Trump and the alt-right

[Admin]

If you’re lucky enough not to be familiar with Jack Posobiec, here’s a brief rundown of his glittering career. Posobiec is a noted pro-Trump troll, famous for spreading the utterly implausible conspiracy theory that a D.C. pizza parlor was actually a front for a Santanic child sex ring. His far-right antics got him banned from the dating app Bumble. In other words, in our current political moment, he’s the ideal candidate to cover the Helsinki summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. 

The president has spent a good portion of his European tour lambasting journalists as “fake news” and “enemies of the people”. On Friday during a press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump outright refused to answer questions from CNN. In Helsinki, an op-ed reporter with The Nationmagazine was forcibly removed after holding up a sign that read “Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.” But despite this clampdown on journalists — and Posobiec’s own checkered history — Posobiec was still able to get a press pass in Helsinki as part of One America News Network (OAN).

The president has previously lauded OAN’s coverage, which has aggressively pursued a pro-Trump agenda. According to insiders who spoke with the Washington Post, the network president directed the channel to minimize coverage of potential Russian interference in the 2016 election, to ignore news about police shootings, and to encourage more anti-abortion stories.

In April the network also “investigated” a chemical attack in Douma, Syria, and proceeded to parrot the claims of the Syrian Army, Russia, and Iran. Despite the fact that British, French, and U.S. forces all launched targeted airstrikes in response to the attack — which killed at least 70 — OAN claimed the entire thing was fake, supplying no concrete evidence to support their claims other than the reporting they did during a visit arranged by Syrian government forces.

A Pizzagate truther is covering the Trump-Putin summit because that’s the world we live in now – ThinkProgress