this attack is only a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the deliberate poisoning of the American mind with fantasy and fear by a network and system of media and social media owned by anti-democracy rightwing billionaires and filled with Russian trolls. And when truth dies, democracy soon follows.
Because democracy — as Thomas Jefferson so accurately pointed out (“Whenever the people are well informed, they may be trusted with their own government”) — depends on an educated public operating on the basis of shared truths and actual facts.
You can’t have a functioning republic if half the country believes extreme weather is a “liberal weapon” and the other half knows it’s the result of an atmosphere warmed by fossil fuel emissions. You can’t govern when reality itself is disputed. And you certainly can’t maintain civil peace when people are being radicalized into acts of violence based on complete and utter delusion.
The fossil-fuel-billionaire-funded radical right’s war on truth isn’t new, but it’s accelerating. When lies are repeated often enough, they become gospel to those who want to believe them.
Right-wing media outlets, extremist influencers, and opportunistic Republicans have learned — as Josef Goebbels famously preached — that a lie can be more powerful than the truth when it aligns with grievance, fear, and identity and is repeated often enough.
The problem isn’t just gullibility. It’s that these lies are weaponized. And when they take hold, facts become negotiable, science becomes suspect, and even saving people from storms becomes controversial.
Just look at how the “mainstream media” consistently omits from their reporting on Trump’s tariffs that they’re a clear violation of the Constitution and was explicitly called that in an unanimous decision by the US Trade Court, as Robert Hubbell points out so eloquently.
Or when the media ignores the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 14th amendment violations of ICE’s random, masked, warrantless arrests and incarceration of brown-skinned people, including those with Green Cards at the “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp, along with those with full, court-ordered permission to be here in America.
What does this mean for democracy?
A shattered consensus on truth makes informed voting impossible. If voters can’t agree on basic facts — like whether the atmosphere is heating up or whether a vaccine works — how can they make rational decisions at the ballot box?
The weaponization of delusion breeds violence. Just like the January 6th attack on our Capitol, these radar attacks are fueled by conspiracy and rage. They don’t just damage property, they destabilize the rule of law.
When truth is optional, tyranny becomes inevitable. Autocrats thrive in the fog of misinformation. The more confused and divided a people are, the easier they are to control, thus the daily Trump Reality Show.
Public trust collapses. Scientists, educators, journalists, and public servants all become suspect. That vacuum gets filled by cult leaders, armed militias, and political demagogues.
:{:{Democracy becomes unrecognizable. Without a shared sense of reality, debate becomes pointless, compromise becomes impossible, and elections become battlegrounds instead of ways to determine a rational direction for our shared future.}:
So what do we do?
We fight back with truth. Unapologetically. Loudly. Persistently.
We stand up for science. For journalism. For civic education. For basic decency.
We hold platforms accountable that spread lies, tweak their algorithms secretly to promote anti-democracy messages, and reject the persistent “mainstream media” cowardice of both-sidesism. There aren’t “two sides” to facts. There is reality and there are lies.
We support platforms, networks, media, newsletters, programs, writers, speakers, politicians, and movements that promote the truth and push back against the creeping fascism that is rapidly overtaking our nation.
So we must loudly and persistently call this out for what it is: an attempt — which has so far been successful at destroying democracy in nations like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey — to engage in social and political sabotage. It’s radicalism, a form of domestic terrorism whose target is democracy itself.
And it’s time to say: enough.
Because without truth, we don’t just lose the weather forecast.
We lose our nation.
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MMA 7 25
President Donald Trump appointed conspiracy-obsessed MAGA media favorites to the highest levels of federal law enforcement, and now those figures are coming under fire from the right-wing fever swamp for failing to confirm their bullshit.
Axios reported on Sunday night that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation had concluded that there was no evidence convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “blackmailed powerful figures, kept a ‘client list’ or was murdered.” Those findings repudiated claims that had for years permeated the MAGA influencer ecosystem and been promoted by the stars of Fox News and the broader right-wing media.
The Trump-appointed leaders of both the FBI and DOJ had previously stoked the same conspiracy theories their agencies rejected. “As social media influencers and activists, Kash Patel (now the FBI's director) and Dan Bongino (now deputy director) were among those in MAGA world who questioned the official version of how Epstein died,” Axios noted. Moreover, Attorney General Pam Bondi had claimed in a February interview on Fox News that the purported “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”
While the Epstein saga is a bit of a sideshow in the grand scheme of things, what it highlights about the underlying dynamics of the MAGA movement is deeply unsettling. It demonstrates that the Trump administration is in hock to some of the most deranged conspiracy theorists imaginable, treating them as among its closest allies and devoting substantial resources to their care and feeding.
The White House brought 15 MAGA influencers in to meet with Bondi in February, sending them home with glossy binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” When those binders did not satisfy the MAGA faithful, the attorney general reportedly tasked “hundreds of FBI employees” with reviewing Epstein investigation documents for release. In May, Patel and Bongino were sent to Fox to make the case, with the fervor of the converted, that Epstein had actually killed himself. And now the FBI and DOJ have produced a memo detailing their findings and released footage taken from outside Epstein’s cell in the hours surrounding his suicide.
The final result left Trump’s most zealous online allies with two options: They could finally acknowledge that they had been peddling nonsense for years — or they could insinuate that the Trump administration itself is part of the cover-up.
MAGA’s Epstein conspiracy theorists lash out at Bondi — and even Trump
In the hours after Axios’ story broke, several prominent MAGA influencers took the latter path, hammering the administration for failing to confirm their Epstein hypotheses.
“This new DOJ memo admits there are countless victims of Epstein on video but no client list or evidence of other rapists they can charge. Oh it claims Epstein wasn’t using videos as blackmail,” Robby Starbuck sneered on X. “NO ONE believes this for very good reason.”
Starbuck put the blame squarely on the attorney general.
“Bondi just made it all worse with this memo,” he wrote. “What a terrible, terrible idea it was to write this memo. It’s also incredibly insulting to our intelligence.”
Noting her prior claim on Fox that she was in possession of Epstein’s “client list,” he commented, “Was she lying then or is she lying now?”
Laura Loomer also blamed Bondi.
“Blondi lied,” she posted on X, using the nickname she typically utilizes for the attorney general. “She was always lying.”
Others were less specific about who was responsible for the cover-up.
“We were all told more was coming,” Jack Posobiec lamented. “That answers were out there and would be provided. Incredible how utterly mismanaged this Epstein mess has been. And it didn’t have to be.”
Tim Pool suggested that the administration was protecting “the adult child rapists who were blackmailed” and floated the possibility that they were protecting “shareholder value” from “the economic fallout if say, hypothetically, Bill Gates was revealed to have been flying around with Epstein and then we got videos of him abusing underage girls.”
And Mike Cernovich suggested that the buck stopped with the president.
“No one is believing the Epstein coverup, @realDonaldTrump,” he wrote. “This will be part of your legacy. There’s still time to change it!”
The right-wing media ecosystem is built to manufacture and distribute conspiracy theories to an audience trained to believe them. Under the incentive structure this ecosystem creates, it makes sense that the Trump campaign relied on conspiracy theorists to bolster its position, that Patel and Bongino boosted their standing within that ecosystem by echoing such claims, and that Bondi kept claiming an Epstein reckoning was imminent.
But eventually, the Trump administration trapped itself. Bondi, Patel, and Bongino were unable to produce the information that the MAGA faithful demanded, and they seem unable to convince them the information does not exist. It is the nature of conspiracy theorists to insist that anything which appears to rebut their claims actually confirms it. And now they’re turning on their erstwhile allies.
The truth about Epstein and Trump
One ironic aspect of the Epstein saga is that while MAGA influencers were apparently certain that the Trump administration was going to implicate a wave of prominent individuals in Epstein’s sex crimes and, perhaps, his death, there are few figures as prominent with ties as close to Epstein as Trump himself.
Consider:
- Trump was quoted in a 2002 profile describing Epstein as a longtime friend and “terrific guy” about whom “it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
- Trump was among the politicians and celebrities who hitched rides on Epstein’s private plane in the 1990s.
- In 2019, shortly before Epstein’s arrest on sex charges, longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon prepped Epstein for a potential interview.
- Trump chose for labor secretary in his first term Alex Acosta, who as a U.S. attorney oversaw a sweetheart plea deal for Epstein that a judge later ruled illegal.
- Alan Dershowitz, the Trump supporter who served on the president’s second Senate impeachment trial team, was one of the defense lawyers who helped Epstein secure that plea deal.
- After longtime Epstein associate Ghislane Maxwell was arrested on sex trafficking charges in 2020, Trump told reporters: “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.”
- Trump waffled about whether he would “declassify the Epstein files” during a Fox interview — but the network edited out that portion of his answer.
- Trump appointed as attorney general Bondi, who was “Florida's attorney general 2011-2109 -- a period of time when Jeffrey Epstein's plane records became public, victims' lawsuits were filed and a lot of new evidence against Epstein surfaced –” but she did not take action.
None of this is actually proof that Epstein was killed to cover up the fact that he had possessed evidence that he had sex-trafficked underage girls for Trump. He killed himself, and the idea of a “client list” was, as the reporter who exposed Epstein put it, “a figment of the internet's imagination -- and a means to just slander people.”
But if, say, a similar set of facts linked former President Joe Biden and his associates to Epstein, you can bet that MAGA’s conspiracy corps would treat them as clear evidence. And so it will be interesting to see, as they scrounge for an explanation for the Bondi/Patel/Bongino about-face, if any of them eventually land there.
Why the right’s conspiracy theory engine matters
The Epstein saga is ultimately a minor drama. It is embarrassing for the right that so many of its leading lights pushed the conspiracy theories for so long, and it’s unnerving that some of those conspiracy theorists now occupy the highest levels of government, but on its own terms, the stakes for the public are relatively low.
But this treatment of the Epstein saga is not an anomaly — the right responds in this same fashion to every news event. Its ecosystem is constantly pumping out new conspiracy theories intended to prove the perfidity of the left, its audience is trapped in a bubble in which it is constantly bombarded by such claims, and the consequences can be real and dire.
Following MAGA media’s fervid promotion in September 2024 of the racist, baseless lie that Haitians were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, local institutions received bomb threats and residents kept their children home from school out of fear for their safety.
Officials at all levels of government seeking to respond to a devastating hurricane in North Carolina the next month were forced to spend precious time debunking that ecosystem’s deranged lies because those were the sources some victims counted on for their information.
When the Epstein conspiracy theories are firmly in the rearview, everyone involved in propagating them will retain their influence over a Trump administration that is more concerned with placating them than in acting in the public interest. And that is truly dangerous.
---
---
---
RWW
07/09/2025
by
- Andrew Prokop @ Vox: The right’s meltdown over Jeffrey Epstein, explained
Trump officials say there’s no deeper Epstein conspiracy they can reveal. The right has reacted with fury.
- Nikki McCann Ramirez @ Rolling Stone: Yes, Right-Wingers Are Pushing Conspiracies About the Texas Flood
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has yet to encounter a national tragedy that she won't spread conspiracies about.
- Media Matters: Charlie Kirk on Texas flooding: “What you are not being told by the media anywhere is that the death toll likely would not have been as high if it wasn't for DEI”
"It's not just incompetence. This is DEI working to undermine meritocratic institutions, and more people likely died than otherwise would have because of DEI."
- Jennifer Bendery @ HuffPost: GOP Rep. Weirdly Lies About Helping His State Survive The Medicaid Cuts He Voted For
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) insists he helped get $1 billion for hospitals in his state hit by Trump’s tax bill. Except his governor and state legislature did that.
- Cameron Oakes @ Rewire News Group: Anti-Choice Groups Seek Stricter Rules on Abortion Medication Mifepristone
A July 8 letter asks HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to allow its use only up to seven weeks of pregnancy and in-person, among other changes. The majority of U.S. abortions involve mifepristone.
- Art Jipson @ The Conversation: What is the ‘Seven Mountains Mandate’ and how is it linked to political extremism in the US?
Vance Boelter, who allegedly shot Melissa Hortman, a Democratic Minnesota state representative, and her husband, Mark Hortman, on June 14, 2025, studied at Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas. The group is a Bible school linked to the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.
---
---
rww 6 25 NO KINGS MARCH
06/14/2025
by
Peter Montgomery (https://www.peoplefor.org/spokespeople/peter)
Christian-right media outlets, which function as an unofficial public relations operation (https://americanfaith.com/trump-watch/) for President Donald Trump, set out this week to smear in advance the ‘No Kings’ (https://www.nokings.org/?SQF_SOURCE=peoplefortheamericanway) protests being held across the country on Sat. June 14 to protest Trump’s authoritarianism and defiance of the law and Constitution.
“As America prepares to honor the birthday of President Donald J. Trump on June 14,” began a screed (https://americanfaith.com/exposing-no-kings-anti-trump-machine/) that ran on the right-wing “America Faith” platform and was republished (https://charismanews.com/news/exposing-no-kings-billionaire-funded-anti-trump-machine-gears-up-for-june-14-power-grab/) by the Pentecostal-oriented Charisma News—not even bothering to sustain the official fiction that Trump’s military parade is more about honoring the armed forces than a presidential exercise in self-glorification.
The diatribe was written by right-wing (https://www.ocregister.com/2021/08/22/some-southern-california-church-leaders-pushing-political-extremes/) southern California pastor Phil Hotsenpiller, who founded (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/california-pastor-puts-faith-in-media-with-launch-of-national-news-and-media-network-301334364.html) American Faith after Trump was defeated in the 2020 election.
In this week’s column, Hotsenpiller warned of the “disturbing agenda” of the No Kings rallies: “to crush Donald Trump’s influence, undermine constitutional authority, and destabilize American sovereignty.”
“Let’s be clear,” wrote Hotsenpiller, “this is not about preserving democracy—it’s about preventing Trump from returning to power.”
Huh? Trump has already returned to power and is flagrantly abusing that power. That’s why Americans are rallying to defend the rule of law and the constitutional checks and balances Trump’s team is working so hard to dismantle.
Hotsenpiller spun a conspiracy theory about the “Walton-Weingarten Nexus”—WalMart heiress and philanthropist Christy Walton and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, two “dangerous” women “merging to push a vision of America that looks more like socialist Europe—or communist China—than a constitutional republic.”
“June 14 is not just a protest,” Hotsenpiller ranted. “It’s a declaration of war—against populism, against Trump and ultimately against the America our Founders envisioned.”
While MAGA religious leaders portray themselves as the voice of American Christians, many Christians (https://faithfulamerica.org/) and other faith leaders (https://religionnews.com/2025/06/09/why-religious-communities-are-rallying-behind-the-protest-message-of-no-kings/) are urging (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/my-no-kings-protest-is-a-message-to-donald-trump-and-the-christians-who-support-him/ar-AA1GHMcI?ocid=BingNewsSerp) Americans to participate in peaceful No Kings protests—and have been on the front lines this week protesting the brutality of the administration’s militarized anti-immigrant operations.
Trump has threatened “very heavy force (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-warns-that-military-parade-protesters-will-face-very-heavy-force/ar-AA1GsqtP?ocid=BingNewsSerp)” against anyone who protests his parade. No Kings organizers have not planned an event in D.C., encouraging locals to join a flagship rally in Philadelphia, participate in Virginia or Maryland events, or take part in DC Joy Day (https://freedcproject.org/event-list/dc-joy-day).
American Faith hosted the ReAwaken America Tour, a traveling cavalcade of far-right conspiracies, Christian nationalism, and pro-Trump propaganda. Last year, Hostenpiller’s Influence Church hosted (https://churchleaders.com/news/474506-charlie-kirk-says-seminaries-produce-weak-beta-male-overly-feminine-pastors.html) Christian nationalist MAGA activist Charlie Kirk, who used the occasion to rail against seminaries “infiltrated with wokeism, social justice nonsense” and “overly feminine ‘pastor-men.’” Hotsenpiller has also teamed up (https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/post/sean-feuchts-super-spreader-road-show-returns-to-washington-d-c) with MAGA musician Sean Feucht.
---
---
benny goes false flag
: Mike Lee Is A Real Piece Of Sh*t - by Evan Hurst}:
_Wonkette_
https://www.wonkette.com › mike-lee-is-a-real-piece-of...](https://www.wonkette.com/p/mike-lee-is-a-real-piece-of-sht)
38 minutes ago — Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, Mike Cernovich, they've all lied about Boelter. ... D'Souza tweet with the picture of the “No Kings” fliers ...
Well, folks, they caught the motherfucker. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/suspect-terrorized-minnesotas-political-leaders-deadly-shooting-found-rcna213181) We don’t know exactly what took so long to find the Christian nationalist anti-abortion activist (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/us/politics/minnesota-shootings-gunman-suspect.html) Trump supporter who impersonated a cop and assassinated Democrats in Minneapolis on Friday night, with plans to target many more, but they caught him. Maybe they were just looking the wrong places? We would have checked Republican politicians’ houses first, but that’s just us.
Anyway, they found him in a field.
Again, who this guy Vance Boelter is, it’s not shrouded in mystery, and it’s been out in the open from the beginning. He’s one of them. He’s just a typical Republican voter who decided to assassinate some Democrats. You’d think MAGA would be proud of what it’s wrought. And some of them are, to be sure.
But then there are piece of dogshit Republican senators like Mike Lee who have been lying since the beginning.
(https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feacfbd1f-3904-49ef-ac24-f492e36ca95f_1100x1360.png)caption...
Why so ashamed, bud?
You’d think considering Mike Lee’s (https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/mike-lee-has-embraced-the-politics-of-extremism-and-division-says-evan-mcmullin-151713349872) extremist record, (https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2022/04/21/david-burns-mike-lees/)he might already be lobbying Donald Trump for any extra pardons he’s got lying around for Boelter.
Vance Boelter is a registered Republican. (https://twitter.com/micah_erfan/status/1934270965057257522?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1934270965057257522%7Ctwgr%5E5bf003829b2a908a024720b83fa97b9e91375fb9%7Ctwcon%5Es1&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.joemygod.com%2F2025%2F06%2Fsen-mike-lee-draws-outrage-with-post-on-mn-killer%2F)He’s an anti-gay, anti-abortion pig. (https://twitter.com/micah_erfan/status/1934294414685352184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1934294414685352184%7Ctwgr%5E5bf003829b2a908a024720b83fa97b9e91375fb9%7Ctwcon%5Es1&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.joemygod.com%2F2025%2F06%2Fsen-mike-lee-draws-outrage-with-post-on-mn-killer%2F) He’s a conservative Christian preacher. Basically all the red flag characteristics that say “Here’s a guy you shouldn’t leave your kids alone with,” but that MAGA Americans find godly and manly. Again, why is Mike Lee so ashamed? He has a lot in common with this guy! Surprised they aren’t taking up a collection for this guy’s legal defen
As Tim Miller from The Bulwark notes, (https://www.thebulwark.com/p/maga-push-lies-as-minnesota-shooter)a bunch of Republicans and MAGA conservatives have taken this tack, instead of embracing this guy who is just like them in so many important ways. Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, Mike Cernovich, they’ve all lied about Boelter. Previously (?) Kremlin-funded (https://www.wonkette.com/p/how-did-evil-russians-manage-to-fool) weirdo Benny Johnson claimed (https://www.startribune.com/fact-check-did-vance-boelter-suspect-in-minnesota-shootings-have-close-ties-to-gov-tim-walz/601373519) Boelter was a “left-wing Tim Walz appointee.” Today Benny is rambling (https://www.joemygod.com/2025/06/maga-podcaster-mn-killings-are-leftist-false-flag/) about how the murders are a “leftist false flag.” Also something about “I’m sorry, but these are the same agencies that brought you the Whitmer Fednapping, that brought you January 6, that brought you the Epstein cases, that brought you Ghislaine Maxwell. These are the same people. The
Uhhhh okeydoke. We guess Kash Patel and Pam Bondi are now card-carrying members of the Deep State voices in Benny Johnson’s head community.
Musk tweeted that “the far left is murderously violent.” Laura Loomer said that “Walz’s goons are now assassinating lawmakers who support legislation Walz opposes.” (There’s a whole conspiracy theory they made up surrounding this that involves healthcare legislation in Minnesota, it’s too stupid to type, but you can read it if you want. (https://www.startribune.com/fact-check-did-vance-boelter-suspect-in-minnesota-shootings-have-close-ties-to-gov-tim-walz/601373519))
:{:{How Did Evil Russians Manage To Fool Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, AND Benny Johnson? Wow!}:
\Evan Hurst (https://substack.com/profile/9485412-evan-hurst)
·
September 5, 2024
\Read full story (https://www.wonkette.com/p/how-did-evil-russians-manage-to-fool)](https://www.wonkette.com/p/how-did-evil-russians-manage-to-fool)
Mike Lee also had another tweet about it that said “Nightmare on Walz Street.” Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno — another Republican dude with a lot in common with Vance Boelter (https://www.wonkette.com/p/sherrod-browns-gross-republican-opponent) — tweeted this, a retweet of another right-wing liar connecting “No Kings” fliers found in Boelter’s car with Randi Weingarten and teachers unions somehow.
(https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11f52827-9f70-4094-a58e-153aca68c51f_1158x1874.png)
He hasn’t removed it. None of the posts and tweets we’re referencing in this post have been removed.
[
Sherrod Brown's Gross Republican Opponent Pretty Sure Women Over 50 Too Old To Vote On Abortion
\Evan Hurst (https://substack.com/profile/9485412-evan-hurst)
·
September 24, 2024
\Read full story (https://www.wonkette.com/p/sherrod-browns-gross-republican-opponent)](https://www.wonkette.com/p/sherrod-browns-gross-republican-opponent)
A mouthy extremist Republican state senator in Tennessee named Brent Taylor, who represents a tiny slice of Memphis, a city that otherwise cannot stand him, posted a Dinesh D’Souza (https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=697678289546370&set=a.128705103110361&comment_id=1268400931676061¬if_id=1749948147655652¬if_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif) tweet with the picture of the “No Kings” fliers, because that’s how debased and pathetic he is. He then proceeded to babble like a dementia patient for 9,000 paragraphs about leftist violence:
The Left's violence masquerading as free speech is a stain on our republic, and it’s escalating at a terrifying pace. From assassination attempts on President Trump—twice in two months—to torching cars at Tesla dealerships during Tesla Takedowns. Members of “Progressive” groups like this have now turned to a call to arms.
Los Angeles burns under their orchestrated chaos, with anti-ICE riots seeing Molotov cocktails, looted businesses, and attacks on federal agents, all while Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass fumble, blaming others for their failures. […]
This is the Left’s legacy: burning cities, targeting conservatives, and excusing violence as “resistance.” Their hypocrisy is glaring—silent on their own extremists while attempting to demonize the Right. It’s time to call this what it is: a dangerous, unhinged movement that threatens our way of life.
Ahem OK sure, pal. Below that are comments from Memphis voters telling him to go drink piss in hell, which is something Memphis voters say to Brent Taylor a lot. (He’s a big buddy (https://twitter.com/toddstarnes/status/1903530181563949368?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1903530181563949368%7Ctwgr%5E2df9767ba23437040f31f30413f25acbbdae2408%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftennesseestar.com%2Fnews%2Ftennessee-republicans-glenn-jacobs-brent-taylor-todd-starnes-support-tesla-amid-protests-over-elon-musk-and-doge%2Ftpappert%2F2025%2F03%2F24%2F) of Todd Starnes, (https://www.wonkette.com/p/todd-starnes-writes-love-letter-to-donald-trumps-penis) which should tell longtime Wonkette readers what kind of guy we’re making fun of here.)
[
Todd Starnes Writes Love Letter To Donald Trump's Penis
\Evan Hurst (https://substack.com/profile/14358125-evan-hurst)
·
July 27, 2015
\Read full story (https://www.wonkette.com/p/todd-starnes-writes-love-letter-to-donald-trumps-penis)](https://www.wonkette.com/p/todd-starnes-writes-love-letter-to-donald-trumps-penis)
Again, there was never any mystery who this murderous piece of shit is. The story, from the beginning, was Typical, Unremarkable Trump Voter Assassinates Democrats. He’s an anti-abortion Christian extremist, which is no surprise, because that’s a really common thing to find in a terrorist profile. There were anti-abortion extremists all over the place among the domestic extremists who attacked the Capitol on January 6. Far-right extremists are the greatest domestic terrorist threat (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/far-right-violence-a-growing-threat-and-law-enforcements-top-domestic-terrorism-concern) to the United States, and have been for a long time, no matter how much the Trump Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security try to cover that up so they can blood libel people who aren’t white.
This is their dude, y’all.
Why they lyin’?
It couldn’t be shame causing them to do this, because white conservative Christian men and the people who serve them don’t have the capacity for that.
We guess they just find it extremely politically inconvenient right now, since everybody hates Trump (https://www.wonkette.com/p/everybody-hates-trump-and-his-little) and his agenda and his incompetent Cabinet, and Trump’s North Korean birthday parade was more poorly attended than a common wiener dog race at the county fair.
Not a great time to remind America just how much they hateall religious conservative Republican extremists, we reckon!
Everybody Hates Trump, And His Little Nazi Loser Friends Too}:
\Evan Hurst (https://substack.com/profile/9485412-evan-hurst)
·
Jun 12
\Read full story (https://www.wonkette.com/p/everybody-hates-trump-and-his-little)](https://www.wonkette.com/p/everybody-hates-trump-and-his-little)
Also Republican politicians are simply bad people who are going to hell when they die, and that’s why they’re doing this.
We probably needn’t try to psychoanalyze it any further.
---
sleazeball conspir projection rubber
update tim miller bulwark mike lee, dsouza....
AN 6 25 STATES N
Just hours after Minnesotans learned that Democratic House leader Melissa Hortman had been assassinated, right-wing influencer Collin Rugg, who has 1.8 million followers on X, posted a “report” that hinted (https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1933924564419129643) that she’d been killed because of a recent vote on ending undocumented adults’ ability to enroll in MinnesotaCare, a subsidized health insurance for the working poor.
Mike Cernovich, another right-wing influencer who has 1.4 million followers on X, took Rugg’s post and amped it up (https://x.com/Cernovich/status/1933961216671490485), but in the “just asking questions” style of many conspiracy theories:
*“Did Tim Walz have her executed to send a message?”
:{:{They were deeply ignorant about the MinnesotaCare issue....}:
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AN 6 25 STATES N
Just hours after Minnesotans learned that Democratic House leader Melissa Hortman had been assassinated, right-wing influencer Collin Rugg, who has 1.8 million followers on X, posted a “report” that hinted (https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1933924564419129643) that she’d been killed because of a recent vote on ending undocumented adults’ ability to enroll in MinnesotaCare, a subsidized health insurance for the working poor.
Mike Cernovich, another right-wing influencer who has 1.4 million followers on X, took Rugg’s post and amped it up (https://x.com/Cernovich/status/1933961216671490485), but in the “just asking questions” style of many conspiracy theories:
*“Did Tim Walz have her executed to send a message?”
They were deeply ignorant about the MinnesotaCare issue.
Walz and Hortman — who was instrumental in passing legislation allowing undocumented people to sign up for MinnesotaCare as speaker of the House in 2023 — negotiated a compromise (https://minnesotareformer.com/2025/05/15/senate-not-on-board-with-walz-house-budget-agreement/) with Republicans in the Minnesota Legislature to end eligibility for adults, but keep it for children. They did so to win necessary Republican support in the 67-67 House to pass a state budget. Without it, state government would have shut down on July 1.
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Both Hortman and Walz signed the compromise agreement in mid-May. This week, Hortman spoke tearfully about how difficult the vote was for her, but she was bound to vote yes on the issue because of the prior agreement.
The “theory” of Hortman’s killing was further undercut by the vote of Democratic Sen. John Hoffman — who was also targeted by the suspect — against rolling back MinnesotaCare for undocumented Minnesotans.
Rugg and Cernovich’s posts were shared widely and just the start of the disinformation.
Once law enforcement sources began revealing a suspect, right-wing influencers ran with an insignificant detail: That Vance Luther Boelter was a “Walz appointee.”
Like many states, but even more so here, Minnesota is home to hundreds of nonpartisan and bipartisan boards and commissions, which are composed of thousands of people who typically win the appointment by simply volunteering. There are currently 342 open positions (https://commissionsandappointments.sos.mn.gov/) on Minnesota boards and commissions. Boelter was appointed to the Workforce Development Council by Walz’s predecessor Gov. Mark Dayton and reappointed by Walz.
It was the equivalent of calling a Sunday school volunteer an “appointee of the bishop.”
No matter, the Murdoch media machine, specifically the New York Post, had their headline (https://nypost.com/2025/06/14/us-news/suspect-in-deadly-minnesota-shootings-identified-as-vance-luther-boelter/): “Former appointee of Tim Walz sought….”
Cernovich had his greasy foil hot dog wrapper and began constructing a hat (https://x.com/Cernovich/status/1933938770362990971):
“The Vice President candidate for the Democrat party is directly connected to a domestic terrorist, that is confirmed, the only question is whether Tim Walz himself ordered the political hit against a rival who voted against Walz’s plan to give free healthcare to illegals.”
Walz had no such plan. He had signed an agreement to end eligibility for undocumented adults.
Joey Mannarino, who has more than 600,000 followers on X, was more crass (https://x.com/JoeyMannarinoUS/status/1933901454877818973):
*“Rumor has it she was preparing to switch parties. The Democrats are VIOLENT SCUM.”
It was a ridiculous “rumor.” One of the last photos (https://x.com/mnhouseDFL/status/1933943231584325828) of Hortman alive was an image of her at the Democratic-Farmer-Labor’s big annual fundraising event, the Humphrey-Mondale dinner, which took place just hours before her assassination.
No matter, Cernovich wanted (https://x.com/Cernovich/status/1933957873270182280) his new friends in federal law enforcement to act:
*“The FBI must take Tim Walz into custody immediately.”
Finally, fresh off his humiliating defeat at the hands of President Donald Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump), world’s richest man Elon Musk quote-tweeted someone again falsely alleging Hortman was killed by “the left” (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1933950533813068181) and added:
*“The far left is murderously violent.”
The suspect’s “hit list,” according to an official who has seen the list, comprised Minnesotans who have been outspoken in favor of abortion rights. CNN reported (https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/minnesota-shootings-manhunt-06-14-25) that it also included several abortion clinics, which doesn’t sound like the work of “the left.”
Right-wing influencers marred Hortman’s death and smeared Walz on a pile of lies.
In a different, saner world, they would be humiliated and slink away. But the smart money is that during the next moment of national crisis and mourning, they will again lie for profit.
Minnesota Reformer (https://minnesotareformer.com/) is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.
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gt REPLACEMENT CONSP THEORY
mma
- ### Daily Wire's Matt Walsh: “The president should use his authority to immediately terminate all migration from the Third World” (https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/daily-wires-matt-walsh-president-should-use-his-authority-immediately-terminate-all)
06/10/25 2:01 PM EDT
- ### Steve Bannon: “All ten million have to go, not just the criminals and the insane asylum” (https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-all-ten-million-have-go-not-just-criminals-and-insane-asylum)
:{:{06/10/25}:
- ### Newsmax host on Democrats: “At what point are they declared to be a terrorist organization?” (https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmax-host-democrats-what-point-are-they-declared-be-terrorist-organization)
06/10/25 9:24 AM EDT
- ### Laura Ingraham says Democrats are using immigration to “resettle America with new people in order to transform it completely” (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/laura-ingraham-says-democrats-are-using-immigration-resettle-america-new-people-order)
06/09/25 7:55 PM EDT
June 9, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): And Biden and Mayorkas, they basically tacitly agreed. They opened the border and they gave benefits to 10 million illegal aliens. The goal? Well, made a lot of those protesters happy, right? Those organizations, but the goal was to resettle America with new people in order to transform it completely in ways that you really can't do at the ballot box, at least when you're that radical. So, what they essentially believe is that all of us need to do penance for the sins of taking this land from native people, for slavery, for what we did to women and so on and so forth. And, by the way, the penance never ends.
- ### Sean Hannity says Gavin Newsom “should be arrested” (https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-says-gavin-newsom-should-be-arrested)
06/09/25
---
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aha
an 6 25
Several senior officials in President Donald Trump's administration are now finding themselves in the crosshairs of Trump's MAGA base, who are upset with their inability to follow through on promises to get to the bottom of unproven conspiracy theories.
According to a Sunday report (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/us/politics/justice-department-fbi-trump-conspiracy-theories.html) in the New York Times, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino have all experienced MAGA's wrath on multiple occasions since they were confirmed to their positions. Bondi was lambasted (https://www.alternet.org/doj-maga-epstein/) for giving far-right, pro-Trump activists binders full of material that was teased as new revelations about the late convicted child predator Jeffrey Epstein, only to disappoint them once it was found that there was no new information contained in those binders.
Similarly, Bongino acknowledged that Epstein did indeed take his own life in a prison cell (https://www.alternet.org/bondi-patel-bongino-trump/#) while awaiting trial in 2019 (though a DOJ Office of the Inspector General report issued in 2023 found that there were numerous failures by staff (https://oig.justice.gov/reports/investigation-and-review-federal-bureau-prisons-custody-care-and-supervision-jeffrey) to prevent his death by suicide). This deflated conspiracy theorists who had argued — as Trump himself has insinuated (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/04/ghislaine-maxwell-case-trump-suggests-jeffrey-epstein-was-killed.html) — that Epstein was murdered by someone connected to his client base of rich and powerful people.
READ MORE:Republican rep. warns the GOP is following Trump 'off a cliff' — and he won't go with them (https://www.alternet.org/gop-rep-republicans-trump/)
As for Patel, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones accused him of "gaslighting" the American public (https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1931146443252732134) for failing to deliver promised results about the Epstein case during a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. Jones asserted that the FBI director was "committing political suicide" by maintaining that Epstein alone was responsible for his own death.
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The Times reported that the MAGA faithful have been more vocal in their condemnations of Bondi, Bongino and Patel in response to their handling of the Epstein case. Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump) supporter Suzzanne Monk – who has repeatedly bemoaned the treatment of participants in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol — said that Trump's base is divided between "Camp Be Patient" and "Camp Demand Results," and that she is firmly on the side of the latter.
Patel and Bongino have since announced new investigations (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fbi-reopens-investigation-cocaine-white-house-leaked-dobbs/story?id=122204145) into three high-profile cases: The discovery of cocaine at the White House in 2023, the leaking of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (https://www.oyez.org/cases/2021/19-1392) Supreme Court opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade and the discovery of pipe bombs left outside of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee buildings on January 6. But former Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson criticized those new investigations as a distraction.
"Dan Bongino & Kash Patel know they destroyed their credibility by claiming that ‘Jeffrey Epstein killed himself’ so now they’re trying to offer up three investigations you don’t care about to misdirect you from the Epstein files you do care about," Robinson wrote. "Sad!"
READ MORE:'Don't have a violin small enough': Critics mock DOGE staff worried about losing jobs (https://www.alternet.org/doge-staff-worried-jobs/)
Click here (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/us/politics/justice-department-fbi-trump-conspiracy-theories.html) to read the Times' full report (subscription required).
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AN 6 25
President Donald Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump) is being criticized for sharing a post containing a debunked conspiracy theory that former President Joe Biden died in 2020. Trump reposted a message on his Truth Social platform claiming that Biden was "executed" in 2020 and that a clone replaced him.
"There is no #JoeBiden (https://truthsocial.com/tags/JoeBiden) - executed in 2020. #Biden (https://truthsocial.com/tags/Biden) clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. >#Democrats (https://truthsocial.com/tags/Democrats) dont know the difference," read the post Trump shared (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/114605660077722777) on Saturday night.
Social media users reacted to the post, saying that the president's act of sharing it was concerning
Political scientist Norman Ornstein wrote on the social platform X: (https://x.com/normornstein/status/1929020322881159355?s=46) “Not to worry, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are on the case. Oh, wait……”
READ MORE:Signs the tide is turning on Trump (https://www.alternet.org/signs-the-tide-is-turning-on-trump/#)
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Researcher Alex Kaplan noted (https://x.com/AlKapDC/status/1929036234803855373): “Claims that Biden has been replaced by a clone have been a thing over the years in the QAnon community. This post Trump amplified was quoting a post from a QAnon group on Truth Social as well.”
“Donald Trump just shared a post on Truth Social that claims Joe Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced with a clone that is “robotic engineered.” Trump is absolutely out of his mind. He’s clearly unstable and unwell. This is very concerning,” said Democratic influencer Harry Sissonin a post on X (https://x.com/harryjsisson/status/1929025338232676383).
“If Joe Biden posted something like this Hannity would be roused from his sleep to anchor special coverage. But Trump posts apes___ conspiracy theories and the mainstream press yawns. His craziness has been completely normalized,” said progressive influencer Aaron Rupar.
“It always gets worse with this guy. Always,” wrote another user.
READ MORE:Outrage grows over a single paragraph buried deep in Republicans' 'Big Beautiful Bill' (https://www.alternet.org/trump-executive-power-2672244222/)
“So there was no cognitive decline?” tweeted another.
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AN 5 25
London-based journalist Phil Tinline, who spent 20 years as a BBC reporter and authored the 2023 book "The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares," (https://www.amazon.com/Death-Consensus-British-Political-Nightmares/dp/1805260359) is known for his expertise on authoritarian movements. And he doesn't exclude the United States and the MAGA movement from his scrutiny.
During a Q&A interview with Salon's Chauncey DeVega (https://www.salon.com/2025/05/07/save-democracy-sounds-like-save-the-status-quo-how-everything-became-a-conspiracy-theory/) published on May 7, Tinline discussed President Donald Trump's second term and where he believes it fits in with anti-democracy movements around the world.
"Trying to keep up with the new Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump) Administration and the implications of its actions is disorientating and exhausting," Tinline told DeVega. "I've spent a lot of time over the last 20 years researching the history of the fear that democracy is about to die, mainly in the U.K., but also, in the U.S. Historically, we have worried about this many times without our nightmares coming to life. This led me to be very wary of people airily predicting that democracy was finished, and made me alive to the way that, paradoxically, such nightmares can actually damage democracy."
READ MORE:'You see falls in politics — but not like this': DeSantis' star imploding amid fraud scandal (https://www.alternet.org/ron-desantis-future-fraud/)
Tinline continued, "But since Trump’s speech at the airport in Waco, Texas, two years ago, and especially since January this year, I've been forced to the conclusion — as many others have — that constitutional democracy in America really is now under severe threat. I hope that, as has happened before, this crisis will force politicians to break free from old taboos and find more effective ways to restore ordinary Americans' trust that democracy can make their lives better — and then to actually deliver on that."
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During the interview, Tinline discussed the role that conspiracy theories play in far-right movements. According to Tinline, conspiracy theories are "one of the warning lights on the dashboard of democracy."
"They express how people feel about power," Tinline told DeVega. "More people who care about democracy should have seen those lights flashing red and acted accordingly much earlier. But now here we are. The only way that I can see America recovering from this situation is for democratically elected politicians to show that they can and do make ordinary people’s lives better."
Tinline added, "The problem is that, meanwhile, conspiracy theories are a very useful way for other politicians to stoke distrust and division in pursuit of power."
READ MORE:'Be more relatable': GOP begs Trump to stop talking about dolls (https://www.alternet.org/trump-doll-statement/)
*Chauncey's DeVega's full interview with Phil Tinline for Salon is available at this link (https://www.salon.com/2025/05/07/save-democracy-sounds-like-save-the-status-quo-how-everything-became-a-conspiracy-theory/).
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