Diamond and Silk aren’t terrorism, and the sisters don’t advocate violence. But if the comediennes got caught up in a content-constricting algorithm, they got caught up in it for a reason: They’ve pushed conspiracy theories from Uranium One to Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) supposed secret “gay lifestyle,” and during the campaign they stumped for Trump in an interview with a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier who insists that “Jews Did 9/11.”
.. Perhaps this messy history doesn’t mean Diamond and Silk deserve for Facebook to restrict their posts’ reach or prevent them from alerting their followers to new videos. Or perhaps it does. It’s a test case for a quandary that Facebook has been muddling through since last summer, when the world and Web exploded with revelations that Russia had harnessed the platform’s reach to sow discord with destructive propaganda
.. Facebook has struggled with the contradictory onus of remaining a “platform for all ideas” while filtering out ideas it deems too dangerous. But there’s little reason to think government would do better. And there’s a lot of reason to wonder whether it even ought to try.
The Conspiracy Theory That Says Trump Is a Genius
The theory is fascinating as an artifact of our current political derangement, but more than that, it’s profoundly revealing about the lengths to which some Trump supporters will go to convince themselves that his presidency is going well.
.. In the QAnon reality, Trump only pretended to collude with Russia in order to create a pretext for the hiring of Robert Mueller, the special counsel, who is actually working with Trump to take down an inconceivably evil and powerful network of coup-plotters and child sex traffickers that includes Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros.
.. “QAnon points out that this is the beginning of the end for the Clintons,” said Jerome Corsi — a prominent proponent of the lie that Obama was born in Kenya
.. the world would be forced to contend with “films of innocent children pleading for their lives while people are butchering them.” Once that happens, presumably, Trump will be revealed as a master of 12-dimensional chess who successfully distracted smirking elites with his buffoonery while he was quietly saving the world.
.. The creativity poured into QAnon is striking; it’s like something between a sprawling work of crowdsourced postmodern fiction and an immersive role-playing game.
.. But for many people, QAnon is very real. Barr has tried to make contact with Q on Twitter. InfoWars, the website run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — who has a close relationship with Trump confidant Roger Stone — has consistently promoted it.
.. Cheryl Sullenger, senior vice president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, posted an article on the group’s website about an “intel drop” from Q revealing a White House plan to end Planned Parenthood. Sean Hannity retweeted a post with the #QAnon hashtag.
.. Some elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory — secret elites, kidnapped children — are classic, even archetypical. “In all Western culture, you can argue that all conspiracy theories, no matter how diverse, come from the idea of the Jews abducting children,”
.. Stories about globalists stealing children for sex aren’t that far removed from stories about Jews stealing children to use their blood making matzo.
.. One twist, however, makes QAnon unusual. Conspiracy theories are usually about evil cabals manipulating world events. QAnon, by contrast, is a conspiracy theory in which the good guys — in this case, Trump and his allies — are in charge.
.. It’s a dream of power rather than a bitter alibi for victimhood. It seems designed to cope with the cognitive dissonance caused by the gap between Trump as his faithful followers like to imagine him, and Trump as he is.
.. legislation many on the right deplored, was shortsighted. In releasing funds to the military, it said, the bill would set off a climactic series of events: “Swamp drain begins, military seizes TRILLIONS in cabal assets, returning them to the people.”.. An inspector general report would then reveal the establishment’s unspeakable crimes, after which “the strings will be cut from the propaganda machine and people will stop falling for the garbage MSM,.. You don’t create a wild fantasy about your leader being a covert genius unless you understand that to most people, he looks like something quite different. You don’t need an occult story about how your side is secretly winning if it’s actually winning... Their desperate conviction that they will be proven right about Trump betrays a secret fear that they will be proven wrong.
Chappaquiddick: The Kennedy Cover-up
In the above video, radio host Howie Carr explores some of the unanswered questions of the Chappaquiddick incident and Ted Kennedy’s cover-up. He is the author of “Kennedy Babylon: A Century of Scandal and Depravity.” Carr wrote the forward for the new re-release of Leo Damore’s book, “Chappaquiddick: Power Privilage, and the Ted Kennedy Cover-up.”
Birther Taps Benghazi Conspiracy Theorist As Secretary Of State
Mike Pompeo went further than many members of his own party in blaming Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of state, and President Barack Obama’s administration for the deaths of four Americans.
His outspokenness was a key reason he gained favor with Trump.
.. some members of Trump’s team chose him because another potential contender, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), was seen as too “soft” on the Benghazi issue.
.. The 2012 incident, they wrote, was “the story of a State Department seemingly more concerned with politics and Secretary Clinton’s legacy than with protecting its people in Benghazi.”
“And it is the story of an administration so focused on the next election that it lost sight of its duty to tell the American people the truth about what had happened that night,” they added in their report, which came out just a few months before the presidential election in which Clinton was running.
- ignored warnings about the danger of the situation,
- refused to call in military help during the attack and then
- tried to cover up what happened.
But the independent investigations into the matter concluded that while there were systemic failures, Clinton herself was not personally responsible or deliberately reckless.Pompeo, however, said the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi was “worse in some ways” than Richard Nixon’s response to Watergate. He also pushed a conspiracy theory about how Clinton supposedly received her intelligence about the attack.
.. Pompeo will have a tough road to climb at the State Department after his role in the Benghazi investigation... “For all of the Republican fulminating about Benghazi, Rex Tillerson refused to meet one on one with his head of diplomatic security and did not nominate ambassadors, who are the officials ultimately responsible for the safety and security of our personnel overseas,” she said. “The bar for any secretary of State is understandably extremely high and, when it comes to Pompeo, will be even higher due to the role he played in politicizing a real national tragedy.”