Conservatives: Your News Source Might Be a Scam
Several right-wing news frauds have been exposed recently.
First, The Epoch Times was engaged in a massive multi-national money laundering scheme. The company's CFO was arrested Monday for laundering $67 million obtained through various criminal enterprises. The Epoch Times was originally founded by a Falun Gong religious group, but has become a popular MAGA news source as it promotes various false conspiracies, many of which originated from QAnon.
Second, Salem Media removed the Dinesh D'Souza book and film "2,000 Mules" from its platform in response to a lawsuit. Salem owns about 100 radio stations across the country and hosts several radio programs with extremist content, such as Charlie Kirk, Eric Metaxas, and Sebastian Gorka. D'Souza promoted many false claims in "2,000 Mules" to suggest that Democrats had engaged in an elaborate scheme to steal the 2020 election. The lawsuit was brought by a citizen of Georgia, Mark Andrews, who D'Souza accused of election fraud. The film showed camera footage of Andrews putting five ballots in an election drop box. But Andrews was simply dropping the ballots for himself and the rest of his family, which is legal.
Third, Alex Jones and InfoWars are reaping the consequences of spreading false and malicious information. Jones owes the families of Sandy Hook victims $1.5 billion after he was found guilty of defamation two years ago. He had spread the lie that the 2021 school massacre was faked. Jones resisted paying but will finally have to liquidate his assets, which included his stake in InfoWars, the media company he founded. InfoWars is also currently going through bankruptcy and its future is uncertain.
Fourth, Steve Bannon is going to prison. Bannon has long been one of the primary figures promoting right-wing extremist content in conservative spaces, first at Brietbart and more recently on his podcast. Yesterday, a judge ordered that he begin his 4-month prison sentence by July 1 after he was found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents related to the J6 investigation.
There is one common thread that runs through all these stories: a lack of truth. This goes against the very core of what a news business should be. All of these news sources have been caught hiding the truth or promoting falsehood. So, pay attention to your news sources. If they're not seeking the truth, telling the truth, and correcting information they got wrong, they're not worth your attention.
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What Else We’re Reading
Charlie Sykes: “The GOP’s Single-Message Machine: Prominent Republicans have made Trump’s revenge tour the centerpiece of their agenda.
Meanwhile, right-wing influencers echoed and amplified Trump’s defiant calls for payback. Trump, of course, has made locking up his opponents a central theme of his campaigns and has repeatedly threatened to use another presidential term to retaliate against his critics, his opponents, and the media. Thus far, it has been tempting to dismiss all of this as Trump’s peculiar and personal animus. But it’s now clear that he has a substantial constituency for his campaign of vengeance. In fact, his base is demanding it. As Ali Breland reports in The Atlantic, the MAGA internet is seething with threats of violence and retaliation—not just at the fringes, but from well-known right-wing media outlets as well.
CNN: “After Trump’s guilty verdict, threats and attempts to dox Trump jurors proliferate online”
On online forums that have previously been linked to mass shootings, people are threatening violence and attempting to publicly identify the 12 New York jurors who on Thursday decided to convict former President Donald Trump.
The calls for retribution began immediately after the verdict was announced. Experts who track online extremism told CNN the volume of violent rhetoric in the last 24 hours is as high as it was after the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in August 2022.
“Hope these jurors face some street justice,” one anonymous user on a pro-Trump forum wrote. Another suggestively asked, “Wouldn’t [it] be interesting if just one person from Trump’s legal team anonymously leaked the names of the jurors?”
RNS: “The second coming of Doug Wilson: Conservatives are elevating long-controversial Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, framing him as a champion of a relatively moderate form of Christian nationalism — but critics say his ideas remain extreme.”
Last month, onetime Fox News host Tucker Carlson sat in his cabin-like studio and introduced a bearded, 70-year-old Idaho pastor named Doug Wilson as the person “most closely identified” with Christian nationalism, calling him one of the “rare” clergy “willing to engage on questions of culture and politics.” The vibe was similarly effusive weeks later, when Charlie Kirk, founder of the youth-focused conservative group Turning Point USA, had Wilson on his podcast to define Christian nationalism for listeners, calling the Reformed pastor a “thoughtful, brilliant thinker.”
Kirk was so excited by the interview that he encouraged listeners to “send it to your pastors.”
From talk shows to the conference circuit, Wilson, the influential head of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, for decades, has become a regular voice in conservative political circles, emerging as a figurehead for what is framed as a comparatively moderate version of Christian nationalism.
Study: “#SaveTheChildren: A pilot study of a social media movement co-opted by conspiracy theorists”
In a preliminary analysis of 121,984 posts from X (formerly known as Twitter) containing the hashtag #SaveTheChildren, we found that conspiratorial posts received more engagement than authentic hashtag activism between January 2022 and March 2023. Conspiratorial posts received twice the number of reposts as non-conspiratorial content. Our initial findings of a forthcoming larger multi-platform study suggest that the way that users strategically exploit the #SaveTheChildren hashtag may have implications for the visibility of legitimate social movements on the X platform. Future work should consider other social media platforms to determine if the visibility of legitimate social movements is decreasing more broadly, particularly in the context of 2024 being the largest election year in history.
Study: “Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation”
The controversy over online misinformation and social media has opened a gap between public discourse and scientific research. Public intellectuals and journalists frequently make sweeping claims about the effects of exposure to false content online that are inconsistent with much of the current empirical evidence. Here we identify three common misperceptions: that average exposure to problematic content is high, that algorithms are largely responsible for this exposure and that social media is a primary cause of broader social problems such as polarization. In our review of behavioural science research on online misinformation, we document a pattern of low exposure to false and inflammatory content that is concentrated among a narrow fringe with strong motivations to seek out such information. In response, we recommend holding platforms accountable for facilitating exposure to false and extreme content in the tails of the distribution, where consumption is highest and the risk of real-world harm is greatest. We also call for increased platform transparency, including collaborations with outside researchers, to better evaluate the effects of online misinformation and the most effective responses to it. Taking these steps is especially important outside the USA and Western Europe, where research and data are scant and harms may be more severe.
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