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 The claim was retracted hours later on a Facebook page appearing to belong to the man.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. 

Conservatives' Disgusting Attacks on the Parkland Students

I find it very revealing to watch the behavior of so-called conservatives as they attack the student activists from Parkland, Florida as they work to spearhead pressure for the enactment of common sense gun control laws.   Much like the Christofascist who disseminate deliberate lies against LGBT individuals, we are now seeing fabricated photos and sound bites attacking Parkland students, especially Emma Gonzales and David Hogg.  The subtitle of a piece in The Guardian described the phenomenon well:

This is a fight between a young, diverse, feminist generation against an old, white, male minority desperate to hang on to power. 

Yes, there is a strong racial component to the attacks on the Parkland students given that many have argued that  America's insane gun laws are really about maintaining white power, and white male power in particular.   A column in the Washington Post looks at the false and immoral attacks as does the piece in The Guardian referenced above.  First highlights from the Post column which notes that the usual haters on the right are furious that their usual tactics of personal destruction against their opponents are not having their usual effectiveness:

As an entirely new movement for gun reform is being driven by a group of smart, passionate and media-savvy Florida teenagers who survived one of America’s frequent mass shootings, many on the right are more than a little put out. The problem, as conservatives see it, is that the mainstream media have given these young people more attention and more credulous coverage than they deserve

But what really ticks conservatives off is that they themselves are feeling constrained from criticizing the Parkland students, because they are worried they will be criticized for attacking such sympathetic spokespeople. Not that some aren’t trying. Just in the last couple of days, we have seen two genuinely fake news stories about Parkland students go viral on the right, one in which involved a doctored photo of a student supposedly tearing up a copy of the Constitution, and another which falsely alleged that one of the students wasn’t on campus on the day of the shooting and had been lying about it. But even in the nonloony corners, the Parkland students are making people frustrated. Head over to the National Review’s website today, and you can find a bunch of articles about guns.  . . . . [one] the magazine’s editor Rich Lowry, is entitled “The Teenage Demagogues.” Lowry, after listing what he sees as rhetorical excesses from some of the students, gets to the heart of the matter: Maybe all of this can be written off as the work of overenthusiastic, under informed 17-year-olds. But the student activists aren’t acting alone. They are promoted and praised by adults who should know better. Since the kids serve a useful purpose in promoting gun control, though, it is practically forbidden in much of the media to dissent from anything they say.

“It is practically forbidden in much of the media to dissent from anything they say,” Lowry says, claiming for the right the status of noble victims, brutally silenced by a system that forbids them to speak their opinions out loud.

But is that true? Tell me: What opinion on the subject of guns has been declared verboten in the current American debate, never to pass the lips of a conservative lest he be banished from the media forever? The idea that we should be arming teachers, or the ludicrously false claim that more guns leads to less crime, or the belief that military-style rifles are awesome, or the notion that we have no gun problem that can’t be solved by bringing more guns into more places? Which of the policy changes advocated by the Parkland students — a ban on those military-style weapons, raising the age to purchase a rifle from 18 to 21, expanded background checks — may no one “dissent” from? Because I hear conservatives making all of these arguments on TV, on the radio, and online every single day.

Here’s the real difficulty the Parkland students present. It’s not that they’re passionate and surprisingly articulate for their age, though they are. It’s not that they’ve widened the conversation on guns by refusing to accept things the adults have taken as given for years, such as the idea that the NRA is simply too powerful to bother opposing, though they have. It’s that they’re too sympathetic. And when a spokesperson is sympathetic, when you attack them personally, you look like a jerk.

[W]hat conservatives are really mad about is that the tactic of demonizing those they disagree with — which is so common in contemporary political rhetoric  . . . .  has, in this case, been taken away from them.

You can say the Parkland kids are wrong, but calling them names, trying to dig into their personal lives to find something embarrassing, encouraging your audience to not simply think they’re mistaken but to hate them with all the venomous fire they can muster — that’s what some on the right wish they could do, but can’t, at least without looking like soulless ghouls. 

The piece in The Guardian gets to the underlying motives of those on the right.  Here are excerpts:

We know that the gun debate is a culture war. But Haider and her sign reminded me that it’s more than an abstract debate over ideology or constitutional principles. It’s a fight between a young, diverse, feminist generation representing an emerging majority and an old, white, male minority desperate to hang on to power. And guns are their security blanket of choice. Just 3% of Americans own half of the guns in America. And that 3% isn’t just anyone. According to a Harvard study flagged by Scientific American this month, the person most likely to stockpile guns in this country is an older, white man from a rural conservative area. And an alarming body of research shows that they’re motivated by racial anxiety and a fear of emasculation. A 2017 Baylor University study, for example, found that men’s attachment to guns often stemmed from economic woes and fear of losing traditional “breadwinner” status. The researchers wrote that “engaging in fantasies about being an NRA ‘good guy’ who uses his gun to protect his family and community from the ‘bad guys’ was one way for men to reclaim that threatened masculinity.” And in 2015, researchers from the University of Chicago reported that racial resentment was a strong predictor of opposition to gun control; and that the more racist respondents were, the more steadfast that opposition was. There’s a long history of white male support for gun rights being connected to anger and fear over gains for women and people of color. That’s part of the reason that many of the most irate responses to recent young activists have skewed racist or misogynist. But while issues of race and gender confound and alarm those on the right, young activists are doing nuanced thinking to bolster their work on gun violence. This generation is calling out the hypocrisy of conservatives who abhor government interference unless it’s over women’s bodies, talking about how arming teachers would endanger students of color, and recognizing how white students are getting the support that young Black Lives Matter activists never did. The new America is made up of communication-savvy, digital natives. They’re not cowed easily, and they see through the arguments that may have stumped their forebears. . . . . A lot of us adults watching the march and the walkout felt hope for the first time in a long time, and not just because of the incredible signs. We saw a generation who is succeeding where we failed, an emerging new force that thinks differently and who is willing to take the power they democratically deserve.

Nothing frightens the far right more than smart, media savvy non-whites and whites who do not feel threatened by the skin color of others. and who embrace modernity rather than tribalism and Bronze Age beliefs.