The Far-Right Media Is Weaponizing Coronavirus

I continue to be shocked by those I know who ought to know better that continue to post and share false stories put out by right wing fringe publications like Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Red State, Town Hall, and, of course, Fox News.  These individuals seemingly never fact check stories and merely promote them because they fall in line with their prejudices - often racial or religiously extreme - and happily spread falsehoods while making themselves look like fools and/or bigots.  Now, with coronavirus creating semi-hysteria and fears and uncertainty, the right wing media machine is jumping into high gear and promoting falsehoods and out right misogyny as laid out in a piece in New York Magazine.  For "friends" who continue to promote false stories, they need to know that others are watching and judging them and not in a good way.   Here are article excerpts:

The coronavirus pandemic has been marked by medical uncertainty, rapidly changing information, and partisan rancor, making it a prime target for the spread of disinformation: some of that disinformation is about unproven cures, for both the disease and the disintegrating economy; some is intended to delegitimize the politicians who may or may not be in a position to steer the nation through it (and some of it comes not via the internet but from [Trump] the president himself; see the man who died after heeding Trump’s assurances that chloroquine was a possible answer to coronavirus). Jiore Craig is a political consultant at a research firm, GQR Insights and Action, who has spent the past four years tracking the spread of disinformation online, much of it originating with, or being propagated by, the far-right political media — sites like Breitbart and Infowars. The Cut spoke to her about the patterns she’s seen and how they’re playing out in the midst of this pandemic. [W]e study conservative bad actors, those known for putting out disinformation, and what’s been interesting in the midst of COVID-19 is that even they needed to take a moment to get their bearings. Typically bad actors on the right — conservative online media which rampantly spreads disinformation — are very quick to align, and get their messaging straight, which usually comes down to reaching for handy attacks, targeting women, etc. But in this moment, it took a while for them to turn their cannons in the same direction. Obviously there’s Fox News, but I’m talking about more specialized online publications, like Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Red State, Town Hall, and people like Ben Shapiro and Tomi Lahren. There’s something called Salem Media Group; they control niche Facebook pages like I Am A Conservative Woman and Shut Down Planned Parenthood, and the social network only recently identified that both of those pages were controlled by Salem. I focus on what’s being shared on Facebook and other platforms where the majority of voters are spending their time. We know that Facebook increasingly has an older audience, so I look at what’s spreading there.
 [T]hose pages I mentioned often coordinate; they’re posting at the same time and coordinating around specific attacks, and one area where they do that is attacks on women. And there is a good example involving coronavirus. When Trump called out individual politicians, including governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, it was very easy for these sites to use a typical framing right away: an unflattering picture of her, where she looks drunk or cross-eyed, or appears dumb, crazy, emotional, unhinged, angry. The sites are ready to echo each other, and so they amplified an attack on Whitmer more than they amplified attacks on other male governors that Trump got into fights with last week. Now part of that is that Whitmer is in a swing state, while Andrew Cuomo, for example, is not. But it’s also that those misogynistic frames are so readily available to them.

They’re very organized, very militant: they will push out the same line as a steady drum beat— the same hashtags, #shiftySchiff or #nervousNancy, to signal that there’s a trend — whereas voices on the left are more individualistic.

So now with Coronavirus, they’ve landed on attacking the left about “PC culture” — arguing that the left is more worried about the racist phrasing Trump uses for the virus than about the virus itself. That’s an example of something they’ve unified on since last week, because they know this playbook; they know how to attack the left on PC culture; they can run with that.

[W]henever we see a social media spike that isn’t correlated with what’s happening in the news and wonder what’s driving that, it’s something that is driven by the right. I still think people underestimate how wide-reaching these pages are and how good they are at repetition. The second part is, how much of what is published online from the right is connected back to pretty extreme movements. I wasn’t expecting my work — which is typically to deal with candidates and how opinions about them are formed — to get so quickly into hate speech, man-o-spheres, intense online misogyny. . . . . the reality is that this is what the mainstream is now on the right. The conservative media I mentioned earlier, which some may consider fringe, have become more mainstream on social media in terms of the volume of content they generate and their reach. W]e’re going to see a lot of conspiracy theories being applied. But the bad actors don’t really know who to attack at the moment; it can’t quite be about government control, because Trump is the government. So there’s going to be a question of how to make it about the Democrats: maybe invoking false claims around martial law. You have Alex Jones and Infowars profiting off of readiness products because people are scared. We may get to the conspiracy that Democrats want to take away their guns and take away their rights. And I think both sides will start asking: Were you focused on people’s health or were you focused on politics-or-profits? Both sides will try to make it seem like the other side isn’t focused on the issue at hand.

Times of crisis show us who remains logical and acting on facts, not conspiracy theories and lies (and prejudices and bigotry), and  some who are blinding promoting far right disinformation should pause to consider how they will be viewed once the crisis has passed.

Far-Right Tries to Slime Pete Buttigieg with False Sex Assault Claim

Jacob Wohl, one of the sleaze masters in the plot against Buttigieg.

I guess in some ways it was to be expected given the far rights hatred of gays, willingness to engage in personal destruction of opponents, and relentless willingness to lie, yet the brazenness of some of the sleaziest elements of the far right right to fabricate false claims of sexual assault against Pete Buttigieg is nonetheless stunning.  It s also instructive that among the "news outlets" that sought to quickly disseminate the lie was Big League Politics which played a leading role on the attacks on state wide Democrat office holders here in Virginia back in early February (others involved were crackpot conspiracy sites: Infowars and Gateway Pundit). The thankfully, unsuccessful effort is ironic for two reasons: (i) it is Republicans elected officials and right wing preachers that seemingly are the assault perpetrators in 99 out of 100 cases, and (ii) Buttigieg seeming is everything Trump - and most Republican congressional figures is not  - a military veteran, academically brilliant, versed in foreign languages, and has a guiding morality and decency.  In any event, the plot fell apart because when right wing sleaze masters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman tried to recruit young men to falsely claim they were sexually assaulted by Buttigieg, one of them recorded their conversation and  and gave it to The Daily Beast.  Here is more from The Daily Beast:

A pair of right-wing provocateurs are being accused of attempting to recruit young Republican men to level false allegations of sexual assault against Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.

The details of the operatives’ attempt emerged as one man suddenly surfaced with a vague and uncorroborated allegation that Buttigieg had assaulted him. The claim was retracted hours later on a Facebook page appearing to belong to the man. A Republican source told The Daily Beast that lobbyist Jack Burkman and internet troll Jacob Wohl approached him last week to try to convince him to falsely accuse Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, of engaging him sexually while he was too drunk to consent.

The source who spoke to The Daily Beast said Burkman and Wohl made clear that their goal was to kneecap Buttigieg’s momentum in the 2020 presidential race. The man asked to remain anonymous out of a concern that the resulting publicity might imperil his employment, and because he said Wohl and Burkman have a reputation for vindictiveness.

[T]he source provided The Daily Beast with a surreptitious audio recording of the meeting, which corroborates his account. In it, Wohl appears to refer to Buttigieg as a “terminal threat” to President Donald Trump’s reelection next year.

Neither Burkman nor Wohl responded to repeated requests for comment on this story.  But after The Daily Beast contacted them last week, traces of the scheme disappeared from the web and social media.

On Monday, a separate individual using the name of Hunter Kelly published a post on the site Medium in which he alleged that Buttigieg sexually assaulted him in February. That post was tweeted out by David Wohl, Jacob’s father, and quickly re-written by the site Big League Politics, which is known as a landing ground for right wing conspiracy theories.

Kelly’s supposed Medium and Twitter accounts both say they were created this month. His Facebook page includes several posts lauding Trump and criticizing Hillary Clinton.
The Daily Beast reached out to Kelly on a cell phone listed to him in the student directory at his  Michigan college. Told we were reporting on apparent efforts by Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman to drum up false sexual assault allegations against Buttigieg, Kelly replied, “I was unaware this was happening. But yes it is true.”

Kelly wrote that he did not control the newly-created Medium and Twitter accounts that posted the allegations under his name. When asked if he could verify his identity, he texted the Daily Beast a selfie that matched the photo seen on Medium and on Kelly’s longstanding Facebook accounts.

“Here is a selfie of me, sorry I have been crying,” he wrote. “Today and the promises made didn’t go as planned.”

Kelly declined to provide more details. But two hours later he posted a message to his Facebook timeline headed, “I WAS NOT SEXUALLY ASSAULTED.”

Again, it is ironic that the Christofascist and right wing trolls like Wohl and Burkman see Buttigieg as some sort of existential threat - most likely because he shines a light on their rank hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy, as well as that of Trump.