The rightwing conspiracy theories

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Facebook, the IRS, and the GOP’s Bullshit Feedback Loop

Republicans can't resist a good anti-conservative conspiracy theory.

BY BRIAN BEUTLER
May 13, 2016

It is considered a historical certainty on the right that during President Obama’s first term, the IRS pursued a political vendetta against conservative advocacy groups seeking non-profit status. It is even common to hear Republicans imply that politically motivated targeting of Tea Party groups may have cost Mitt Romney the 2012 presidential election.

In reality, the IRS “scandal” was the unhappy byproduct of an agency being tasked with determining the validity of claims to non-profit status, but lacking the proper resources to do it or clear guidance on how. The fact that new Tea Party groups, many with dubious claim to non-profit status, had flooded the IRS with applications compounded the difficulty. The agency thus used watchwords like “tea party” and “progressive” to, in its words, triage the workload.

Mythmaking summons more outrage, sharpens a sense of victimization, and thus creates a larger appetite for right-wing electioneering groups and more conspiracy theories.

For the purposes of ginning up voters, that story is much less useful than one in which a liberal agency leader masterminded a sabotage campaign against patriotic conservatives trying to rescue the country from Obama. And so the IRS scandal was born.

Flash forward to this week, when John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, launched an inquiry into Facebook’s “trending topics” after an anonymous, conservative former Facebook worker told Gawker Media that the social media giant empowered reviewers to suppress conservative news and blacklist conservative news sources on the basis of naked political bias. The GOP’s intense interest in imposing content neutrality on a private company has inspired comparisons to the defunct “fairness doctrine” that used to regulate public-affairs content on U.S. airwaves. Republican beneficiaries of conservative talk radio turned the fairness doctrine into a free-speech bogeyman, but they take a much kinder view of the concept if it can be used to reduce alleged liberal bias online.

At a glance, the IRS and Facebook “scandals” bear little resemblance to one another—but the imperative both organizations face to sort truth from fiction creates a key similarity. Facebook has denied the core allegation fairly strongly. But it is easy to imagine how a conservative Facebooker might see his coworkers manipulating Facebook trending topics, and walk away convinced of a conspiracy exactly like the one the right imagines unfolded at the IRS.

Much like the IRS, inundated with non-profit status applications from groups that by all appearances were created for electioneering purposes, Facebook is a vast dumping ground for viral political content, much of which is garbage, some of which is bigoted, and some of which carries information that is outright false. It would be irresponsible of Facebook to facilitate the spread of birther nonsense or September 11 conspiracy theories by letting an algorithm pull such stories into trending topics without override power.

Thus, like the IRS, Facebook needs to triage. And here the differences between mainstream and liberal political content on the one hand, and conservative content on the other, become critical. Facebook reviewers tasked with“disregard[ing] junk … hoaxes or subjects with insufficient sources” are going to ensnare more climate-change denialism, more birther stories, more racist Breitbart agitprop than anything comparably dubious that comes out of the liberal internet. And those dubious stories will come not just from fringe sites or content farms, but from prestige outlets of the online right. Presumably liberal hoaxes and inaccurate liberal news are also bumped from trending topics (would Facebook let a celebrity’s anti-vaccine story linger there for long?)—yet among the presumably liberal ranks of Facebook workers, this is probably seen not as suppression, but as obligatory empiricism and social responsibility.

Much of this is admittedly conjecture. But acknowledging the reality of what Facebook grapples with doesn’t serve Republicans’ political interests. If theyreally wanted to get to the bottom of the Facebook controversy, they would have to implicitly acknowledge that climate-change denial is crankery and Glenn Beck is a charlatan, and sacrifice the political upside: incensing conservatives by alleging a scandal. Mythmaking around both the IRS and Facebook flaps summons more outrage, sharpens a sense of victimization, and thus creates a larger appetite for right-wing electioneering groups and conspiracy theories. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of bullshit.

The differences between the IRS and Facebook are numerous, of course. The IRS is obligated to use a neutral basis for sniffing out tax cheats, while Facebook is a lightly regulated Internet company that has the right to be a Democratic Party propaganda machine if it wants to. As a matter of principle, Facebook shouldn’t claim any of its features are fully automated, free from human meddling, if that simply isn’t true. But the fact that Facebook may have shaded the truth about trending topics doesn’t obligate anyone to give conspiracy-mongers with a rooting interest in stirring up right-wing anger the benefit of the doubt.

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That Russia friendly Congressman has some weird ideas..

California’s Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher apparently believes the deadly white nationalist protests that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month were the result of a left-wing plot orchestrated to score political points against President Trump.

GOP Congressman Claims Charlottesville’s Deadly White Nationalist Rally Was a Left-Wing Set-Up – Mother Jones

LOL

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And another one with weird ideas..

Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore implied during a speech to a church congregation in February that the U.S. could have been punished with the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks because the country had separated itself from God.  The comments were first reported by CNN's KFile team.  Video shows Moore, who is currently competing with Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.) in the state's GOP primary, addressing the congregation at the Open Door Baptist Church.

Ala. Senate candidate: 9/11 might have been punishment for rejecting God | TheHill

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Soros the puppet master..

Soros hatred is a global sickness
Gideon Rachman
Published 3 Hours AgoFinancial Times

George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, has had a busy year. Since the beginning of 2017, he has faked a chemical attack in Syria, funded anti-Trump marches in Washington, come up with the "Soros plan" to flood Hungary with refugees, forced a change of government in Macedonia, undermined the Israeli prime minister and got several key White House aides sacked. Not bad for a man of 87.

All of the above are, of course, conspiracy theories. But the fact that they have surfaced this year — and all feature the name of Mr Soros — is not just a curiosity. It says something important and worrying about global politics.

In the 1990s, Mr Soros was in tune with the spirit of the age, as he used the billions he had made in finance to support the transition to democracy in post-communist Europe and elsewhere. But now the global political climate has changed and liberal ideas are in retreat. For a new generation of nationalists — from the US to Russia and Hungary — Mr Soros has become the perfect villain. He is an internationalist in an age of nationalism. He is a supporter of individual rights, not group rights. He is the 29th-richest man in the world, according to the Forbes rich list. And he is also Jewish, so is easily cast in the role of the shadowy and manipulative international financier, once reserved for the Rothschilds.

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One of the nastier bits of anti-Soros propaganda this year explicitly linked him to the old slurs against the Rothschilds. When America First nationalists became worried that HR McMaster, national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was purging their allies in the White House, they set up a website called "McMaster leaks" which featured a cartoon of Mr McMaster being manipulated by puppetmasters labelled "Soros" and "Rothschilds". 

In 1989, one of the beneficiaries of a Soros scholarship to study at Oxford was a young Hungarian activist named Viktor Orban. Today, the same Mr Orban is prime minister of Hungary and demonises his one-time benefactor. The Hungarian leader has made denunciation of an alleged "Soros plan" to flood Hungary with Muslims central to his re-election campaign. There is no such plan. What is true is that Mr Soros is a generous backer of refugee charities and has also supported the EU's plan to resettle Syrian refugees across the bloc, including in Hungary. That was excuse enough for Mr Orban to plaster the country with posters featuring a grinning Mr Soros, and urging: "Don't let Soros have the last laugh."

The demonisation of Mr Soros in Hungary, where he was born, is not an isolated case. In the past year, he has been denounced by political leaders in Macedonia, Poland, Romania and Turkey, all of whom claim he is plotting against them.

The paranoid right in America also churns out anti-Soros material. As long ago as 2007, Mr Soros was denounced on Fox News as the "Dr Evil of the whole world of leftwing foundations". The origins of Soros-hatred in the US may date back to his opposition to the Iraq war. His support of liberal causes in the US, as well as of international institutions such as the UN, has kept the far-right pot boiling.

There is clearly an echo-chamber element to the anti-Soros campaigns around the world, as far-right groups pick up on the same conspiracy theories. But some strongman leaders have more concrete reasons to fear Mr Soros's Open Society Foundation, which funds civil society organisations that promote education, a free press, minority rights and anti-corruption initiatives. In 2015, Vladimir Putin's government chucked the Open Society Foundation out of Russia since it was no longer willing to tolerate the latter's support for organisations such as Memorial, which promoted research into the Soviet terror.

Mr Soros's activities have even made him a target in Israel. The obvious anti-Semitism in many of the anti-Soros campaigns around the world evidently matters less to the Netanyahu government than Mr Soros's support for Palestinian rights and other causes unpopular on the Israeli right. There is also a personal element in prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's anti-Soros ire. As an anti-corruption probe has got closer and closer to Israel's first family, so they have lashed out against Mr Soros. 

Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister's son, complained recently that the "Fund for the Destruction of Israel, funded by Soros and the European Union, is threatening me". He even re-published a cartoon of Mr Soros dangling the world in front of a reptilian creature, the kind of image that his father would routinely denounce as anti-Semitic if it had been published by another source. 

Conspiracy theorists have an explanation for everything. So the fact that the FT should publish a column defending Mr Soros will simply be taken as further evidence of his nefarious influence. For the record, I have had precisely two conversations with Mr Soros. On both occasions, we were on the same public panel at seminars organised by the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank that he partially funds.

We have never had a private conversation and I certainly would not claim him as a friend. But I have no hesitation in applauding his philanthropy. The fact that it even needs to be defended says something sad about the times we are living in.

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Here he is again, Rush, hahahaHAHAHAHA

You can't make this stuff up, first hurricanes were a left-wing conspiracy, now this:

Rush Limbaugh thinks that the NFL protests are part of a grand left-wing conspiracy aimed at diminishing the cultural value of “masculinity, strength, [and] toughness” in America. During an interview on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show that aired Thursday night, Limbaugh theorized that “the left wants to do great damage to the NFL,” and is using players toward that end. He suggested the idea that players are taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality is a false flag.

Limbaugh — whose short-lived tenure as an ESPN NFL analyst ended back in 2003 after he made racially loaded comments about a black quarterback on television— described the NFL as “patriotic” because “you’ve got the flag, you’ve got the anthem, you’ve got uniformed military personnel — all the things that the left wants to erase from this country.”

On Fox News, Limbaugh offers NFL protest conspiracy theory that’s completely divorced from reality – ThinkProgress

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LOL

A GOP lawmaker floated a conspiracy theory about August's fatal rally in Charlottesville, Va., in a new interview, proposing without evidence that billionaire Democratic donor George Soros could have been involved in organizing the white supremacist event. In an interview published Thursday with Vice News, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) suggests that the neo-Nazis rallying in Charlottesville were funded by Soros. 

GOP rep suggests conspiracy theory about Charlottesville violence | TheHill

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An endless closed loop..

The “IRS scandal” -- the right-wing delusion that the Internal Revenue Service was disproportionately targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status and slow-walking their approvals -- began as a political hit job by a partisan Republican congressman. It matured into a full-fledged scandal, with President Barack Obama apologizing and the IRS commissioner resigning in disgrace. And it should die after last night, when reports circulated that a federal watchdog had found that progressives groups had also been targeted for scrutiny in the same way over the same period.

It should, but it likely won’t. Bolstered by a closed loop of conservative thought that is fiercely resistant to new facts that overturn existing narratives, right-wing pundits have turned the “IRS scandal” into a catchphrase for the perfidy of the Obama administration. Like the endless efforts to turn the 2012 Benghazi attacks into a scandal, such efforts are not repelled by reams of reporting or fruitless congressional probes. They build their own momentum and coast onward..

Right-wing media “scandals” never end, they just fade away

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How on earth does this guy still have an audience, arguing that Sandy Hook and 9/11 were conspiracies, he would be considered a lunatic everywhere else but in the US. And now this..

ALEX JONES (HOST): The enemy’s engaging us. Everybody needs to be packing, like I told you on Friday and on Sunday. Get ready -- Democrats are going to be killing people, a lot of folks. And obviously, just like you don’t see conservatives going out and doing mass shootings, they don’t want to blame the Second Amendment, they don’t want to go out and kill people. It’s almost always drug-head Democrats, devil worshippers, you name it. That’s their M.O. The Democrats know when they mass-kill now, they know to not say they’re Democrat operatives. They just want to use that to get the Second Amendment and get a civil war going.

Alex Jones: “Everybody needs to be packing” because “get ready -- Democrats are going to be killing people”

ALEX JONES (HOST): The literal grandchildren of the folks that financed the Bolshevik Revolution out of New York and London are now bragging saying Bolshevik 2 is launching. I told you over and over again that I believe their November 4th launch terror date was a smokescreen for them to begin launching terror attacks in October. They will get successively more intense until you basically come punch-drunk to them, then they’ll launch their main attack. Here’s the other big news. On Saturday night, Monday morning -- Sunday morning, they released O.J. [Simpson] just 20 hours before the attack took place so all the media would come and be in place to cover this event. The whole thing has the hallmarks of being scripted by deep state Democrats and their Islamic allies using mental patient cut-outs. I’m Alex Jones.

Alex Jones: Las Vegas massacre “has the hallmarks of being scripted by deep state Democrats and their Islamic allies”

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And if you think Alex Jones is alone, think again.. It's a bit of a business model for the up and coming. But for established people with big media like Laura Ingraham..

Previously, DIY investigative attempts of this sort have ended badly. When an attacker drove a car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville, VA, “alt-right” media personalities accused the wrong person of committing the attack. And when pro-Trump trolls pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., was a front for a ring of pedophiles, a gunman from North Carolina drove to D.C. to investigate the matter and fired shots inside the restaurant.

For opportunistic pro-Trump trolls, the incentive to push wacky conspiracy theories is the same as their reason for committing other sophomoric, attention-grabbing stunts: to gain notoriety, grow their platform by amassing social media followers, and make an income by asking for donations in support of their efforts. Such is the case for Laura Loomer, formerly linked to the Canadian outlet The Rebel. Loomer has been one of the most prominent pusher of conspiracy theories regarding the shooting in Las Vegas and is asking for monetary support to continue her “investigative journalism.” Her journalistic portfolio includes disrupting a Shakespeare play in New York City, harassing journalists, and heckling former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the asinine Seth Rich conspiracy theory.

Recently, Loomer has relentlessly tweeted wide-ranging and baseless speculation about the Las Vegas massacre. She has implied that the CEO of MGM Resorts, which owns the Mandalay Bay hotel from where the attacker opened gunfire on the crowds below, was somehow involved in the tragedy, has claimed MGM’s union gave its members 10 weeks of paid vacation during Clinton’s presidential campaign, and  has doggedly attempted to link the shooter to Islamic extremism, all in efforts to cast doubts over the available facts about the tragedy and push a “deep state” conspiracy theory. Kindred spirit Alex Jones enthusiastically elevated her moronic speculation by inviting her on his Infowars show.

Conspiracy theories such as these and others about the Las Vegas tragedy are so unhinged that even alternative media troll Mike Cernovich has dismissed them, and pro-Trump media figure Scott Adams remarked on their implausibility during a Periscope session. That hasn’t stopped prominent right-wing media figures like Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and Laura Ingraham from unscrupulously pushing the theories -- even at the risk of casting doubts on official investigative efforts and undermining the efficacy of law enforcement authorities.

The Drudge Report propelled Loomer by headlining the site with her conspiracy theories. Drudge also featured other stories seemingly lifted from message boards like Reddit. Laura Ingraham, who will soon host her own show on Fox News, retweeted Loomer and baselessly speculated on October 4 that the shooter didn’t act alone. Ingraham continued to lean into conspiracy theories during her radio show on October 5, commenting that the “selective” leaked photos from the crime scene showed it was “perfectly laid down” and looked “like a scene from Law & Order.” Ingraham claimed that “something doesn’t add up” and chided the press for its “overwhelming lack of curiosity” and for not “asking questions.”

How right-wing media are elevating conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas shooting

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The dark underbelly of the US, a couple of days after yet another mass shooting, from the NYT..

Right-Wing Media Uses Parkland Shooting as Conspiracy Fodder

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM FEB. 20, 2018

The teenagers of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., who a week ago lost 17 of their classmates and school staff members in a mass shooting, have emerged as passionate advocates for reform, speaking openly of their anger in the hope of forcing a reckoning on guns.

But in certain right-wing corners of the web — and, increasingly, from more mainstream voices like Rush Limbaugh and a commentator on CNN — the students are being portrayed not as grief-ridden survivors but as pawns and conspiracists intent on exploiting a tragedy to undermine the nation’s laws.

In these baseless accounts, which by Tuesday had spread rapidly on social media, the students are described as “crisis actors,” who travel to the sites of shootings to instigate fury against guns. Or they are called F.B.I. plants, defending the bureau for its failure to catch the shooter. They have been portrayed as puppets being coached and manipulated by the Democratic Party, gun control activists, the so-called antifa movement and the left-wing billionaire George Soros.

The theories are far-fetched. But they are finding a broad and prominent audience online. On Tuesday, the president’s son Donald J. Trump Jr. liked a pair of tweets that accused David Hogg, a 17-year-old who is among the most outspoken of the Parkland students, of criticizing the Trump administration in an effort to protect his father, whom Mr. Hogg has described as a retired F.B.I. agent.

Mr. Hogg, the high school’s student news director, has become a sensation among many liberals for his polished and compelling television interviews, in which he has called on lawmakers to enact tougher restrictions on guns. Just as quickly, Mr. Hogg attracted the disdain of right-wing provocateurs like The Gateway Pundit, a fringe website that gained prominence in 2016 for pushing conspiracies about voter fraud and Hillary Clinton.

In written posts and YouTube videos — one of which had more than 100,000 views as of Tuesday night — Gateway Pundit has argued that Mr. Hogg had been coached on what to say during his interviews. The notion that Mr. Hogg is merely protecting his father dovetails with a broader right-wing trope, that liberal forces in the F.B.I. are trying to undermine President Trump and his pro-Second Amendment supporters.

Others offered more sweeping condemnations. Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist behind the site Infowars, suggested that the mass shooting was a “false flag” orchestrated by anti-gun groups. Mr. Limbaugh, on his radio program, said of the student activists on Monday: “Everything they’re doing is right out of the Democrat Party’s various playbooks. It has the same enemies: the N.R.A. and guns.”

By Tuesday, that argument had migrated to CNN. In an on-air appearance, Jack Kingston, a former United States representative from Georgia and a regular CNN commentator, asked, “Do we really think — and I say this sincerely — do we really think 17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally?” (He was quickly rebuked by the anchor Alyson Camerota.)

Conspiracies, wild and raw online, are often pasteurized on their way into the mainstream. A subtler version of the theory appeared Tuesday on the website of Bill O’Reilly, the ousted Fox News host. Mr. O’Reilly stopped short of saying the students had been planted by anti-Trump forces. But, he wrote: “The national press believes it is their job to destroy the Trump administration by any means necessary. So if the media has to use kids to do that, they’ll use kids.”

Some of those who have been spreading the conspiracies are facing consequences.

Benjamin Kelly, an aide to a Florida state representative, Shawn Harrison, emailed a Tampa Bay Times reporter on Tuesday accusing Mr. Hogg and a classmate, Emma Gonzalez, of being actors that travel to the sites of crises.

Mr. Kelly was soon fired.

“I made a mistake whereas I tried to inform a reporter of information relating to his story regarding a school shooting,” Mr. Kelly tweeted. “I meant no disrespect to the students or parents of Parkland.” His boss, Mr. Harrison, said on Twitter that he was “appalled” by Mr. Kelly’s remarks.

But by Tuesday evening, a new conspiracy was dominating Gateway Pundit’s home page. “Soros-Linked Organizers of ‘Women’s March’ Selected Anti-Trump Kids to Be Face of Parkland Tragedy,” read the headline. Within an hour, it had been shared on Facebook more than 150 times.