The rightwing conspiracy theories

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Amazing stuff..

Former Secretary of State John Kerry trolled Alex Jones’ far-right conspiracy theory website Infowars on Friday after it accused Kerry of being responsible for Hurricane Lane. Infowars host Owen Shroyer was interviewing Darrell Hamamoto, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California at Davis, Thursday about climate change as Hurricane Lane made its way across the Pacific Ocean toward Hawaii. Shroyer claimed an energy wave had been fired out of Antartica and split into two hurricanes that were heading for Hawaii. “Boom. An energy beam," he said. "See if you guys can just pause it on that still frame so that — boom, right there. See if you guys can — right there. There’s the still frame right there. What is that coming out of Antarctica?” Hamamoto brought up that Kerry went to Antarctica after the presidential election, before Shroyer suggested the former secretary of State was somehow responsible for the hurricanes.

John Kerry trolls Infowars for claiming he used an 'energy beam' from Antarctica to control Hurricane Lane | TheHill

Still can't stop laughing..

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Ben Carson, the guy haplessly running housing, in his newsletter:

The Democrats are like a pack of vicious dogs with this whole Kavanaugh “crisis”, sinking their teeth in and tearing at the flesh until rivers of blood flow through the street. They’re crazed lunatics on a seek and destroy mission to annihilate Trump and anyone associated with him. And the driving force behind them—the reason the left has gone so full-on radical extreme left? The Deep State.

Vicious Dogs – Talking Points Memo

Simply amazing, as if the Democrats created Christine Ford.. In fact, the Republicans did everything to hush this through, but it's enough for them to point to some kind of conspiracy and rally the troops, as even Kavanaugh himself did during his testimony. 

No matter that it isn't actually based on facts. The one thing one can blame the Democrats for is that they didn't release the info earlier, and that would have actually been to their advantage as there would have been more time to do a proper FBI background check (rather than the whitewash that was conducted). But there were good reasons for that, Democratic Senator Feinstein had promised Ford to protect her privacy. 

Rather than weigh whether these accusations had merit (in fact, they did the exact opposite), the Republicans went all-in on conspiracy theory, which is what they usually do when they don't have facts.

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No surprises here..

Just hours after the news broke this week that explosive devices had been sent to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and other prominent Democrats, a conspiracy theory began to take shape in certain corners of conservative media. The bombs, this theory went, were not actually part of a plot to harm Democrats, but were a “false flag” operation concocted by leftists in order to paint conservatives as violent radicals ahead of the elections next month. “These ‘Suspicious Package’ stories are false flags, carefully planned for the midterms,” tweeted Jacob Wohl, a pro-Trump internet troll who writes for Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site.

By nightfall, as more explosives were discovered addressed to Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, and Eric H. Holder Jr., an attorney general under Mr. Obama, the fact-free explanation had gelled: The bombs were props, planted by Democratic operatives and amplified by a biased liberal media. A woman arrived at a debate between the two candidates for Florida governor, Ron DeSantis and Andrew Gillum, with a sign that read “Democrats Fake News Fake Bombs.” Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business host and confidant of President Trump, echoed that line in a tweet that he later deleted...

Within hours of the first bomb’s discovery, conservative media figures were openly speculating about the true motives behind the campaign. Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and other high-profile commentators flocked to an alternative narrative that could explain the targeted threats to top Democrats without blaming those Democrats’ political opponents. “Republicans just don’t do this kind of thing,” Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio show. (Critics quickly provided Mr. Limbaugh with plenty of counterexamples, including abortion clinic bombings committed by right-wing extremists.)

Conspiracy theories play especially well on social media, which amplifies provocative and engaging content by design and often rewards misinformation with increased distribution. One study published this year, led by M.I.T. researchers, found that on Twitter, falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than accurate news..

‘False Flag’ Theory on Pipe Bombs Zooms From Right-Wing Fringe to Mainstream - The New York Times

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Still at it..

Fox News continues to push a conspiracy theory that a caravan of migrants traveling through Mexico toward the U.S. border represents an “invasion,” even after it motivated a gunman to carry out the largest mass killing of Jews in American history at a synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday morning. The gunman, Robert Bowers, repeatedly referred to people traveling with the caravan as “invaders” on Gab, a social media website that serves as a den for white supremacists. Bowers blamed the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a Jewish group that resettles refugees in the U.S., writing in a Gab post published shortly before the shooting that “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

In the days leading up to the shooting, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), the NRA, and Trump-supporting CNN commentator Matt Schlapp all pushed the baseless conspiracy theory that George Soros, a wealthy Jewish philanthropist, was somehow financing the caravan. A piece in The Atlantic details how the “invasion” conspiracy theory. If you thought that the murder of 11 Jewish people in their place of worship would be enough to stop Fox News personalities from pushing this “invasion” narrative, think again. In the three days since the shooting, Fox News contributors and guests have continued to use militaristic language to talk about the caravan — which in reality consists of impoverished mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons from countries like Nicaragua and Honduras who are making a dangerous journey north to escape desperate conditions in their homelands..

Fox News keeps pushing conspiracy theory that motivated Pittsburgh synagogue shooter – ThinkProgress

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Smallpox is a horrendous disease that killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone, and millions more before that. But it’s a scourge of the past — the only human virus to have been eradicated. Remembering that, you can appreciate the stupidity of the statement on Fox News — by an ex-ICE agent — that the migrant caravan of 4,000 men, women, and children mainly from Central America is going to bring smallpox to America.
“They are coming in with diseases such as smallpox, leprosy, and TB that are going to infect our people in the United States,” the former agent, David Ward, said this week.

There is no smallpox in circulation anymore. That’s been true since 1980, when a major global vaccine effort wiped the virus from the planet. The risk of leprosy — now called Hansen’s disease — being imported from Latin America is similarly remote. And while some foreign-born people do have higher rates of TB, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) screens for TB in people moving to the US. This particular kind of xenophobic fear-mongering, which Donald Trump spread as a presidential candidate, is now surfacing again as we approach the midterms, in an apparent ploy to rile up the conservative base..Fox News’s claim the migrant caravan will spread disease is xenophobic nonsense - Vox

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A Fox Business Network executive on Sunday condemned the appearance of a guest on one of the network’s leading shows, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” after the guest’s remarks were linked to anti-Semitism. The guest, Chris Farrell of the conservative Washington group Judicial Watch, claimed the caravan of refugees now traveling in southern Mexico was funded by George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist and Democratic donor who has frequently figured in right-wing and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Earlier last week, Mr. Dobbs tweeted twice claiming that bomb threats aimed at the news media and prominent Democrats were false. He later deleted the tweets

Fox Executive Condemns Remarks by Guest on Lou Dobbs Show - The New York Times

The Campbell Soup lobbyist who tweeted that George Soros was helping fund the immigrant caravan streaming toward the U.S. border left the company late last week after his already planned departure was accelerated. "Mr. Johnston and the company discussed in August that he would transition out of his role with his departure scheduled for early November," a company spokesperson told The Hill via email regarding Kelly Johnston.

Campbell Soup to ‘accelerate’ departure of executive who tweeted about Soros funding caravan | TheHill

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During an interview on Fox Business on Thursday, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) went on a bizarre rant about George Soros that ended with him echoing a baseless conspiracy theory about the billionaire progressive donor that has been spread by people like Alex Jones. Responding to a question about Google, Gohmert started talking about George Orwell, and then said, “You mention Orwell — it also reminds me of another George: George Soros.” “George Soros is supposed to be Jewish, but you wouldn’t know it from the damage he’s inflicted on Israel and the fact that he turned on fellow Jews and helped take the property that they owned,” Gohmert added.

GOP congressman spreads anti-Semitic Soros conspiracy on Fox Business - Vox

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From the wife of a Supreme Court Justice, no less:

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has generated controversy with her use of of social media to spread far-right rhetoric. CNN and The Washington Post published separate reports in recent days highlighting Thomas's use of social media. She has in recent months shared posts on Facebook alleging Democrats committed voter fraud, claiming survivors of a mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school are a threat to the country, and that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) was the subject of "false accusations" because he "threatens the elite."

Justice Thomas's wife under scrutiny for partisan posts | TheHill

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You really have to read the following article, the world where wing-nut conspiracy theories are combined with scams, and the right-wing wingnut world is rife with it:

As the Lavenders came to discover, sovereign fraudsters are the snake-oil salesmen of our time. Peddling a bouquet of grifts as varied as tax fraud and real estate scams, they prey on our suspicion of institutions, financial illiteracy, greed and despair. You don’t even have to buy into sovereign dogma to get swindled. You just need to be, as Ms. Lavender was, in debt. From 1990 to 2013, far-right extremists carried out more than 600 financial schemes that resulted in criminal charges, according to the researchers who run the U.S. Extremist Financial Crime Database, which is affiliated with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism and is the only clearinghouse of its kind. That adds up to — conservatively — public losses of $1 billion. The majority of perpetrators were either sovereigns or their ideological cousins, tax defiers. Fraud is to them what cross-burning is to white supremacists: an expression of belief.

How Sovereign Citizens Helped Swindle $1 Billion From the Government They Disavow - The New York Times

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And of course the Clintons killed a lot of people, including Epstein..

According to a history and debunking first published by Snopes in 1998, the body count meme originated in 1993 with Indianapolis lawyer and militia movement activist Linda Thompson, who compiled a list of 34 people connected to the Clintons who had passed away and titled it, “The Clinton Body Count: Coincidence or the Kiss of Death?” William Dannemeyer, a notoriously homophobic then-retired Congressman from Orange County, California, picked up the list, trimmed it to 24, and sent it Congressional leadership in 1994 as he ran for the US Senate. Thompson provided — by her own admission — “no direct evidence” that the Clintons were responsible for any of the deaths, and Snopes provides a comprehensive account of each death, most of which were easily explained heart attacks, plane crashes, or suicides..

#ClintonBodyCount and Jeffrey Epstein, explained - Vox