In the days leading up to the election, the firehose of lies, half–truths, dumb memes, inflammatory political claims, and private obsessions emanating from Elon Musk’s Twitter account has grown ever more pressurized, with the world’s richest man posting in a frenzied effort to elect Donald Trump.
Musk’s own attempts to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny.
Musk has returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the necessity of voter ID laws, and his persistent concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote. The timing of this push to build outrage over alleged illegal election activity might strike some observers as ironic, given that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office has just sued Musk for running his own “illegal…scheme” to entice conservative leaning voters with the prospect of cash.
The lawsuit follows Musk’s unveiling of two election-related cash giveaways, both through America PAC, the super PAC he recently created to support Trump. First, he promised to pay $100 to registered voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who sign a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms. Second, he committed to select one registered voter who signs the petition each day to receive $1 million.
While exchanging money for votes is illegal, it’s safe to say that Musk and his lawyers intended to design a system that sidesteps such restrictions. But on Monday, Philadelphia’s DA Larry Krasner filed a civil suit against Musk calling the giveaway an “unlawful lottery.” Musk and America PAC haven’t responded publicly to the suit, and awarded another million dollar winner in North Carolina on Monday.
On Wednesday, Musk also tweeted in support of Virginia winning a Supreme Court ruling allowing it to remove alleged non-citizen voters from the polls, calling it “insane” that the “Democratic party”—which he put in scornful scare quotes—“was suing to allow non-citizens to vote.” In fact, legal opposition to the move came from Justice Department lawyers and civil rights groups, who argued eligible voters were at risk of erroneously being kicked off the rolls.
As Musk continues making unfounded claims of voter fraud, X has established an “Election Integrity Community,” a crowd-generated feed sharing usually-unverified claims, reports, and complaints of purported election malfeasance. In all, Musk seems intent on using his megaphone to depict the United States as rife with a certain kind of fraud committed by a certain kind of illegal, non-citizen voter. The irony of Musk’s obsession with the issue is rich, given that he worked illegally in the U.S. while launching his first company. While Musk has since claimed he had a student visa allowing him to work, in a 2013 joint interview, his brother Kimbal described them both as “illegal immigrants.”
In the days leading up to the election, the firehose of lies, half–truths, dumb memes, inflammatory political claims, and private obsessions emanating from Elon Musk’s Twitter account has grown ever more pressurized, with the world’s richest man posting in a frenzied effort to elect Donald Trump.
Musk’s own attempts to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny.
Musk has returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the necessity of voter ID laws, and his persistent concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote. The timing of this push to build outrage over alleged illegal election activity might strike some observers as ironic, given that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office has just sued Musk for running his own “illegal…scheme” to entice conservative leaning voters with the prospect of cash.
The lawsuit follows Musk’s unveiling of two election-related cash giveaways, both through America PAC, the super PAC he recently created to support Trump. First, he promised to pay $100 to registered voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who sign a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms. Second, he committed to select one registered voter who signs the petition each day to receive $1 million.
While exchanging money for votes is illegal, it’s safe to say that Musk and his lawyers intended to design a system that sidesteps such restrictions. But on Monday, Philadelphia’s DA Larry Krasner filed a civil suit against Musk calling the giveaway an “unlawful lottery.” Musk and America PAC haven’t responded publicly to the suit, and awarded another million dollar winner in North Carolina on Monday.
On Wednesday, Musk also tweeted in support of Virginia winning a Supreme Court ruling allowing it to remove alleged non-citizen voters from the polls, calling it “insane” that the “Democratic party”—which he put in scornful scare quotes—“was suing to allow non-citizens to vote.” In fact, legal opposition to the move came from Justice Department lawyers and civil rights groups, who argued eligible voters were at risk of erroneously being kicked off the rolls.
As Musk continues making unfounded claims of voter fraud, X has established an “Election Integrity Community,” a crowd-generated feed sharing usually-unverified claims, reports, and complaints of purported election malfeasance. In all, Musk seems intent on using his megaphone to depict the United States as rife with a certain kind of fraud committed by a certain kind of illegal, non-citizen voter. The irony of Musk’s obsession with the issue is rich, given that he worked illegally in the U.S. while launching his first company. While Musk has since claimed he had a student visa allowing him to work, in a 2013 joint interview, his brother Kimbal described them both as “illegal immigrants.”
In the days leading up to the election, the firehose of lies, half–truths, dumb memes, inflammatory political claims, and private obsessions emanating from Elon Musk’s Twitter account has grown ever more pressurized, with the world’s richest man posting in a frenzied effort to elect Donald Trump.
Musk’s own attempts to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny.
Musk has returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the necessity of voter ID laws, and his persistent concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote. The timing of this push to build outrage over alleged illegal election activity might strike some observers as ironic, given that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office has just sued Musk for running his own “illegal…scheme” to entice conservative leaning voters with the prospect of cash.
The lawsuit follows Musk’s unveiling of two election-related cash giveaways, both through America PAC, the super PAC he recently created to support Trump. First, he promised to pay $100 to registered voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who sign a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms. Second, he committed to select one registered voter who signs the petition each day to receive $1 million.
While exchanging money for votes is illegal, it’s safe to say that Musk and his lawyers intended to design a system that sidesteps such restrictions. But on Monday, Philadelphia’s DA Larry Krasner filed a civil suit against Musk calling the giveaway an “unlawful lottery.” Musk and America PAC haven’t responded publicly to the suit, and awarded another million dollar winner in North Carolina on Monday.
On Wednesday, Musk also tweeted in support of Virginia winning a Supreme Court ruling allowing it to remove alleged non-citizen voters from the polls, calling it “insane” that the “Democratic party”—which he put in scornful scare quotes—“was suing to allow non-citizens to vote.” In fact, legal opposition to the move came from Justice Department lawyers and civil rights groups, who argued eligible voters were at risk of erroneously being kicked off the rolls.
As Musk continues making unfounded claims of voter fraud, X has established an “Election Integrity Community,” a crowd-generated feed sharing usually-unverified claims, reports, and complaints of purported election malfeasance. In all, Musk seems intent on using his megaphone to depict the United States as rife with a certain kind of fraud committed by a certain kind of illegal, non-citizen voter. The irony of Musk’s obsession with the issue is rich, given that he worked illegally in the U.S. while launching his first company. While Musk has since claimed he had a student visa allowing him to work, in a 2013 joint interview, his brother Kimbal described them both as “illegal immigrants.”
“Don’t you want a president who’s going to make America healthy again?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked a roaring crowd, during Sunday’s triumphal rally in support of Trump at Madison Square Garden.
When Kennedy, the country’s most famous anti-vaccine activist, suspended his campaign to endorse Donald Trump, it not only represented the death of his presidential aspirations, but the dawn of something new: the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement, a tidy bit of sloganeering designed to highlight where Trump and Kennedy’s agendas overlap.
“How can you claim this is going to make people healthy?”
The concept is meant to convince skeptical Kennedy supporters to back Trump. But so far it’s mainly illustrated the various ways Kennedy is on board with Trump’s radical deregulation agenda, which would see the agencies responsible for policing food, environmental and medication safety defunded.
There are signs that another Trump administration will be even worse for public health: Project 2025, an agenda for his second administration prepared by his allies, calls for the CDC to be broken up, slamming it as “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” It also demonizes the National Institutes of Health, claiming the agency has an “incestuous relationship” with vaccine manufacturers and is in the grip of “woke gender ideology.”
Despite his governing record, Trump has adopted some MAHA talking points, promising to end the “chronic illness epidemic” in America, which, like Kennedy, he has previously blamed partly on vaccines. Trump, who already installed Kennedy on his presidential transition team, also publicly promised to put him on a panel to study what he called “the decades-long increase in chronic health problems, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and many more.”
The main overlap between Trump and Kennedy—and the driving force behind the MAHA movement—is a their shared conviction that the institutions responsible for policing the safety of food and drugs should be defunded and their employees investigated and possibly jailed.
On Monday, Kennedy told a group of MAHA supporters that Trump had “promised me…control of the public health agencies,” including HHS, the CDC, FDA, NIH, USDA, “and a few others.” Kennedy recently tweeted that the FDA’s “war on public health is about to end” under a new Trump administration, before listing an array that encompassed pseudoscientific practices and products: “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.” He added, “If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”
At the Madison Square Garden rally, Kennedy accused Democrats of “giving us the sickest children in the world,” called the chronic disease crisis “existential for our country,” and said he was focused on “ending the corruption” at agencies including the NIH, the CDC, and the FDA, all which he lumped in with the CIA as being in dire need of top-to-bottom reform.
According to researcher and author Matthew Remski, Kennedy’s recent appearances have seen him deemphasize attacks on vaccines to instead focus on a much broader set of purported issues around health.
“It’s probably the most successful rebrand that he’s managed since his anti-vax turn back in 2005,” says Remski, a co-host of Conspirituality, a podcast examining the alignment between New Age and right wing spheres. “MAHA represents his organizational capacity to bring the full spectrum of anti-vax-adjacent issues and concerns and grievances together under one umbrella.”
And could be a profitable one. The brand has given rise to the MAHA Alliance—a new conservative super PAC led by Del Bigtree, an anti-vaccine personality and Kennedy’s former campaign communications director. Bigtree says the group has already raised nearly $8 million, including a recent $3 million donation from Elon Musk.
Kennedy’s new role in GOP politics has opened doors to him and those in his circles—including some with a track record of promoting harmful or scientifically unsupported health claims. In September, Kennedy and a number of close allies and MAHA boosters took part in a Capitol Hill event on nutrition hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), a longtime friend of the anti-vaccine movement. Billed as “a nonpartisan panel discussion about the industries that impact national health,” in his opening remarks, Kennedy accused the FDA, the USDA, and the CDC of being “sock puppets for the industry they’re supposed to regulate.”
Other panelists included Calley Means, a self-styled “healthcare reform” advocate who had been involved in Kennedy’s campaign, men’s rights activist and pop psychologist Jordan Peterson (as well as his daughter Mikhaila, who promotes an all-meat regimen she’s dubbed “the Lion Diet”), and Vani Hari, a wellness influencer who uses the moniker Food Babe, who’s previously been accused of making unscientific claims in her quest to pressure food makers to drop certain ingredients.
Given “his distorted views,” Kennedy makes a poor figurehead for a movement purportedly centered on health.
During her panel remarks, Hari pushed a new campaign against Kellogg’s cereals’ use of food dyes as part of a larger agenda against foods with “synthetic preservatives and pesticides.” The science demonstrating danger from the synthetic food dyes Kellogg’s uses in the U.S. is far from settled; according to a 2014 NPR profile, a previous campaign Hari mounted against supposedly-questionable beer additives actually targeted products derived from algae and fish.
Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist who combats health misinformation, told Mother Jones the panel gave participants like Hari “a huge megaphone.” Love has pointed out that some of the Kellogg’s ingredients that Hari has claimed are “banned” in other countries legally appear there under different names. When Love later criticized a video actress Eva Mendes made praising Hari’s campaign and calling Kellogg’s dyes “harmful for children,” Calley Means baselessly accused Love of “advertising for Monsanto.” Peterson called her “a liar” as well as “incompetent, deceitful, resentful and arrogant.”
Danielle Shine—an Australian registered dietitian and nutritionist who studies nutrition misinformation also drew fire from Means and Peterson after commenting on Mendes’ video—says Kennedy makes a poor figurehead for a movement purportedly centered on health, given “his distorted views.”
“It’s perplexing that someone who seems to lack an understanding of basic science and promotes misinformation about vaccinations, food, and health would be positioned to lead a public health initiative,” she says. “His rhetoric repeatedly demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of food and nutrition science.”
Kennedy’s demonization of public health agencies, as he foregrounds influencerswho make unsubstantiated claims about science and health, illustrates, Love argues, that the efforts of the so-called Make America Healthy Again circle are entirely misdirected.
“They’re pushing towards an ecosystem where there’s less protection, safety, oversight and regulation,” she says. “They’re not talking about the things that do matter, like getting more Americans insured… They say they’re going to take on a company like Kellogg’s, an entity that has no impact on health outcomes, while also pushing to take all authority, oversight, and funding away from federal entities who do that.”
“How,” she adds, with a measure of disbelief, “can you claim this is going to make people healthy?”
Days after helping launch a clearly false claim about vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, a disinformation peddler with a huge platform has disappeared from X.
The “Black Insurrectionist” profile began claiming last week that he’d been in touch with a former student of Walz who baselessly alleged the Minnesota governor sexually abused him years ago when he was a teacher and football coach. The now-missing account, which posted under the name @Docnetyoutube, has a documented history of promoting fake stories. But even with his profile gone, the seeds of the lie had already been sown and spread across the conspiracy ecosystem, driven by right-wing activists and self-styled conservative journalists.
“If it’s all a big lie, all a big hoax, that’s cool.”
The @Docnetyoutube account seems to have been deleted sometime on the evening of Thursday, October 17. It’s unclear if the user deleted the account or the company did: under Elon Musk’s ownership, X no longer responds to journalists and could not be reached for comment.
Twitter has proved to be a key nexus for the false claim. Earlier this week, a video began circulating on the platform claiming to depict Walz’s alleged victim. One of the most widely-seen tweets promoting the video was also recently deleted. It came from an X user calling himself @TheWakeninq, who uses variations of the name “QAnon76” on other websites. But the video, as BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh noted, had obvious hallmarks of being a deepfake, with distorted facial features and a foreign-accented voice that was out of sync with the speaker’s movements. While the alleged victim is a real person who, according to his social media presence, did graduate from the school where Walz once taught and coached, other videos on his Facebook account capture someone who looks different and speaks with an American accent. According to his Facebook account, the now-adult former student—who did not immediately respond to a request for comment—has previously experienced homelessness; a Gofundme from 2021 said that he was living in Hawaii and trying to “get off the streets.” The video is still up on @TheWakeninq’s Rumble page, where it has been viewed by at least 6,000 people.
A local Texas Republican official named Sarah Fields, who also describes herself as a journalist, shared the video on Wednesday, claiming the student had come forward and “officially” accused Walz of abuse. She claimed to have filed public record requests with Walz’s old school, before adding that “Reportedly, a lawsuit is soon to be filed. I will keep you all updated. I’m watching this very closely.”
“I was able to confirm with multiple sources within the Trump campaign that THEY believe there is truth to these allegations, and have begun their own investigation,” she wrote.
Other conspiracy peddlers have gotten involved, including Ian Carroll, a self-styled independent journalist with a history of antisemitic statements. Carroll first promoted the story on October 14, crediting Black Insurrectionist with “breaking” it. In his own video on the subject, which has been viewed 2.5 million times on X, he claimed that Walz had been accused of “rampant” sexual assault. In a stab at fairness, he acknowledged that the claims “had not been corroborated yet,” but concluded that, “personally, I don’t think it’s looking good for Tim.”
A day later, Carroll provided an update of sorts—which has been viewed roughly a million times— saying that he’d been in contact with Black Insurrectionist and that he had a “40 minute phone call” with someone who “sounded an awful lot like a genuine whistleblower.” Still, noting “a lot of problems and inconsistencies” with the story, he conceded that it was “probably safe to assume” the claim was not real.
“I’m not some professional journalist or anything,” he said, while passing on word from the “whistleblower” that more proof would be forthcoming. He declared that a “somewhat decentralized network of powerful journalists and other protected actors” were working behind the scenes to promote the story if it turned out to be true.
“If it’s all a big lie, all a big hoax, that’s cool,” Carroll added, sounding chipper. “We all learned something.”
Days after helping launch a clearly false claim about vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, a disinformation peddler with a huge platform has disappeared from X.
The “Black Insurrectionist” profile began claiming last week that he’d been in touch with a former student of Walz who baselessly alleged the Minnesota governor sexually abused him years ago when he was a teacher and football coach. The now-missing account, which posted under the name @Docnetyoutube, has a documented history of promoting fake stories. But even with his profile gone, the seeds of the lie had already been sown and spread across the conspiracy ecosystem, driven by right-wing activists and self-styled conservative journalists.
“If it’s all a big lie, all a big hoax, that’s cool.”
The @Docnetyoutube account seems to have been deleted sometime on the evening of Thursday, October 17. It’s unclear if the user deleted the account or the company did: under Elon Musk’s ownership, X no longer responds to journalists and could not be reached for comment.
Twitter has proved to be a key nexus for the false claim. Earlier this week, a video began circulating on the platform claiming to depict Walz’s alleged victim. One of the most widely-seen tweets promoting the video was also recently deleted. It came from an X user calling himself @TheWakeninq, who uses variations of the name “QAnon76” on other websites. But the video, as BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh noted, had obvious hallmarks of being a deepfake, with distorted facial features and a foreign-accented voice that was out of sync with the speaker’s movements. While the alleged victim is a real person who, according to his social media presence, did graduate from the school where Walz once taught and coached, other videos on his Facebook account capture someone who looks different and speaks with an American accent. According to his Facebook account, the now-adult former student—who did not immediately respond to a request for comment—has previously experienced homelessness; a Gofundme from 2021 said that he was living in Hawaii and trying to “get off the streets.” The video is still up on @TheWakeninq’s Rumble page, where it has been viewed by at least 6,000 people.
A local Texas Republican official named Sarah Fields, who also describes herself as a journalist, shared the video on Wednesday, claiming the student had come forward and “officially” accused Walz of abuse. She claimed to have filed public record requests with Walz’s old school, before adding that “Reportedly, a lawsuit is soon to be filed. I will keep you all updated. I’m watching this very closely.”
“I was able to confirm with multiple sources within the Trump campaign that THEY believe there is truth to these allegations, and have begun their own investigation,” she wrote.
Other conspiracy peddlers have gotten involved, including Ian Carroll, a self-styled independent journalist with a history of antisemitic statements. Carroll first promoted the story on October 14, crediting Black Insurrectionist with “breaking” it. In his own video on the subject, which has been viewed 2.5 million times on X, he claimed that Walz had been accused of “rampant” sexual assault. In a stab at fairness, he acknowledged that the claims “had not been corroborated yet,” but concluded that, “personally, I don’t think it’s looking good for Tim.”
A day later, Carroll provided an update of sorts—which has been viewed roughly a million times— saying that he’d been in contact with Black Insurrectionist and that he had a “40 minute phone call” with someone who “sounded an awful lot like a genuine whistleblower.” Still, noting “a lot of problems and inconsistencies” with the story, he conceded that it was “probably safe to assume” the claim was not real.
“I’m not some professional journalist or anything,” he said, while passing on word from the “whistleblower” that more proof would be forthcoming. He declared that a “somewhat decentralized network of powerful journalists and other protected actors” were working behind the scenes to promote the story if it turned out to be true.
“If it’s all a big lie, all a big hoax, that’s cool,” Carroll added, sounding chipper. “We all learned something.”
In 2020, as for so many people, things shifted for Jessica Reed Kraus. A Southern California–based lifestyle blogger who got her start writing about motherhood, Kraus felt dubious about Covid safety measures and vaccines, and disaffected from mainstream liberal politics.
With her photogenic world upended, she wanted to talk about natural immunity and her objection to “vax cards,” she later wrote, and how they would “eliminate portions of society from general aspects of life.” When she did, she wrote that she was branded “an anti-vax Qanon nutjob which made me overly defensive.”
Kraus has a million Instagram followers, and her Substack is top-ranked in the platform’s culture category.
The pandemic ushered in a new focus, a transition from posts about decorating her gorgeous Southern California home—once featured on Martha Stewart’s Instagram—and her Etsy business helping others make similarly tasteful purchases; the most popular items were canvas teepees for children. Instead, she grew both increasingly conspiratorial and, at the same time, more invested in carving out a niche where celebrity gossip met hard news. It “proved,” she has written on Instagram, “an accidental hit.”
Today, Kraus has a million followers on Instagram, and her Substack, House Inhabit, is top-ranked in the platform’s culture category, with some 380,000 subscribers, many of whom pay $7 a month for her paywalled posts. (By the Wall Street Journal’s estimate, the site pulls in more than $1 million annually.) Over the the last year, she’s given more attention to a new set of boldface names, becoming a fixture in both the Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. universes, providing unstinting positive coverage of both men that she depicts as free from mainstream media bias.
During his now-suspended campaign and into his current Trump-surrogate phase, Kraus has provided a glossy view of Kennedy, depicting him as a handsome, breezy scion of his famous family. “My campaign coverage has provided a rare source of balanced insight,” she writes, “presenting an authentic interpretation of Kennedy and his messaging amid a storm of recycled, slanderous articles.” After she accompanied Kennedy, family members, and actress Alicia Silverstone on a hike, she described being allowed to linger in his office while he hurried off to a campaign event in ecstatic terms: “My dreams are manifesting now as reality,” she wrote. In this Polo catalogue vision, she also manages to brush off some of his strangest moments; in response to the revelation he’d once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park, she noted that someone DMed her that it made them “like him more.”
“Maybe the series of strange scandals is working for him?” she wrote, rather hopefully.
Kraus’ depiction of Trump has been statesmanlike; she’s called him “a showstopper” and depicted him as a mesmerizing speaker whose supporters have been unfairly tarnished by the mainstream media for their abiding and patriotic love for him. Her Substack posts from the Republicans’ convention were as schmaltzy as they were high-flown, depicting a normal political gathering as a battle for the soul of a nation. “With every story and tear shed, it became clear that this was not just another convention,” she wrote. “It was a watershed moment, a fierce reclamation of a vision for America that many felt had been slipping away.”
This intense rhetoric—good versus evil, manful heroes facing off against the abyss of the Deep State—helps Kraus inject drama and glamour. “I kind of love the new challenge of making politics engaging again,” she told a Wall Street Journal interviewer.
But to see Kraus’ career as a tidy narrative—mommy blogger to political quasi-journalist—would elide the notably weird flavor of her politics and beliefs. Despite her protests about being called a “Qanon nutjob,” for years Kraus has been obsessed with Pizzagate-ish ideas about occult rituals among Hollywood celebrities, making claims that Travis Scott’s 2021 Astroworld festival, where 10 people died in a concert stampede, was literally a demonic ritual. She and her occasional Substack co-author, Emilie Hagen, have hosted and platformed the work of New Age conspiracy Instagrammer Jennifer Carmody, who has claimed that celebrities like Elvis were victims of CIA mind control. She’s reposted comments by far-right conspiracist Liz Crokin asserting that “Israel can’t have the truth about Pizzagate coming out.” Whatever the most eyeball-grabbing news of the day—Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, Diddy’s arrest—she’ll spin the event as a forerunner to a promised post that will blow the lid off a sprawling sexual abuse scandal.
Throughout Kennedy’s run, Kraus left it ambiguous about whether she was there as an affiliate of the campaign.
Kraus’ oeuvre is a window into a world of exceedingly rich and privileged women enmeshed in conspiracy theories, especially those involving allegations of elite occult sexual abuse. Her celebrity coverage, combined with the aspirational lifestyle she presents, has helped her amass a large, devoted, and heavily female fanbase, who seem to want to emulate her and other wealthy women in her circles. Last summer, I spoke to one Kraus fan, an exceedingly polished and fit mom of teenage children, for hours at a tony Oregon hot spring spa, who struck up a hot tub conversation by asking what I knew about aliens and told me House Inhabit was the only media source she trusted. Kraus appears to be friendly on social media with Lady Victoria Hervey, an English model and socialite (and former girlfriend of Prince Andrew) who now posts Instagram musings about “Hollywood’s dark Satanic cults” and “plandemics,” both posts that Kraus has liked. (Hervey responded to a request for comment by writing, “Let me check with Jessica on this.” She didn’t reply to follow-up messages.)
Throughout Kennedy’s campaign, Kraus took on the role of an observer-participant, leaving it ambiguous about whether she was there as an affiliate of the campaign or on her own. This week, Kraus denied “being paid by a campaign,” as she put it on Instagram, while disclosing that American Values 2024, a PAC promoting Kennedy, had “offered me a hotel room” during the Democratic National Convention and threw her a pizza and wine party while there. Hours later, she said that was incorrect, and that she’d paid for her own hotel but that American Values spent $1,140 on merch from her site: hats reading “Make Speech Free Again” for supporters to wear around the convention.
Kennedy’s political team, which did not respond to a request for comment, has been happy to reward and promote her positive coverage, making her the moderator of a September 12 conversation between Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard in Arizona. His campaign even auctioned off a Zoom conversation with her during a fundraiser. (It went for $500.) She was also briefly named as the “director of social media” for a fizzled birthday party fundraiser that would have been hosted by another Kennedy-backing super-PAC. Her efforts to get close to the Trump campaign haven’t been as successful, though there have been some inroads: In August, Donald Trump Jr. showed up at a backyard meetup for Kraus’ followers in Jupiter, Florida. “Sitting fireside, in front of a group of strangers, he shared funny stories about his father,” Kraus wrote on Instagram.
After Kennedy suspended his campaign in August and endorsed the former president, she posted a photo to Instagram of the two men sharing a stage. “You know I fought hard for this,” she wrote, adding a weeping emoji and telling her readers the endorsement was “significant and deeply emotional, built of Shakespearean bones.”
Since then, she’s filmed herself backstage at several Trump campaign events, standing next to personalities who have endorsed the former president, like Roseanne Barr. She also shows signs of becoming a more regular feature in Republican circles, especially Kennedy-adjacent ones: she was spotted at a DC book party in May for Gabbard. She also posted a beaming photo of herself backstage at one of Tucker Carlson’s recent live events, wedged into frame with him and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones.
Spokesperson Steven Cheung did not respond to emails asking about Kraus’ access or role with Trump’s campaign. And Kraus herself, after initially agreeing to speak but twice canceling by citing lunch dates that ran long, ultimately declined my interview requests. “I sense the angle. And I’m just too busy with everything springing up without warning,” she wrote, adding that she was about to catch a flight to a Trump event. She also declined to respond to emailed questions.
Kraus was raised in Corona, a midsize town at the intersection of two freeways in Riverside County. As a child, she has written on Instagram, “I adored all the top 90s gossip columnists. I could not think of a more fabulous existence.” She’s said that her father died by suicide when she was 6, and that she experienced a period of “elective mutism” in the aftermath. The Journal piece also noted that she is estranged from her mother.
After becoming pregnant with her first child in 2005 with her then-boyfriend, Mike, Kraus got her start in the public eye with a carefully curated, Goop-esque form of lifestyle blogging and ruminations about motherhood. (The couple later married and now have four boys in all.) Early posts, where she went by the name Mrs. Habit, tend to fall flat; you can feel her boredom with the genre and its limitations leaking through the screen. “I know I’ve had a really tough time keeping up on posts,” she admitted in a 2011 update.
In 2014, while pregnant with her youngest, Kraus launched The Ma Books, a literary-minded blog which billed itself as an “online haven for women with brains and a budget.” It was born, she has written, out of a disgust with overly curated mommy blogs. “They want you to believe they do it all, and much better and more fashionable than you too,” she wrote. But despite any suggestion it might counterprogram the space’s typically too-polished images, visually, it was quite similar: a beautiful and more upscale vision of motherhood than what Kraus saw from other mommy chroniclers on Blogger.
In 2016, Kraus backed Hillary Clinton on Instagram and created a hashtag for women to flaunt voting day outfits.
The Ma Books continued until 2019, as Kraus grew her personal Instagram, sharing photos of her husband’s extensive DIY renovations, her family’s travels, and wistful photos of her children playing on the beach, surfing, and getting ready for camp, often laid over with sepia-tinted filters. As an Instagram influencer, she was modestly successful, and the family got plenty of approving write-ups in magazines and lifestyle and design blogs, as Kraus described herself as a “stay at home mom” who did a little writing on the side. While there was some mild and anodyne Democratic-leaning political content—in 2016, Ma Books posted a Hillary Clinton endorsement on Instagram, and created a hashtag for its readers to flaunt the stylish outfits they wore to the polls—what she churned out felt tuned to appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of women online.
All of that changed with Covid, and Kraus’ newly out-loud viewpoints. “My income, at that point, depended on the sellable nature of my ‘brand,’ which was liberal-leaning & sans controversy,” she wrote on Instagram last year, reflecting on that time. “During the lockdown, though, I grew bitter and resentful over my own silent surrender and increasing censorship online. We couldn’t question anything.”
“This is how the pop culture stories started—as a way to house my passion for truth in a volatile online environment, without sacrificing my beliefs,” she wrote. Kraus has said she fell under the spell of 2021’s Maxwell trial, watching obsessively from home until Mike suggested she simply go to New York and see it herself. In her coverage from the courtroom, Kraus developed what seems to be a queasy kind of sympathy for Maxwell—describing her “uncomfortable magnetism” and “electric presence,” as she depicted Jeffrey Epstein’s enabler as taking the fall for more powerful male abusers.
During the 2022 defamation trial between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, New York’s Choire Sicha wrote about how influencers—Kraus first among them—were, to Depp’s benefit, “shaping the general public’s understanding” far more than many mainstream reporters. Kraus, he wrote, became “a trial-obsessed Instagrammer” and “a chief instigator of the anti-Heard story line.” While covering the proceedings, she also became a minor character, reporting that she spoke to Depp by phone in advance of the proceedings, a conversation in which he denounced the failings of the mainstream media. When her Instagram account was suspended during the trial, she intimated a conspiracy: “The whole thing feels very calculated. I feel like I’m siting here with my hands tied, paying a hefty price for seeking truth.” (The account was quickly restored.)
“Completely false. I have never even heard that.”
There have only been a few moments that Kraus doesn’t seem proud of. For one, she has deleted her Astroworld claims. While Catherine, the Princess of Wales, was being treated for an undisclosed illness, she claimed to have spoken to “an individual connected to hospital staff.” She deleted that phrase, replacing it with the more ambiguous “an individual connected to recovery.” (She also claimed that the princess had had bowel surgery and was wearing a temporary stoma bag; royal spokespeople have said she had abdominal surgery and chemotherapy for an undisclosed form of cancer.) Other, wilder stories remain on her platforms, like one purporting Amber Heard presided over sex parties with “Satanic themes” and “lesbian orgies.” She wrote that Elon Musk not only attended, but is also the father of Heard’s young daughter. Kraus later wrote on Instagram that Elon Musk and Amber Heard had teamed up to file a potential lawsuit against her. “Completely false,” says Heard attorney Elaine Bredehoft. “I have never even heard that.”
Kraus also made false claims about an actual journalist during Depp and Heard’s trial, saying that NBC reporter Kat Tenbarge was working for Heard’s legal team. “Any idiot would know that is not true,” Tenbarge wrote on Twitter recently, “and I reached out to her and told her it wasn’t, and she blocked me.”
Kraus is fascinated by legacies, famous people, and power. She’s written at length on Maxwell’s tony upbringing and the royal family, and is clearly more than a little attracted by what the Kennedys represent. A key part of her appeal to readers are claims to have inside sources and tipsters close to the nerve centers of politics and entertainment alike.
But as Kraus continues her particular blend of access journalism and campaign boosterism, some close to Kennedy and Trump describe her as little short of a political social-climber. “Donald has no clue who the fuck she is,” one person familiar with the situation told me. As for Kennedy, the same person added, “She’s saying she’s a friend of Kennedy’s. She’s not. She doesn’t know any of Kennedys’ friends. She’s just been stalking him all over.” Indeed, Kraus told more than one person that she temporarily lost her Kennedy campaign access after an argument of some kind with one of his children.
On September 13, Kraus published a fawning Q&A with Olivia Nuzzi, which seemed calibrated to showcase her closeness to New York magazine’s star political correspondent. Kraus described how they had developed a “valued friendship,” dubbing her an “inspirational force” and “the last of the real ones.”
But a little more than a week later, shortly after Nuzzi was reported to have exchanged “personal” text messages with Kennedy—later reported to have included intimate photos—Kraus made an abrupt pivot. “As I reflect, my overall take is that I was a pawn,” Kraus wrote in a new post that assailed Nuzzi as an amoral fake and seductress, reflecting on how she was taken by a “phony connection.” Notably, it also quoted Gavin de Becker, Kennedy’s “security expert,” claiming that Kennedy planed to file “civil litigation” as well as make “potential criminal referrals” against Nuzzi. De Becker claimed to Kraus that Kennedy was hounded by Nuzzi sending him nudes, saying, “This had nothing to do with romance. He was being chased by porn.” These Kraus-reported remarks were widely repeated in the mainstream press—without much context about the media figure who relayed them or her relationship with the campaign.
A second Trump White House could see Kraus take up a perch at Mar-a-Lago.
Nuzzi claimed in court in the process of obtaining a protection order against her ex-fiance, Politico journalist Ryan Lizza, that he shared information about her communications with Kennedy with the news media to hurt her. Nuzzi—who, like many people in journalism, I’ve been casually friendly with for years—declined to comment. Kraus has announced plans to mine 10 months of text messages between herself and Nuzzi to write about Nuzzi’s relationship with Lizza, and make the story available first to paid subscribers.
Whatever Kraus feels about Nuzzi, she seemed furious with Kennedy over his part in the relationship. After the New York Times reported that Kennedy knocked down conversations this summer about becoming Trump’s running mate—Kennedy has said that his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, was uncomfortable with him even endorsing Trump—Kraus complained on Instagram that he was willing to “risk [his] marriage for big boned Olivia Nuzzi” but not for the VP slot “to save America.” She followed up with a series of other cryptic messages, including, “JOHNNY DEPP TRIAL ENERGY RISING AGAIN,” and, more ominously, “I’M DONE BEING NICE.”
The posts seem to illustrate the dangers of keeping a gossip influencer close enough that she might feel personally wounded by campaign decisions. But any estrangement didn’t seem to last long: In early October, Kraus Instagrammed herself aboard a yachtwith Kennedy and a handful of other supporters, including Sopranos actress Drea de Matteo. (“Am I the only one wondering if it’s awkward?” a commenter wrote, seemingly referring to Kraus’ apparent anger over Kennedy and Nuzzi.) Soon after, Kraus jetted to Trump’s marquee rally in Butler, the site of July’s assassination attempt, where she provided rapturous play-by-play coverage from somewhere extremely close to the stage.
What Kraus is doing here—a sometimes queasy blend of journalism and fluffery—is certainly not new. Conspiracy influencers cosplaying as journalists have been a regular feature of the last few election cycles. Men’s rights activist, Pizzagate promoter, and all-purpose alt-right troll Mike Cernovich began pivoting to a form of hyper-partisan journalism during the Trump administration, with posts that suggested sourcing in the White House and on the National Security Council. Jack Posobiec, who could be described using many of the same terms as Cernovich, also got a White House press pass. Far-right figure and Trump-confidant Laura Loomer wields similar tools and affects, traipsing with cameras in tow to migrant camps and promising up inside knowledge.
There’s some overlap between Kraus and this earlier generation. “In addition to riveting insight about dirty secrets and filthy politicians,” Kraus has written of Loomer, “she is funny and fearless in her approach and comes stocked with receipts to back her theories and conspiracies.” The two met for lunch to discuss a conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift has been “activated by the left” and may have “made a deal with George and Alex Soros to regain the rights to her music in exchange for getting fans registered to vote Democrat,” as Kraus wrote. Loomer has not presented any compelling evidence to this effect.
But campaign season only goes so long, which raises the question of what Kraus will do next. She clearly has ambitions to extend her brand, recently placing an enormous billboard promoting her site on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard. In the event of a second Trump White House, you could see her taking up a perch at Mar-a-Lago. But even if he wins, she could end up on the margins, chasing celebrity gossip and Satanic shadows.
“She thinks it will go on and on and on,” her detractor, who’s familiar with the Trump world, said dismissively. “No. After the election, it’s over and bloggers like her are invited nowhere.”
In recent days, a number of news sites that rely heavily on aggregation have posted stories about Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, reporting “allegations” that he sexually assaulted a minor while working as a teacher and football coach.
The clearly false claims stem from the prolific work of one man, a Twitter conspiracy peddler who goes by Black Insurrectionist. After previously pushing a lie about a presidential debate “whistleblower,” he’s at it again, and even his clownish mistakes haven’t kept the claims from taking off on Twitter, or being promoted by automated sections of the news ecosystem.
Black Insurrectionist, who tweets under the handle @docnetyoutube, is a self-professed MAGA fan who says he’s based in Dallas. He’s paid for his Twitter account, meaning his visibility is boosted on the site; he’s also followed by a number of people in the MAGA and right-leaning fake news spheres, including Donald Trump Jr., dirty tricks specialist and Trump adviser Roger Stone, Pizzagate promoter Liz Crokin, and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones.
A screenshot of the email included a cursor, making it obvious he’d written it himself.
In September, he promoted an obviously fake story about a “whistleblower” at ABC News anonymously claiming the presidential debate hosted by the channel had been biased in favor of Kamala Harris. To back up the claims, he published a purported affidavit by the whistleblower, a poorly formatted and typo-riddled document that, among other things, claimed that Harris had been assured she wouldn’t be questioned about her time as “Attorney General in San Francisco,” a job she never held, as it doesn’t exist. The clumsy story still received immense pickup, including from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who began tweeting at various entities to investigate the claim; Elon Musk also shared some of Ackman’s posts.
This time, Black Insurrectionist says he received an anonymous email on August 9 from someone claiming they’d been sexually assaulted as a minor by Tim Walz. “I did indeed call the person making the claims,” Black Insurrectionist wrote. “He laid out a story that was very incredulous. I told him he would need to lay everything out in writing for me. In depth and in detail.” Black Insurrectionist included a screenshot of the purported firstemail; as thousands of people immediately noted, the image had a cursor at the end of the last sentence, making it obvious that he’d written it himself.
Undaunted, Black Insurrectionist went on to post dozens of tweets outlining the claim, including relaying another written “statement” from the victimclaiming that Walz has a “raised scar” on his chest and a “Chinese symbol” tattooed on his thigh. Black Insurrectionist also claimed to have asked the Harris-Walz campaign for comment, writing, “If anything I am saying is not true, they could shoot me down in a hot second.”
The campaign is unlikely to comment on a weird set of lies spread by a random guy, but Black Insurrectionist’s claims, and his pose of performing journalism, have had their intended effect, with some of his posts being viewed over one million times. Other large accounts on Twitter who have paid for verification have posted versions of the claim, garnering hundreds of thousands of other views and retweets. A search for Tim Walz’s name on the platform’s “For You” tab return verified accounts making the allegations at the very top.
With the claim taking off on Twitter, it was quickly picked up by purported news sites that rely heavily on aggregating from social media, including the Hindustan Times, a New Delhi newspaper whose web operation often reposts viral rumors vaguely arranged into the form of a news story. Another Indian-based news outlet, Times Now, also reshared the claims; both stories also appeared on MSN.com, a news aggregation site owned by Microsoft with a large audience, since it appears as the internet homepage for many users of their software. Search MSN.com for “Tim Walz,” and you get results from Bing, the Microsoft search engine, collecting of aggregated stories under the heading “Tim Walz Accused Of Inappropriate Relations.”
This is one way a successful fake news story is built: the seeds sown in the ever-more chaotic Twitter, spread across the automated news sectors of the internet, and piped into the homes of potentially millions of people who won’t necessarily read past the headlines. And, as the ABC whistleblower story makes clear, if someone even more prominent—perhaps Twitter’s owner, busy as he is stumping for Donald Trump—reposts the allegations in any form, this smoldering claim could become a full-on wildfire.
MSN acknowledged a request for comment but did not immediately respond to emailed questions. Twitter no longer responds to requests for comment from journalists.
In recent days, a number of news sites that rely heavily on aggregation have posted stories about Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, reporting “allegations” that he sexually assaulted a minor while working as a teacher and football coach.
The clearly false claims stem from the prolific work of one man, a Twitter conspiracy peddler who goes by Black Insurrectionist. After previously pushing a lie about a presidential debate “whistleblower,” he’s at it again, and even his clownish mistakes haven’t kept the claims from taking off on Twitter, or being promoted by automated sections of the news ecosystem.
Black Insurrectionist, who tweets under the handle @docnetyoutube, is a self-professed MAGA fan who says he’s based in Dallas. He’s paid for his Twitter account, meaning his visibility is boosted on the site; he’s also followed by a number of people in the MAGA and right-leaning fake news spheres, including Donald Trump Jr., dirty tricks specialist and Trump adviser Roger Stone, Pizzagate promoter Liz Crokin, and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones.
A screenshot of the email included a cursor, making it obvious he’d written it himself.
In September, he promoted an obviously fake story about a “whistleblower” at ABC News anonymously claiming the presidential debate hosted by the channel had been biased in favor of Kamala Harris. To back up the claims, he published a purported affidavit by the whistleblower, a poorly formatted and typo-riddled document that, among other things, claimed that Harris had been assured she wouldn’t be questioned about her time as “Attorney General in San Francisco,” a job she never held, as it doesn’t exist. The clumsy story still received immense pickup, including from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who began tweeting at various entities to investigate the claim; Elon Musk also shared some of Ackman’s posts.
This time, Black Insurrectionist says he received an anonymous email on August 9 from someone claiming they’d been sexually assaulted as a minor by Tim Walz. “I did indeed call the person making the claims,” Black Insurrectionist wrote. “He laid out a story that was very incredulous. I told him he would need to lay everything out in writing for me. In depth and in detail.” Black Insurrectionist included a screenshot of the purported firstemail; as thousands of people immediately noted, the image had a cursor at the end of the last sentence, making it obvious that he’d written it himself.
Undaunted, Black Insurrectionist went on to post dozens of tweets outlining the claim, including relaying another written “statement” from the victimclaiming that Walz has a “raised scar” on his chest and a “Chinese symbol” tattooed on his thigh. Black Insurrectionist also claimed to have asked the Harris-Walz campaign for comment, writing, “If anything I am saying is not true, they could shoot me down in a hot second.”
The campaign is unlikely to comment on a weird set of lies spread by a random guy, but Black Insurrectionist’s claims, and his pose of performing journalism, have had their intended effect, with some of his posts being viewed over one million times. Other large accounts on Twitter who have paid for verification have posted versions of the claim, garnering hundreds of thousands of other views and retweets. A search for Tim Walz’s name on the platform’s “For You” tab return verified accounts making the allegations at the very top.
With the claim taking off on Twitter, it was quickly picked up by purported news sites that rely heavily on aggregating from social media, including the Hindustan Times, a New Delhi newspaper whose web operation often reposts viral rumors vaguely arranged into the form of a news story. Another Indian-based news outlet, Times Now, also reshared the claims; both stories also appeared on MSN.com, a news aggregation site owned by Microsoft with a large audience, since it appears as the internet homepage for many users of their software. Search MSN.com for “Tim Walz,” and you get results from Bing, the Microsoft search engine, collecting of aggregated stories under the heading “Tim Walz Accused Of Inappropriate Relations.”
This is one way a successful fake news story is built: the seeds sown in the ever-more chaotic Twitter, spread across the automated news sectors of the internet, and piped into the homes of potentially millions of people who won’t necessarily read past the headlines. And, as the ABC whistleblower story makes clear, if someone even more prominent—perhaps Twitter’s owner, busy as he is stumping for Donald Trump—reposts the allegations in any form, this smoldering claim could become a full-on wildfire.
MSN acknowledged a request for comment but did not immediately respond to emailed questions. Twitter no longer responds to requests for comment from journalists.
The scale and depth of the lies about Hurricane Helene have been breathtaking—and they are far from over, even as the next storm gathers force.
Hundreds of people have died or lost their homes and been displaced from Helene, as lies about the storm and recovery have emanated from politicians, conspiracy peddlers, and far-right figures. These lies have done a number of things extremely well: demonized migrants, focused blame on the government and especially FEMA, and cast doubt on the established science of human-created climate change. The false claims have been picked up and further spread by ordinary people trying to make sense of what’s happening in their communities.
Lies about Helene spread widely, amplified by established conspiracy accounts.
There were signs that the disinformation about Helene would be especially bad. Before the rain even stopped, people like Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene got to work tweeting about how “they” can control the weather. (She has since tripled down on the claim, by, for instance, tweeting an instantly-debunked image of patents supposedly created for weather modification.)
With the storm coming during a bitterly partisan election year, there’s obvious incentive for Donald Trump and prominent backers like Greene, Elon Musk, and the QAnon-peddling retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn to spread lies about the current administration’s disaster response. FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on Tuesday that misinformation around the storm has been “the worst I have ever seen.”
On Tuesday, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online extremism, released a report on the deluge of antisemitism and violent threats FEMA and other public officials have faced since the storm. The ISD researchers found that false information on Twitter has been especially widely viewed, with just 33 posts “containing claims debunked by FEMA, the White House and the US government” amassing 160 million views.
“The situation exemplifies a wider trend,” the report warns. “Increasingly, a broad collection of conspiracy groups, extremist movements, political and commercial interests, and at times hostile states, coalesce around crises to further their agendas through online falsehoods, division, and hate. They exploit social media moderation failures, gaming their algorithmic systems, and often produce dangerous real-world effects.”
It is virtually inevitable the same playbook will be used for Hurricane Milton.
The lies about Helene spread so widely because they were amplified, ISD found, by large and established conspiracy-peddling accounts, ones that have previously made claims about election fraud and spread antisemitic and anti-immigrant ideas like the Great Replacement theory. “Their role as amplifiers here reveals how diverse groups converge on moments of crisis,” ISD’s analysts wrote, “to co-opt the news cycle and launder their positions to a wider or mainstream audience.”
Twitter is again serving as a useful driver for this activity; ISD wrote that accounts on the platform used by their analysts were “automatically served antisemitic posts on X after viewing three posts in the dataset that implied there was Jewish control of government agencies such as FEMA.” The recommended posts made claims about Jewish control of public institutions in the US, ISD wrote, as well as about “the nose sizes of figures in public office.”
Both news media and FEMA have lagged behind the conspiracy peddlers in responding to these lies. FEMA created a webpage on October 4, eight days after Helene made landfall, to “respond to rumors.” By then, though, the things they sought to debunk—that FEMA is out of money, or that it will confiscate supplies donated by volunteers—had already spread far and wide, with a disinformation network ready to seize on and amplify any possible useful claims that might sustain them. In one instance, a Tennessee woman posted on Facebook that FEMA was “confiscating” supplies donated to Helene survivors. Large conspiracy websites like Natural News seized on and promoted this claim, even after she made her post private and shared a second post saying the agency did not “fully take” the items.
In addition to antisemitic claims, there has also been a marked increase in anti-immigrant sentiment following Helene, with powerful figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk falsely claiming that FEMA had taken money from hurricane relief efforts and used it on undocumented people elsewhere.
“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you!” Musk tweeted on October 4. “It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.”
Such claims seek to focus rage and blame on two useful groups: government officials and immigrants. And these lies dovetail with another persistent and widely-spread false claim, that the Biden Administration either caused these hurricanes to happen through weather modification, or “sabotaged” the response to them in order to drown rural voters who favor Trump.
All of these claims both coalesce useful anger against the Biden administration and, given it is less than a month from Election Day, can be used set up nebulous claims of voter fraud for future use. “Now you know why FEMA is hindering the recovery efforts,” tweeted conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones earlier this week, resharing a post from Politico about how the aftermath of Helene could “swing” the election.
The claims have worked so well, it is virtually inevitable the same playbook will be used for Hurricane Milton as it makes landfall this week. Indeed, ISD’s analysts found evidence that “incoming weather events are already being used to perpetuate the same false narratives,” pointing, for instance, to a Twitter post that read, “The Biden Harris administration are sending Hurricane Milton to the remaining Trump strongholds ahead of the 2024 presidential elections to finish the job.”
The false narratives are even affecting conservative conspiracy peddlers in their own right, like Florida governor Ron DeSantis. On Wednesday, as Hurricane Milton approached, DeSantis pleaded with residents to evacuate if asked to do so by local officials, taking pains to reassure them, contrary to rumors online, that FEMA would not keep them from returning home when safe.
“We live in an era where if you put out crap online, you can get a lot of people to share it and you can monetize that,” DeSantis said. “That’s the way it is.” He asked people to be “careful about the nonsense that gets circulated. And just know that the more titillating it is, the more likely it is that somebody is making money off of it. And they don’t really give a damn about the wellbeing and safety of the people who are in the eye of this storm.”
The scale and depth of the lies about Hurricane Helene have been breathtaking—and they are far from over, even as the next storm gathers force.
Hundreds of people have died or lost their homes and been displaced from Helene, as lies about the storm and recovery have emanated from politicians, conspiracy peddlers, and far-right figures. These lies have done a number of things extremely well: demonized migrants, focused blame on the government and especially FEMA, and cast doubt on the established science of human-created climate change. The false claims have been picked up and further spread by ordinary people trying to make sense of what’s happening in their communities.
Lies about Helene spread widely, amplified by established conspiracy accounts.
There were signs that the disinformation about Helene would be especially bad. Before the rain even stopped, people like Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene got to work tweeting about how “they” can control the weather. (She has since tripled down on the claim, by, for instance, tweeting an instantly-debunked image of patents supposedly created for weather modification.)
With the storm coming during a bitterly partisan election year, there’s obvious incentive for Donald Trump and prominent backers like Greene, Elon Musk, and the QAnon-peddling retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn to spread lies about the current administration’s disaster response. FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on Tuesday that misinformation around the storm has been “the worst I have ever seen.”
On Tuesday, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online extremism, released a report on the deluge of antisemitism and violent threats FEMA and other public officials have faced since the storm. The ISD researchers found that false information on Twitter has been especially widely viewed, with just 33 posts “containing claims debunked by FEMA, the White House and the US government” amassing 160 million views.
“The situation exemplifies a wider trend,” the report warns. “Increasingly, a broad collection of conspiracy groups, extremist movements, political and commercial interests, and at times hostile states, coalesce around crises to further their agendas through online falsehoods, division, and hate. They exploit social media moderation failures, gaming their algorithmic systems, and often produce dangerous real-world effects.”
It is virtually inevitable the same playbook will be used for Hurricane Milton.
The lies about Helene spread so widely because they were amplified, ISD found, by large and established conspiracy-peddling accounts, ones that have previously made claims about election fraud and spread antisemitic and anti-immigrant ideas like the Great Replacement theory. “Their role as amplifiers here reveals how diverse groups converge on moments of crisis,” ISD’s analysts wrote, “to co-opt the news cycle and launder their positions to a wider or mainstream audience.”
Twitter is again serving as a useful driver for this activity; ISD wrote that accounts on the platform used by their analysts were “automatically served antisemitic posts on X after viewing three posts in the dataset that implied there was Jewish control of government agencies such as FEMA.” The recommended posts made claims about Jewish control of public institutions in the US, ISD wrote, as well as about “the nose sizes of figures in public office.”
Both news media and FEMA have lagged behind the conspiracy peddlers in responding to these lies. FEMA created a webpage on October 4, eight days after Helene made landfall, to “respond to rumors.” By then, though, the things they sought to debunk—that FEMA is out of money, or that it will confiscate supplies donated by volunteers—had already spread far and wide, with a disinformation network ready to seize on and amplify any possible useful claims that might sustain them. In one instance, a Tennessee woman posted on Facebook that FEMA was “confiscating” supplies donated to Helene survivors. Large conspiracy websites like Natural News seized on and promoted this claim, even after she made her post private and shared a second post saying the agency did not “fully take” the items.
In addition to antisemitic claims, there has also been a marked increase in anti-immigrant sentiment following Helene, with powerful figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk falsely claiming that FEMA had taken money from hurricane relief efforts and used it on undocumented people elsewhere.
“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you!” Musk tweeted on October 4. “It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.”
Such claims seek to focus rage and blame on two useful groups: government officials and immigrants. And these lies dovetail with another persistent and widely-spread false claim, that the Biden Administration either caused these hurricanes to happen through weather modification, or “sabotaged” the response to them in order to drown rural voters who favor Trump.
All of these claims both coalesce useful anger against the Biden administration and, given it is less than a month from Election Day, can be used set up nebulous claims of voter fraud for future use. “Now you know why FEMA is hindering the recovery efforts,” tweeted conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones earlier this week, resharing a post from Politico about how the aftermath of Helene could “swing” the election.
The claims have worked so well, it is virtually inevitable the same playbook will be used for Hurricane Milton as it makes landfall this week. Indeed, ISD’s analysts found evidence that “incoming weather events are already being used to perpetuate the same false narratives,” pointing, for instance, to a Twitter post that read, “The Biden Harris administration are sending Hurricane Milton to the remaining Trump strongholds ahead of the 2024 presidential elections to finish the job.”
The false narratives are even affecting conservative conspiracy peddlers in their own right, like Florida governor Ron DeSantis. On Wednesday, as Hurricane Milton approached, DeSantis pleaded with residents to evacuate if asked to do so by local officials, taking pains to reassure them, contrary to rumors online, that FEMA would not keep them from returning home when safe.
“We live in an era where if you put out crap online, you can get a lot of people to share it and you can monetize that,” DeSantis said. “That’s the way it is.” He asked people to be “careful about the nonsense that gets circulated. And just know that the more titillating it is, the more likely it is that somebody is making money off of it. And they don’t really give a damn about the wellbeing and safety of the people who are in the eye of this storm.”
The news that New York Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted came as a surprise to precisely no one. For one thing, federal authorities first began raiding the homes of people connected to his campaign in November of 2023, amid many, many, many reports about the mayor’s suspiciously frequent luxury travel to Turkey, not to mention rumors of donations from foreign nationals.
For another, the mayor is just a profoundly weird guy, and it really seemed like anything might be possible with him. But now that Adams has officially been federally charged with bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals, one thing does come as a bit of a shock: how deeply, grimly, unfortunately funny some of this is.
Look past the serious allegations, and Mayor Adams and his allies are accused of behavior that rises to a comedic plane.
The indictment alleges Adams has been accepting “improper value benefits,” from wealthy Turkish nationals and officials connected to the Turkish government for at least a decade, going back to his time as Brooklyn Borough President. Those benefits included luxury hotel stays, upgraded plane tickets, free meals at high-end restaurants, and “luxury entertainment” during his frequent trips to Turkey. It also alleges that he and his mayoral campaign baldly and happily took what a reasonable person would construe as bribes from Turkish nationals, accepting large sums of illegal contributions through straw donors and giving favorable treatment in return, including pressuring the fire department to approve a luxury high-rise which houses the Turkish consulate, ceasing his association with a Turkish community center in Brooklyn that Turkey claimed was hostile to the government, and declining to make a statement on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day simply because a “Turkish official” asked him not to.
All of that is arguably less funny; perhaps, when you consider the breadth and length of the alleged corruption, not funny at all. But if you can look past the serious allegations, Mayor Adams and his campaign staffers are accused of behaving in ways so breathtakingly buffoonish, so truly, deeply ill-advised, that the whole thing transcends ordinary crime and makes its way to a comedic plane.
For instance: their commitment to putting everything—far more than any competent lawyer would advise—in writing. After Adams began traveling to Turkey in 2015 and getting extremely sweet deals on Turkish Airlines, prosecutors say he went out of his way to instruct his partner to only buy tickets on Turkish Air. Adams, the indictment alleges, “flew the Turkish Airline even when doing so was otherwise inconvenient. For example, during the July and August 2017 trip, Adams’ “Partner was surprised to learn that ADAMS was in Turkey when she had understood him to be flying from New York to France. ADAMS responded, in a text message, ‘Transferring here. You know first stop is always instanbul [sic].’ ” Furthermore, it adds, when Adams’ partner wanted to plan a trip to Easter Island, Adams “repeatedly asked her whether the Turkish Airline could be used for their flights, requiring her to call the Turkish Airline to confirm that they did not have routes between New York and Chile.”
A text message saying the “first stop is always Istanbul,” will surely go down in the lexicon of phrases denoting rank political corruption. But the incredible commitment to putting everything in written words goes much further. Adams and his staffers, the indictment alleges, even typed out discussions about deleting evidence. “To be o[n the] safe side Please Delete all messages you send me,” a staffer texted Adams, who is said to have responded with a chipper, “Always do.”
At the same time they tried to delete their paper trail, Adams and his staffers allegedly created a far dumber one. In 2017, for instance, Adams emailed his scheduler to pay for some free flights he’d already taken on Turkish air. But, the indictment reads, “the emails provided inconsistent explanations: in some, ADAMS suggested that the Adams Scheduler should pay by using ADAMS’s credit card, while in others, ADAMS claimed to have left cash in an envelope for the Adams Scheduler to send to the Turkish Airline.” The indictment also dryly notes that given the value of the tickets, Adams would have put at least $10,000 cash in a desk drawer to send to Turkish airlines for flights he’d already taken months before. “He did not do that,” the indictment helpfully adds, “as records from the Turkish Airline confirm that ADAMS did not pay the airline, in cash or otherwise, because the tickets were complimentary.”
Another grimly hilarious aspect of the indictment is Adams’ surprising willingness to immediately take piles of money, even cash—a fact that was, again, laid out in writing, in perfect clarity. In June of 2018, an Adams staffer and a Turkish entrepreneur—referred to in the document as “the Promoter”—talked about Adams taking another trip. Per the indictment, the Promoter wrote, “Fund Raising in Turkey is not legal, but I think I can raise money for your campaign off the record.” The Adams staffer is said to have responded, “How will [Adams] declare that money here?” The Promoter responded, “He won’t declare it… Or… We’ll make the donation through an American citizen in the U.S….A Turk… I’ll give cash to him in Turkey . .. Or I’ll send it to an American . . . He will make a donation to you.”
Any reasonable person might identify this as, let’s say, a problem. And indeed, the Adams staffer seemed to recognize the red flags, responding, “I think he wouldn’t get involved in such games. They might cause a big stink later on,” but added, “I’ll ask anyways.” The promoter said he could contribut “Max $100k,” to which the staffer replied, “100K? Do you have a chance to transfer that here? … We can’t do it while Eric is in Turkey,” to which the promoter replied, “Let’s think.”
“After this conversation,” the indictment reads, “the Adams Staffer asked ADAMS whether the Adams Staffer should pursue the unlawful foreign contributions offered by the Promoter, and contrary to the Adams Staffer’s expectations, ADAMS directed that the Adams Staffer pursue the Promoter’s illegal scheme.” Later, instructing his staff about another Turkish businessman who was offering to provide illegal contributions, Adams wrote, that the businessman “is ready to help. I don’t want his willing to help be waisted [sic].”
Adams’ mordantly funny business continued right up until the feds closed in.
The indictment goes on—and on, and on—like this. At one point, when Turkish university officials were pledging $20,000 in “donations” to Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign, in return for his attendance at an event, an Adams staffer responded, “if the donation is not more than $25K, then Mr. President does not participate in person.” In another instance, Adams is alleged to have placed Turkish Airlines’ general manager on his transition team, after telling an Adams staffer, “It would suit me well to be lead Or Senior Advisor.” Two days later, he reiterated, writing, “Lead Plz :) Otherwise seat number 52 is empty … On the way back.” As the indictment helpfully explains, that meant “if the Airline Manager was not given a position on a transition committee, it would affect ADAMS’s travel benefits from the Turkish Airline.”
The mordantly funny business continued right up until the feds closed in, when, on November 6, 2023, the FBI executed a search warrant on Adams and seized some of his electronics, including an iPad and a cellphone.
“Although ADAMS was carrying several electronic devices, including two cellphones, he was not carrying his personal cellphone,” the indictment adds, “which is the device he used to communicate about the conduct described in this indictment. When Adams produced the phone the following day, in response to a subpoena, it was locked and password protected.”
“ADAMS claimed that after he learned about the investigation into his conduct, he changed the password…and increased the complexity of his password from four digits to six,” the indictment continues, with a straight face. “ADAMS had done this, he claimed, to prevent members of his staff from inadvertently or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone because, according to ADAMS, he wished to preserve the contents of his phone due to the investigation. But, ADAMS further claimed, he had forgotten the password he had just set, and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone.”
As of Thursday afternoon, Adams was defiant, having released a statement he pre-recorded before the indictment was even unsealed, pledging to fight the charges “with every ounce of my strength and spirit.” As he keeps that promise, unbelievable, almost surreal levels of morbid comedy will likely continue.
The news that New York Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted came as a surprise to precisely no one. For one thing, federal authorities first began raiding the homes of people connected to his campaign in November of 2023, amid many, many, many reports about the mayor’s suspiciously frequent luxury travel to Turkey, not to mention rumors of donations from foreign nationals.
For another, the mayor is just a profoundly weird guy, and it really seemed like anything might be possible with him. But now that Adams has officially been federally charged with bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals, one thing does come as a bit of a shock: how deeply, grimly, unfortunately funny some of this is.
Look past the serious allegations, and Mayor Adams and his allies are accused of behavior that rises to a comedic plane.
The indictment alleges Adams has been accepting “improper value benefits,” from wealthy Turkish nationals and officials connected to the Turkish government for at least a decade, going back to his time as Brooklyn Borough President. Those benefits included luxury hotel stays, upgraded plane tickets, free meals at high-end restaurants, and “luxury entertainment” during his frequent trips to Turkey. It also alleges that he and his mayoral campaign baldly and happily took what a reasonable person would construe as bribes from Turkish nationals, accepting large sums of illegal contributions through straw donors and giving favorable treatment in return, including pressuring the fire department to approve a luxury high-rise which houses the Turkish consulate, ceasing his association with a Turkish community center in Brooklyn that Turkey claimed was hostile to the government, and declining to make a statement on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day simply because a “Turkish official” asked him not to.
All of that is arguably less funny; perhaps, when you consider the breadth and length of the alleged corruption, not funny at all. But if you can look past the serious allegations, Mayor Adams and his campaign staffers are accused of behaving in ways so breathtakingly buffoonish, so truly, deeply ill-advised, that the whole thing transcends ordinary crime and makes its way to a comedic plane.
For instance: their commitment to putting everything—far more than any competent lawyer would advise—in writing. After Adams began traveling to Turkey in 2015 and getting extremely sweet deals on Turkish Airlines, prosecutors say he went out of his way to instruct his partner to only buy tickets on Turkish Air. Adams, the indictment alleges, “flew the Turkish Airline even when doing so was otherwise inconvenient. For example, during the July and August 2017 trip, Adams’ “Partner was surprised to learn that ADAMS was in Turkey when she had understood him to be flying from New York to France. ADAMS responded, in a text message, ‘Transferring here. You know first stop is always instanbul [sic].’ ” Furthermore, it adds, when Adams’ partner wanted to plan a trip to Easter Island, Adams “repeatedly asked her whether the Turkish Airline could be used for their flights, requiring her to call the Turkish Airline to confirm that they did not have routes between New York and Chile.”
A text message saying the “first stop is always Istanbul,” will surely go down in the lexicon of phrases denoting rank political corruption. But the incredible commitment to putting everything in written words goes much further. Adams and his staffers, the indictment alleges, even typed out discussions about deleting evidence. “To be o[n the] safe side Please Delete all messages you send me,” a staffer texted Adams, who is said to have responded with a chipper, “Always do.”
At the same time they tried to delete their paper trail, Adams and his staffers allegedly created a far dumber one. In 2017, for instance, Adams emailed his scheduler to pay for some free flights he’d already taken on Turkish air. But, the indictment reads, “the emails provided inconsistent explanations: in some, ADAMS suggested that the Adams Scheduler should pay by using ADAMS’s credit card, while in others, ADAMS claimed to have left cash in an envelope for the Adams Scheduler to send to the Turkish Airline.” The indictment also dryly notes that given the value of the tickets, Adams would have put at least $10,000 cash in a desk drawer to send to Turkish airlines for flights he’d already taken months before. “He did not do that,” the indictment helpfully adds, “as records from the Turkish Airline confirm that ADAMS did not pay the airline, in cash or otherwise, because the tickets were complimentary.”
Another grimly hilarious aspect of the indictment is Adams’ surprising willingness to immediately take piles of money, even cash—a fact that was, again, laid out in writing, in perfect clarity. In June of 2018, an Adams staffer and a Turkish entrepreneur—referred to in the document as “the Promoter”—talked about Adams taking another trip. Per the indictment, the Promoter wrote, “Fund Raising in Turkey is not legal, but I think I can raise money for your campaign off the record.” The Adams staffer is said to have responded, “How will [Adams] declare that money here?” The Promoter responded, “He won’t declare it… Or… We’ll make the donation through an American citizen in the U.S….A Turk… I’ll give cash to him in Turkey . .. Or I’ll send it to an American . . . He will make a donation to you.”
Any reasonable person might identify this as, let’s say, a problem. And indeed, the Adams staffer seemed to recognize the red flags, responding, “I think he wouldn’t get involved in such games. They might cause a big stink later on,” but added, “I’ll ask anyways.” The promoter said he could contribut “Max $100k,” to which the staffer replied, “100K? Do you have a chance to transfer that here? … We can’t do it while Eric is in Turkey,” to which the promoter replied, “Let’s think.”
“After this conversation,” the indictment reads, “the Adams Staffer asked ADAMS whether the Adams Staffer should pursue the unlawful foreign contributions offered by the Promoter, and contrary to the Adams Staffer’s expectations, ADAMS directed that the Adams Staffer pursue the Promoter’s illegal scheme.” Later, instructing his staff about another Turkish businessman who was offering to provide illegal contributions, Adams wrote, that the businessman “is ready to help. I don’t want his willing to help be waisted [sic].”
Adams’ mordantly funny business continued right up until the feds closed in.
The indictment goes on—and on, and on—like this. At one point, when Turkish university officials were pledging $20,000 in “donations” to Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign, in return for his attendance at an event, an Adams staffer responded, “if the donation is not more than $25K, then Mr. President does not participate in person.” In another instance, Adams is alleged to have placed Turkish Airlines’ general manager on his transition team, after telling an Adams staffer, “It would suit me well to be lead Or Senior Advisor.” Two days later, he reiterated, writing, “Lead Plz :) Otherwise seat number 52 is empty … On the way back.” As the indictment helpfully explains, that meant “if the Airline Manager was not given a position on a transition committee, it would affect ADAMS’s travel benefits from the Turkish Airline.”
The mordantly funny business continued right up until the feds closed in, when, on November 6, 2023, the FBI executed a search warrant on Adams and seized some of his electronics, including an iPad and a cellphone.
“Although ADAMS was carrying several electronic devices, including two cellphones, he was not carrying his personal cellphone,” the indictment adds, “which is the device he used to communicate about the conduct described in this indictment. When Adams produced the phone the following day, in response to a subpoena, it was locked and password protected.”
“ADAMS claimed that after he learned about the investigation into his conduct, he changed the password…and increased the complexity of his password from four digits to six,” the indictment continues, with a straight face. “ADAMS had done this, he claimed, to prevent members of his staff from inadvertently or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone because, according to ADAMS, he wished to preserve the contents of his phone due to the investigation. But, ADAMS further claimed, he had forgotten the password he had just set, and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone.”
As of Thursday afternoon, Adams was defiant, having released a statement he pre-recorded before the indictment was even unsealed, pledging to fight the charges “with every ounce of my strength and spirit.” As he keeps that promise, unbelievable, almost surreal levels of morbid comedy will likely continue.
A Texas bankruptcy judge ruled on Tuesday that a plan to sell the assets of Alex Jones’ company Free Speech Systems, the parent company of Infowars, can proceed. The profits from the conspiracy-powered media organization’s sale will be awarded to Jones’ creditors, most of whom are families who sued Jones after he repeatedly defamed them by claiming that the Sandy Hook mass shooting that killed their loved ones was a hoax. The judge’s approval means that Infowars’ slow wind-down will continue, after years of delays during bankruptcy proceedings. A separate fight still remains over whether Jones’ personal Twitter account can also be sold off, something he and his attorneys have opposed.
“Alex Jones will no longer own or control the company he built.”
Jones lost by default in a series of lawsuit brought by two sets of Sandy Hook families in Texas and Connecticut; both Free Speech Systems and Jones personally have since filed for bankruptcy. The total amount expected from the sale, while likely to be in the millions, won’t approach the $1.5 billion courts have ordered Jones and Infowars pay out to the families. Two parents who sued him in Texas, Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa—their son Noah was the youngest child to die at Sandy Hook—also have yet to have their case heard.
“FSS will now be sold at auction, meaning Alex Jones will no longer own or control the company he built,” Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Connecticut plaintiffs, said in a statement provided to NPR. “This brings the families closer to their goal of holding him accountable for the harm he has caused.”
The sale is scheduled to happen in stages beginning in November, and will include both the company’s intellectual and physical property. In a separate ruling earlier this year, Houston bankruptcy Judge Christopher M. Lopez ruled that some of Jones’ personal assets could also be sold off, although he is being allowed to keep his home in Austin. One remaining fight is whether FSS owes money to a company called PQPR holdings, which claims to sell Infowars the pills and supplements the company markets. PQPR is another Jones-controlled entity, and the families have long maintained that its sudden appearance in business filings not long after the families were told they could proceed with their defamation suit was part of a plan to “siphon off” assets that might otherwise be subject to court judgement.
The process has also revealed strain between the families who brought suit in Texas, Jones’ home state, and those who sued in Connecticut, where the killings occurred. As an attorney representing the U.S. bankruptcy trustee appointed to the case put it during the Tuesday hearing, the sale of FSS assets could kick off a “race to the courthouse,” as groups of families and lawyers tussle over whose settlements are paid out first.
The Connecticut plaintiffs co-counsel wrote in a filing earlier this month that the Texas families were “seeking immediate turnover of FSS’s assets for the Texas Families’ sole benefit.” He added that it suggested “a continued belief on the part of the Texas Families that they—and they alone—should be entitled to recover from FSS, while the Connecticut Families should receive nothing.”
In a plan previously proposed by the Texas side, Infowars would remain operational and Jones would pay them over the next decade. (As the New York Times notes, that plan would have required him to never mention the shooting on-air again, something he arguably doesn’t have the self-control to do.)
But attorneys for the Texas families now say they also support the trustee’s current plan. Avi Moshenberg, an attorney for the Texas families, wrote in a September 20 filing that his clients support the wind-down motion put forward by the trustee, and “agree that FSS’s assets should be sold.” Moshenberg added that “the Court can rest assured that the Texas Plaintiffs are striving to work out an agreement with the parties” over “how FSS sale proceeds should be distributed.”
For his part, Jones has made it clear he wants the company to be auctioned off, in hopes that “patriots,” as he puts it, will buy it more or less whole and let him continue broadcasting.
“The Democratic party running all this, the FBI, the CIA running this, didn’t want that,” Jones said of the proposed auction in a broadcast on Tuesday, shortly before the hearing. “They wanted me off the air…They want us shut down and closed and don’t even let ‘em sell the assets.” He tied the case to the upcoming election adding, “They’re getting ready to try to take Trump out, and don’t want us on the air during that fight.”
Jones also hinted, as he often does, that he has yet another plan up his sleeve. “They have our phones tapped and know something better is coming,” he declared. “They’re gonna have an issue on their hands.”
During the same show, Jones claimed to be “out of money,” and urged his audience to go to the The Alex Jones Store—an entity he insisted was separate from Free Speech Systems—and buy merchandise to support him. “We need the funds,” Jones wheedled. “These are great T-shirts. I need your aid.”
A Texas bankruptcy judge ruled on Tuesday that a plan to sell the assets of Alex Jones’ company Free Speech Systems, the parent company of Infowars, can proceed. The profits from the conspiracy-powered media organization’s sale will be awarded to Jones’ creditors, most of whom are families who sued Jones after he repeatedly defamed them by claiming that the Sandy Hook mass shooting that killed their loved ones was a hoax. The judge’s approval means that Infowars’ slow wind-down will continue, after years of delays during bankruptcy proceedings. A separate fight still remains over whether Jones’ personal Twitter account can also be sold off, something he and his attorneys have opposed.
“Alex Jones will no longer own or control the company he built.”
Jones lost by default in a series of lawsuit brought by two sets of Sandy Hook families in Texas and Connecticut; both Free Speech Systems and Jones personally have since filed for bankruptcy. The total amount expected from the sale, while likely to be in the millions, won’t approach the $1.5 billion courts have ordered Jones and Infowars pay out to the families. Two parents who sued him in Texas, Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa—their son Noah was the youngest child to die at Sandy Hook—also have yet to have their case heard.
“FSS will now be sold at auction, meaning Alex Jones will no longer own or control the company he built,” Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Connecticut plaintiffs, said in a statement provided to NPR. “This brings the families closer to their goal of holding him accountable for the harm he has caused.”
The sale is scheduled to happen in stages beginning in November, and will include both the company’s intellectual and physical property. In a separate ruling earlier this year, Houston bankruptcy Judge Christopher M. Lopez ruled that some of Jones’ personal assets could also be sold off, although he is being allowed to keep his home in Austin. One remaining fight is whether FSS owes money to a company called PQPR holdings, which claims to sell Infowars the pills and supplements the company markets. PQPR is another Jones-controlled entity, and the families have long maintained that its sudden appearance in business filings not long after the families were told they could proceed with their defamation suit was part of a plan to “siphon off” assets that might otherwise be subject to court judgement.
The process has also revealed strain between the families who brought suit in Texas, Jones’ home state, and those who sued in Connecticut, where the killings occurred. As an attorney representing the U.S. bankruptcy trustee appointed to the case put it during the Tuesday hearing, the sale of FSS assets could kick off a “race to the courthouse,” as groups of families and lawyers tussle over whose settlements are paid out first.
The Connecticut plaintiffs co-counsel wrote in a filing earlier this month that the Texas families were “seeking immediate turnover of FSS’s assets for the Texas Families’ sole benefit.” He added that it suggested “a continued belief on the part of the Texas Families that they—and they alone—should be entitled to recover from FSS, while the Connecticut Families should receive nothing.”
In a plan previously proposed by the Texas side, Infowars would remain operational and Jones would pay them over the next decade. (As the New York Times notes, that plan would have required him to never mention the shooting on-air again, something he arguably doesn’t have the self-control to do.)
But attorneys for the Texas families now say they also support the trustee’s current plan. Avi Moshenberg, an attorney for the Texas families, wrote in a September 20 filing that his clients support the wind-down motion put forward by the trustee, and “agree that FSS’s assets should be sold.” Moshenberg added that “the Court can rest assured that the Texas Plaintiffs are striving to work out an agreement with the parties” over “how FSS sale proceeds should be distributed.”
For his part, Jones has made it clear he wants the company to be auctioned off, in hopes that “patriots,” as he puts it, will buy it more or less whole and let him continue broadcasting.
“The Democratic party running all this, the FBI, the CIA running this, didn’t want that,” Jones said of the proposed auction in a broadcast on Tuesday, shortly before the hearing. “They wanted me off the air…They want us shut down and closed and don’t even let ‘em sell the assets.” He tied the case to the upcoming election adding, “They’re getting ready to try to take Trump out, and don’t want us on the air during that fight.”
Jones also hinted, as he often does, that he has yet another plan up his sleeve. “They have our phones tapped and know something better is coming,” he declared. “They’re gonna have an issue on their hands.”
During the same show, Jones claimed to be “out of money,” and urged his audience to go to the The Alex Jones Store—an entity he insisted was separate from Free Speech Systems—and buy merchandise to support him. “We need the funds,” Jones wheedled. “These are great T-shirts. I need your aid.”
Nick Fuentes is a white supremacist, an antisemite, a misogynist, and a lunkish weirdo so radioactive that even the Trump campaign doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. Earlier this summer Fuentes, 26, exercised his growing disenchantment with Trump by rallying his fanbase of similarly trollish and aggrieved young men, the so-called “groypers,” to do his will against the campaign.
New research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online extremism, shows how Fuentes mounted what he called a “groyper war” against the Trump campaign on Twitter and TruthSocial. “The tactics Fuentes and his fans used were pretty crude,” says Jared Holt, a senior researcher at ISD studying hate and extremism. But “more serious actors” seeking to sway the election, he adds, including “countries that would seek to influence political discourse in the US for their own agendas may well look at this and see a bit of a blueprint.”
Fuentes’ attempt to push X posts despite policies barring manipulation could encourage more sophisticated players.
Fuentes is among a group of far-right figures, including Candace Owens and Laura Loomer, who have argued that the Trump campaign needs to take a more extreme stance on immigration. That was one demand of this social media campaign, alongside extracting a commitment from Trump to not go to war with Iran, an extension of Fuentes’ stated “America First” views and his disdain for Israel, which he’s called “a terrorist nation with nukes holding America hostage.” Fuentes also called on Trump to fire campaign managers Christopher LaCivita and Susie Wiles; he’s called LaCivita “lame” and complained he encourages Trump to talk about the economy, which it’s fair to surmise Fuentes finds less salient a topic than immigration and deportation and more boring than the racism, weird grudges, and stories about windmills with which Trump otherwise fills his rallies.
This isn’t the first time Fuentes has grandiously deployed the term “Groyper war.” In 2019, he used it to describe his fans storming in-person events featuring Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Charlie Kirk, and Donald Trump Jr, rattling the Republican figures with heckling questions. This summer’s digital effort was fairly simple: he wanted people to sign up en masse for TruthSocial to yell at the campaign, and get certain topics and keywords trending on Twitter.
His fans followed those instructions well. Holt found that when Fuentes directed livestream viewers to use certain phrases on Twitter, like “FIRE LACIVITA” and “NO WAR WITH IRAN” those phrases showed “clear spikes,” with groypers creating “thousands of posts—often within just a few minutes—after which usage of the phrases steeply dropped.”
Fuentes also encouraged his fans to sign up for TruthSocial to push similar messaging, Holt found—and they obliged, creating accounts in the thousands.
“Check the scoreboard,” one alleged Groyper tweeted. “We’re just getting started,” as they shared a graphic that claimed a victory in Corey Lewandowski rejoining the Trump campaign in August and LaCivita and Wiles purportedly being “demoted,” painting it as a concession to the Groypers’ demand. The same graphic bragged about how the “Groyper war” had attracted media attention, and that JD Vance had been asked about Nick Fuentes. (Vance answered the question by calling him “a total loser.”)
But in the real world,Trump didn’t fire LaCivita or Wiles. Nor did he rule out going to war with Iran or change his tune on funding for Israel or any of Fuentes’ other current fixations. On August 26, Holt wrote in his analysis, “Fuentes appeared to concede that their efforts on social media had ultimately been unsuccessful.”
According to Holt, Fuentes declared, “They didn’t hear us on Twitter. They didn’t hear us on Truth Social. They just censored the hashtags. They didn’t hear us when we emailed them. And they didn’t hear us when The Washington Postand every other news media outlet reported it. So, now we’re going to travel to Michigan, and we will say it to their faces with a crowd of actual America Firsters.” On September 4, he again declared on Twitter that he was “heading out to Michigan next week” to continue the fight. On September 14, he said that he and the Groypers would soon be “live from Michigan,” dubbing it “Groyper war two,” adding: “We are going to hit them in real life.” Whatever Fuentes envisions in Michigan, it hasn’t yet materialized.
Holt says Fuentes aimed a bit high, and that it was too much to hope “to get a national presidential campaign to suddenly clean house by firing top campaign managers and crafting their message around some racist podcaster’s wishes.” While Fuentes was once invited to dine with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, alongside Kanye West, and has lately gained some purchase among mainstream Republican crowds, Holt says Fuentes’ failed “War” illustrates that Trump now believes he has “nothing in particular to gain from associating with him and his odious fanbase.”
That said, Fuentes’ overt attempt to push certain messages on Twitter and TruthSocial, in violation of Twitter’s policies against platform manipulation and spam, Holt said, could encourage more sophisticated players to try to manipulate the platforms, since neither has signaled a particular interest in punishing such behavior.
It also, he adds, could show the social media platforms—if they cared to look—what enforcement actions remain to be taken. Given that TruthSocial is Trump’s own platform and that he hasn’t ever purported to care about platform manipulation, and given Elon Musks decimation of Twitter’s trust and safety teams, his exuberant embrace of extremism and conspiracy theories, and his own massive role in spreading disinformation on Twitter, in this case that seems unlikely.
“These are private companies at the end of the day,” Holt says, with a note of exhaustion. “It’s up to them if they want to enforce on it.”
The most striking thing about Lauren Chen, in hindsight, is how she managed to be everywhere. Until earlier this month, when the Department of Justice alleged that Chen, a Canadian influencer and self-described “Christian nationalist” with ties to the far right, had been secretly funded by Russia, she wasn’t much of a mainstream figure. But, through a remarkable number of platforms, podcasts, spinoffs, guest appearances, and side hustles, she was undoubtably prolific in conservative spaces.
Chen, now 30 years old, began her public career around 2016 and had since managed to build remarkably diverse ties across the right-wing spectrum, courting conservative media, white nationalists like Richard Spencer, likeminded podcasters, “paleo conservatives,” comedians turned aggrieved libertarians, and many others. She even dipped her toe into lifestyle influencing, peddling both ivermectin and a chintzy soap line she co-owned with her mother. She appeared as a commentator on The Blaze’s TV channel, as a “contributor” for conservative activist group Turning Point USA, and made appearances on Fox News, One America News, Newsmax, and in videos from The Daily Wire, Rebel Media, and PragerU. With a young daughter and a home in Nashville that she shared with husband Liam Donovan, who served as president of their video-making company, Tenet Media, it appeared to be paying off.
Chen’s career raises questions about mercenary personalities willing to amplify any message.
All of that came to an abrupt end earlier this month, when the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment alleging that Tenet was secretly funded by RT, the Russian state media company that functions as a Kremlin propaganda arm. The department said Chen had received money from RT’s parent company since 2021, billing them for videos that she posted without any kind of disclosure of that financial relationship on her personal YouTube channel. (Chen has not been personally indicted or accused of criminal wrongdoing; the filing only charges Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, two RT employees, for their alleged role in the scheme.) A “reporter” for Tenet announced the following day that the company was shutting down.
The well-known conservative and far-right commentators who worked for Tenet—including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern—have all described themselves as unwitting victims in a scheme the DOJ alleges was meant to promote pro-Putin talking points and deepen partisan divisions within American society. But the indictment explains that at least one of them had suspicions. When one (who appears to be Rubin or Pool) began asking questions about the supposed French funder of the company, a French banker and philanthropist named “Eduard Grigoriann,” Chen sent that commentator a fake resume, which the indictment alleges was provided to her “by another fictional persona.” The resume claimed that Grigoriann had “held various positions in Brussels and France at a multinational bank,” and featured a stock photo of a model peering out a private jet’s window. That, apparently, was enough to quell concerns.
But while Chen and Donovan allegedly worked hard to conceal the source of the funding for Tenet from the commentators they were paying, they also continued building her brand outside of the company. She appeared at a Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA earlier this year, on a borderline-ludicrous number of podcasts, and made a constant string of videos on YouTube and elsewhere, mocking feminism, gender non-conforming people, migrants and anyone who might need welfare—standard conservative targets. In the course of doing so, she barely mentioned Tenet at all, focusing much more on her roles at The Blaze and Turning Point USA.
But Chen’s motivations for allegedly partnering with Russia, if they go beyond simply making a buck, are still hazy. The indictment depicts her and Donovan as mainly preoccupied with money—how quickly “the Russians,” as they called their funders, would pay their invoices. Chen’s career seems to show someone of ideological flexibility, willing to promote a range of ideas across the conservative spectrum—if it comes with time in the spotlight: anti-feminism, fearmongering about migrants, barely-concealed racism. If the allegations are proven true, Chen’s career could be read as a cautionary tale not just about the dangers of foreign influence peddling, but about the kinds of mercenary domestic personalities who—out of self-interest, a lack of curiosity about how their actions might affect the world, or simple greed—are all too willing to help amplify any message.
Chen was born Lauren Yu Sum Tam in Hong Kong in1994, but was raised in Canada and came to the US for college, eventually graduating from Brigham Young University. (Unlike most of BYU, Chen is not Mormon and said in 2018 that she “wouldn’t recommend” the school to other Christians.) Beginning in 2016, Chen (a stage name she adopted at the start of her career) began making YouTube videos, calling herself Roaming Millennial. It was a time, as NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny points out, that YouTube was incentivizing engagement above all else: “Political and algorithmic incentives amplified the most extreme and entertaining voices and reactionary takes, making stars of creators on the ideological fringe.”
In her videos, Chen was all too willing to platform people even more radical than herself, earning her first taste of true notoriety in May 2017 with a jaunty three-part interview featuring white supremacist and alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer. She seemed thrilled when the series earned a response video from YouTuber Natalie Wynn, who makes intelligent cultural commentary under the name ContraPoints; Chen jokedon Twitter that she was releasing the next installment of the series early, just for Wynn.
“No one (Richard Spencer included) is advocating people be killed,” she told one person on Twitter who objected to the series. “Calm down.” (Spencer would participate in the violent Unite the Right rally three months later, in which counter-protestor Heather Heyer was murdered by white nationalist James Alex Fields.)
Chen hawked ivermectin, urging Americans to seek “healthcare without the propaganda.”
A quest for attention, whether positive or negative, seemed to drive many of Chen’s next moves, as did branding herself as a young woman in opposition to mainstream feminism. She began writing for the anti-feminist women’s site Evie Magazine in late 2018, contributing pieces deriding hookup culture, careerism in women, and, in early 2020, a column that argued it wasn’t racist to call Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” and derided Chinese state media’s “propaganda” covering the disease. Later in the pandemic, Chen hawked ivermectin as a cure for Covid, entering into a partnership with an anti-vaccine, Florida-based company called The Wellness Company, whose “medical board” includes Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist famous for promoting bad information about Covid. Chen’s page on the retailer’s site is still live, urging Americans to seek “healthcare without the propaganda.” (TWC did not respond to a request for comment about whether their partnership with Chen is ongoing.)
As the indictment lays out and her internet footprint makes clear, Chen worked directly for RT prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By 2021, Chen was writing op-eds for RT serving the same fare she produced everywhere else, although with more overt pro-Russian messaging. In February 2022, for instance, argued that Americans who opposed “mounting calls for war”—she named Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein, and Tucker Carlson—“can expect to be smeared as unpatriotic.”
While that was the last of dozens of pieces she wrote for RT, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chen tweeted and posted to Telegram in opposition to US funding for the Ukrainian military. The Canadian citizen positioned her stance as an America-first approach, writing in February, “Neither Ukraine nor Israel should be allowed to loot the coffers of the American taxpayers. Especially when America’s borders are in such neglected disarray.”
Donovan kept far less of a public presence than his wife. When Donovan did tweet about foreign policy, he presented himself as simply too naive to have an opinion about Russia. “I approach Russia (and some other topics) with complete agnosticism,” he posted in June 2023. “It would take far too much effort to gain reliable knowledge about something I can have very little to no impact on. I just hope for the best and leave it at that.”
But according to the indictment, about two years before that tweet, Donovan and Chen had exchanged messages on Discord in May 2021 discussing payments from “the Russians” for her RT op-eds. “Also, the Russians paid,” she wrote. “So we’re good to bill them for the second month I guess.”
That money was only a prelude to the sums that the indictment pictured at play since August 2023, when Chen and Donovan began sending bimonthly invoices to a UK shell entity that would eventually total more than $10 million, including both payments to commenters and Chen and Donovan’s own “fees and commissions.”
RT did not respond to a request for comment; the closest they’ve come to issuing a statement is an unbylined, English-language story about the indictments, which states that “Producing videos that highlight social and political divisions in the US is not a crime.”
Chen’s overt Putin boosterism attracted little attention or outrage among her conservative peers, where it stood out little from what others were also saying. In November 2023, more than a year into the invasion, she called him “pretty reasonable in regard to Ukraine.” In praising a rambling interview he did with Carlson, she called his performance “a two-hour dissertation on Russia’s history and its place on the world stage,” comparing him to President Biden, who she said, “could not finish a cohesive sentence in a five-minute carefully choreographed setting.” On Ukraine, her politics resemble not only those of people like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s made attacks on Ukrainian military aid a cornerstone of her public policy, but those of JD Vance, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee.
Nor did anyone who appeared with Chen at public events seem to notice anything amiss. “I knew nothing about Lauren’s business endeavors,” says Erin Elmore, a Trump surrogate who featured alongside Chen earlier this year at the Turning Point women’s summit. “We only spoke briefly and this topic never came up. She was always cordial and we kept things very surface.”
The end, when it did come, was exceedingly swift. After the DOJ indictment was unsealed, Pool, Rubin and Southern all quickly declared themselves to have been unaware of the ultimate source of their paychecks, with Pool announcing he would be “offering [his] assistance” to the FBI. Chen’s YouTube account and TikTok were both deleted within a week, while her Instagram, Twitter, Rumble, GETTR and Telegram accounts remain online, but silent.
The reaction from the conservative galaxy, whose every planet Chen worked so hard to visit, has been muted. One of the only visible defenses came from far-right personality Candace Owens, who appeared many times with Chen on one another’s podcasts, and whose work was reshared multiple times by Tenet Media.
“Just pathetic to see what the conservative movement has become,” Owens tweeted. “Lauren Chen was always nice to everybody. At the first hint of trouble, everyone is throwing her under the bus and believing the DOJ.”
Through a spokesperson, Owens elaborated to Mother Jones: “In the limited capacity that I knew Lauren Chen, she was always very kind to me. While I have nothing to do with the case at hand, as someone who believes in due process, I will never enjoin myself to the media culture of ‘guilty until proven innocent.'”
Tayler Hansen, a self-described “field reporter” for Tenet, said on Twitter that the allegations against the company came as “a complete shock,” and that he has always been free to report whatever he wanted. Before his association with Tenet, Hansen was best known for filming drag performances and posting them online as part of a purported crusade for child safety, telling the Texas Tribune, “Drag queens do not belong around children. Neither does gender ideology.” Hansen has claimed that YouTube shut down his personal channel following the indictment; the Daily Dot reported that YouTube says Hansen shut it down himself, a version of events he denied.
Hansen told Mother Jones in an email that he had not been contacted by the FBI, and that he learned that Tenet was no more in a message from Tenet’s ownership: “Hosts received a message from the owner explaining that due to the ongoing investigation we would not be able to continue with TENET Media.” He didn’t respond to questions about how he’d met Chen, and why the arrangement with Tenet didn’t strike him as suspicious.
In contrast to Chen’s well-lit trail of podcasts and public appearances, the paths of the two RT employees accused of secretly funding Tenet are murky. One of the few English-language traces of either is a Twitter profile appearing to belong to Astafaneya, which she used to ask people posting on the platform about hot-button issues to come on TV. (When pursing such guests—someone who blamed a loved one’s Covid death on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, say, or Afghans seeking to flee after the US withdrawal—she identified herself only as a “producer,” not identifying the outlet.)
While Chen has nuked any chances of a career with a more credible outlet, the people paying her did a far better job covering their trail. And it seems exceedingly likely that, should someone in the Russian government want to further shape US conservative opinion to their benefit, there are more influencers who, for the right price, will be willing to act as eager salespeople for whatever they’re trying to peddle.
In the week following the presidential debate, Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have all tweeted in support of a thinly sourced rumor claiming that a “whistleblower” at ABC News came forward to reveal that the event was rigged in favor of Kamala Harris.
The notion has taken on increasingly farcical dimensions, with some sources claiming that the whistleblower died in a car accident soon after revealing his secrets, and others, including Ackman and Musk, circulating a typo-riddled “affidavit” from said whistleblower that is obviously not real.
Fake news peddlers claimed Harris was given debate questions in advance.
Now, thanks to a curious bit of unwitting help from Google News, the name of a real person who recently died—a Virginia plumber and pipefitter who has no connection to ABC—is being tied to the story.
Following Donald Trump’s uninspired performance last Tuesday against Kamala Harris, prominent Trump supporters and fake news peddlers alike began claiming without evidence that the ABC News-hosted debate had somehow been rigged in Harris’ favor or that she’d been given the debate questions in advance. This isn’t new: Trump spent much of 2016 arguing the presidential debates would be rigged against him, claims he repeated in 2020 in regards to his first debate with Joe Biden.
This time, however, the idea has taken on new contours, spread by Twitter users who claim to be independent journalists and researchers. One central player has been a person calling himself Black Insurrectionist, a Trump partisan who specifically says he’s not a journalist, but who claims to get inside information from figures in conservative politics. He’s also paid for his account, @DocNetyoutube, to be verified, meaning his replies and visibility are boosted on the site.
Two days after the debate, Black Insurrectionist claimed to have access to an affidavit from an ABC News whistleblower, outlining the ways in which Harris was given an upper hand.
“I have just signed a non-disclosure agreement with the attorney of the whistleblower,” he wrote. “The affidavit states how the Harris campaign was given sample question [sic] which were essentially the same questions that were given during the debate and separate assurances of fact checking Donald Trump and that she wouldNOTbe fact checked.” He added that he would release the affidavit after the attorney redacted the whistleblower’s name.
A few days later, he did so, producing a clumsily redacted, typo-filled, strangely-formatted document, dated September 9. The affidavit claimed that Harris was promised she wouldn’t be questioned about the health of Joe Biden or her tenure as “Attorney General in San Francisco”—a position that doesn’t exist.
When people pointed out a range of such shortcomings, Black Insurrectionist took to feuding with those arguing the document appears to be obviously fake. After claiming that the document was sent to Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in unredacted form, he signaled a retreat. “I have gone as far with it as I can,” he tweeted on Monday morning. “The rest is up to the whistleblower and Congress.”
None of this makes a lot of sense, and as ABC News told Mother Jones in a statement, “ABC News followed the debate rules that both campaigns agreed on and which clearly state: No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates.”
Nonetheless, the affidavit story was quickly picked up by a variety of sources, including, as the Daily Beast first pointed out, a fake news site called Leading Report, whose tweet about the affidavit has been viewed nearly two million times. Other people who shared the affidavit include former Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, who did a brief prison stint in 2018 for lying to the FBI, and Republican commentator and plagiarist Benny Johnson, who worked as a commentator for Tenet Media, the company that the DOJ alleges was secretly funded by employees of the state-backed Russian media company RT. (Johnson and other commentators have said they didn’t know about RT’s role.)
Another person promoting the affidavit is hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who tweeted it at Disney CEO Bob Iger on Sunday evening. (Disney is ABC News’ parent company.) “I find the allegations credible as written,” Ackman wrote, adding that he “strongly encourage[s]” Iger to investigate them. “Our democracy depends on transparency, particularly with regard to events which can impact the outcome of the presidential election. I ask on behalf of all voters that you treat these allegations with the seriousness they deserve.” Elon Musk was among those who retweeted Ackman’s post, which has now been viewed 5 million times. Musk also commented “Woah!” to another person sharing images from the supposed affidavit. (By Tuesday, Ackman had declared he planned to alert the SEC about ABC’s supposed debate misconduct.)
As word of the supposed affidavit picked up steam, so too did a tale about the untimely death of the person purportedly behind it. On Sunday, Rep. Taylor Greene tweeted, “The ABC whistleblower who claimed Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of the debate has died in a car crash according to news reports.”
Those “reports” appeared to be a WordPress blog whose URL is “County Local News,” but whose homepage title reads “Bgrnd Search.” The site, which seems to be running malware, ran a gobbledygook story claiming that the unnamed whistleblower died in a car accident on September 13 outside Bethesda, Maryland.
Because of an unfortunate twist of Google News’ algorithms, the car-crash story is being given an unwitting boost. Searches for the words “ABC whistleblower” bring up an article about an unrelated 64-year-old personwho died in a car accident on September 11 in Virginia. That story appears to be coming up because it links to another story about whistleblower lawsuits filed against the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) authority.
There’s no indication whatsoever that any ABC News “whistleblower” even exists, and even less that this Virginia man was him. But Google’s algorithm has helped create a link where none exists—at least one fake news site has named the deceased 64-year old as the whistleblower, although most others haven’t followed suit.
A Google spokesperson confirmed that the article on the car crash was likely appearing in unrelated news results because it contained similar keywords. The spokesperson said that in such situations, the company will typically look for ways to improve their algorithm to prevent future occurrences, rather than take immediate action.
While Greene, on the other hand, has since tweeted that the car crash story “appears to be false,” she still doubled down on repeating the earlier unproven claim that gave rise to it: “We need a serious investigation into the whistleblower’s report that Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of time from ABC!”
A few months ago, a man crawling along a rooftop in Pennsylvania tried to murder Donald Trump at a campaign rally. Hours later, press releases started to circulate, from analysts, think tanks, politicians, and pundits, all offering to cut through the swell of confusion and misinformation.
One of the people who washed up in my inbox was Ben Swann, whom a New York–based PR team presented as a journalist, and a source “to separate the conspiracy theories from the facts behind Trump’s assassination attempt.”
This was curious for several reasons, the main being that Swann is himself an energetic conspiracy theorist, who first attracted notice in 2017 by touting Pizzagate, a lurid conspiracy about child trafficking, while working for Atlanta’s CBS affiliate. Swann was ultimately fired, but quickly launched a new career as a star of the most conspiracy-addled corner of the online universe, posting to his website Truth in Media. He also began accepting millions of dollars in funding from a Kremlin-backed broadcaster to produce pro-Russian propaganda, according to disclosure forms he filed with the federal government when registering as a foreign agent.
While Swann has prospered by confidently and cynically presenting himself as a force for truth, legitimate researchers of disinformation—the kind he’s spread for much of his professional life—are struggling. Over the last several years, the field has undergone a broadscale attack from politicians, right-wing media, and tech industry giants. As a result, research has been curtailed, people have been laid off, and academics working in the space even fear talking to one another, lest it leave them open to charges of “conspiring” by their adversaries.
Who is trying to kill their industry and why are their attacks working so well?
The timing of the crisis could hardly be worse. In January, the World Economic Forum highlighted dis- and misinformation as a top global threat over the next few years, citing concerns about increasingly sophisticated AI and the ways that disinformation could be used to destabilize consequential elections—including here in the United States, but also in the UK, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, and India. With our campaign season in full swing, the political implications of the battle over disinformation are obvious: Identifying fake news and misleading narratives is both a core part of the researchers’ work and routinely attacked as a political project.
The question that has begun to bedevil these disinformation researchers—used to recognizing patterns and ferreting out the source of influence operations—is, who is trying to kill their industry and why are their attacks working so well? Some see strong similarities to corporate-backed assaults on climate scientists in the 1990s, where oil and gas groups teamed up with conservative politicians to push back against the scientific consensus that human beings were causing climate change. Others see echoes of Cold War paranoia.
“The Red Scare came for academia also,” one researcher said recently, with exasperation. “How do we not see the historical parallels?”
There are, to be clear, still some cops on the beat. At the University of Washington, for instance, the Center for an Informed Public does rapid response on electoral rumors. Other academic institutions like Clemson University and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard continue to publish peer-reviewed research, like Shorenstein’s Misinformation Review, which looks at global misinformation. But no one disputes that the environment for doing this work has gotten much, much worse.
Led by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the Trump loyalist who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans in Congress have mounted an onslaught of harassing investigations and legislative attacks, accusing the field of colluding with the Biden administration to silence conservatives. Jordan and his committee investigators have grilled disinformation researchers from both Clemson and the University of Washington, where Dr. Kate Starbird, co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, has been under sustained attack. The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which spent the last five years studying misinformation and misuse of social media platforms, has been gravely weakened after lawsuits brought by conservative pundits and anti-vaccine activists alleging it was promoting censorship. One was filed by America First Legal, the organization run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who bragged it was “striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex.”
Stanford has denied that SIO is ending its work, saying it is simply facing “funding challenges.” But its founder, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, has left, as has its star researcher Renée DiResta, who warned in a June New York Times op-ed that her field was “being dismantled.” Disinformation scholar Joan Donovan recently filed a whistleblower complaint against Harvard, alleging the university dismissed her to “protect the interests of high-value donors with obvious and direct ties to Meta.” (Harvard said her departure was due to her research lacking a faculty sponsor, and insisted “donors have no influence” over its work.)
The conservative legislative onslaught against disinformation shows very little sign of slowing. In May, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced a bill that would ban federal funding for “disinformation research grants, and for other purposes.” The right-wing Cato Institute applauded and praised Massie for fighting back against “censorship.”
Arguments over truth, and the role of the government and academia in safeguarding it, aren’t new.
Some blows have been self-inflicted. The industry had become, as researchers Chico Q. Camargo and Felix M. Simon put it in a 2022 paper, “too big to fail” without reckoning with its rapid growth or establishing enough “methodological rigor.” In a passage that inadvertently echoes conservative attacks, the paper, sponsored by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, cautions against the field’s “unique position,” given that whatever it determines “counts as mis-/disinformation will likely be regulated as such.”
Arguments over the nature of truth, and the role of the government and academia in safeguarding it, aren’t new. Before misinformation, disinformation, and fake news became phrases in America’s political lexicon, a similar storm wracked climate science. Beginning in the 1990s, climate researchers faced attacks from politicians and private groups alike, who contested their widely accepted finding that human activity was causing climate change. Fossil fuel–funded organizations like the Heartland Institute began loudly promoting scientists willing to attack the consensus while hosting a series of lavish conferences devoted to promoting alternative climate facts. In 2009, a hacker stole emails between climate researchers, helping launch a scandal, known as Climategate, sustained by false claims that the messages documented scientific misconduct.
One target of the hack, and of climate change deniers throughout this period, was Dr. Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climatologist best known for his 1998 “hockey stick” graph, which showed sharply rising temperatures over the past century. Mann told me he sees “parallels between the politically and ideologically motivated attacks on climate scientists, public health scientists, and now disinformation researchers…including common actors (e.g. plutocrats and Republican politicians).” Mann ultimately sued some of his most strident critics for defamation, two conservative authors who published pieces for National Review and the libertarian think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute; one called Mann’s research “fraudulent,” while the other wrote that he “could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” After more than a decade of delay, this winter a jury awarded Mann a $1 million judgment.
“The only solution to the larger problem of ideologically motivated antiscience is to go after the bad actors behind it,” Mann says, not just through such lawsuits, but by voting out Republican politicians involved in the attacks. In 2022, GOP state officials filed a suit against the Biden administration that alleged the government’s requests that social platforms take down Covid misinformation were unconstitutional. The case, thanks to the arch-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, made it to the Supreme Court, where it was dismissed for a lack of standing, but not before contributing to the chill cast over the broader anti-disinformation field.
At the same time fighting disinformation has become a political battleground, it has also shown to be a problem on which Big Tech has been all too eager to throw in the towel. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, it stopped policing Covid misinformation in November 2022. Since then the site and Musk in particular have energetically amplified disinformation; one calculation found that his posts sharing election and immigration disinformation have been seen more than 1 billion times. Mass layoffs at companies like Meta have made it harder to set and establish standards around misinformation, including election fraud or dangerous pseudomedical advice. On the whole, the platforms have prioritized gathering eyeballs and profit over safeguarding an informed public.
So, for industrious conspiracy peddlers, conditions are a dream: confused, acrid, and with the powers that be seemingly convinced that combating disinformation is more expensive or more trouble than it’s worth. From now on, if you need help, you might be on your own.
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