All posts by Brooke Binkowski

2018 midterms, CNN, disinformation, donald trump, Fact Checks, jim acosta, Politics, trump administration, TruthOrFiction

Did a CNN Reporter Assault a White House Employee?

The morning after a hotly-contested midterm election resulted in Republicans resoundingly losing control of the House, United States President Donald Trump held a rambling, bizarre press conference in which he alternately took credit for Republicans maintaining control of the Senate and blamed candidates he had endorsed for losing.

In the middle of this event, CNN reporter Jim Acosta stood to ask questions of Trump, including one about the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A visibly agitated Trump insulted him, then cut him off:

…Acosta asked about Trump’s claim that a caravan of migrants posed a threat to the country, but then persisted in trying to ask another about the Russia investigation.

“That’s enough,” Trump said, several times, as he called on Alexander. A White House staffer attempted to grab the microphone from Acosta, but he persisted.

“Are you worried about indictments coming down in this investigation?” Acosta asked.

Trump, visibly angry, then walked away from the lectern and then looked at Acosta and said, “I’ll tell you what. CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn’t be working for CNN.”

This exchange quickly morphed into claims and rumors that Acosta had attempted to “assault” the woman tasked with grabbing his microphone, which was quickly picked up by the usual bots and trolls on social media trying to push it into the mainstream narrative:

However, multiple videos clearly show what actually happened. A woman walked over to Acosta and tried to pull it from his grip as he says, “Pardon me, ma’am.” At that point, she relinquishes the microphone and sits back down:

A photograph from another angle makes it even clearer:

Eventually, the White House employee grabbed the microphone and walked away, at which point Trump insulted Acosta:

At no point did the reporter assault her, as these multiple videos and photographs make clear. This rumor is completely false.

CNN also issued a statement about the press conference. “This President’s ongoing attacks on the press have gone too far,” the network said, calling the attacks not only dangerous, but “disturbingly un-American”:

While President Trump has made it clear he does not respect a free press, he has a sworn obligation to protect it. A free press is vital to democracy, and we stand behind Jim Acosta and his fellow journalists everywhere.

CNN and reporter Jim Acosta have been frequent targets of Trump and his administration due to his frequent questions about ongoing investigations into possible criminal activities and public criticism of Trump’s near-daily attacks on the press.

The post Did a CNN Reporter Assault a White House Employee? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

american flag, canada, caravana migrante, disinformation, Fact Checks, guatemala, honduras, Immigration, mexico, trump, TruthOrFiction

Are Members of a Refugee Caravan Defiling American Flags on Their Way to the United States?

An annual caravan heading from Central America to the southern United States border to seek asylum has been beset by rumors, misinformation, and dramatic disinformation during the 2018 election cycle.

Participants in the annual event are generally from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras who have exhausted all their options to work or live free of violence all around them, but who do not have the money to drive or fly to the United States border to seek asylum. (The United States, like Canada, is known as a “safe third country,” whereas Mexico is not.)

The Safe Third Country Agreement was implemented in 2004 in order to help manage the flow of asylum-seekers and refugees to both countries:

The complexity and disorderly nature of contemporary mixed migration flows increases the burden on states by making it more difficult for states to properly distinguish between refugees who need protection and other migrants, resulting in significant strains on asylum systems.

[…]

International cooperation based on the principle of responsibility sharing provides a basis for states to respond to these challenges, in part by providing for the more orderly handling of refugee applications. To this end, developed countries, including Canada and the U.S., have articulated a “Safe Third Country” policy. The premise of this policy is that where a refugee claimant could have previously sought protection in another safe country, it is reasonable and appropriate to require the refugee claimant to return and make use of that opportunity.

Despite this, the caravans of people coming to the United States to turn themselves in and request asylum (unlike applying for refugee status, which has a different set of qualifying criteria, you have to be within the borders of the United States in order to seek asylum) have been accused of coming to “invade” or “infiltrate” the country with increasingly hysterical and bizarre stories as “proof.”

One version of this “proof” involves photographs purportedly showing members of the caravan purportedly burning American flags as it treks through Mexico:

Not one of these images comes from any of the caravans of people who regularly make the increasingly dangerous trek to the American border, and none of them come from the same event — as a reverse image search readily shows.

The first photograph was taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in May 2016:

There’s another layer to this repurposed photograph, as well, as this video clearly shows: It’s not an American flag, but a Trump campaign flag. You can see below what was cropped out in the above photograph:

The second image, showing just a flag on fire, could have been taken anywhere, at any time, and simply inserted into this post, which actually is the case here:

The caption reads:

Demonstration Held Outside US Embassy Against Qur’an Burning Threats
LONDON, ENGLAND – SEPTEMBER 11: An American flag burns outside the American Embassy, during a protest in Grosvenor Square, on September 11, 2010 in London, England. US Controversial pastor, Terry Jones has sparked protests across the world after planning to stage an International Burn a Koran Day on 9/11, the anniversary of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. Mr Jones has since postponed the event after sparking international condemnation and protests around the world. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

The final image in the post was stolen from Reuters, and it also shows a scene not from Central America or Mexico in 2018, but from Cleveland in 2016:

A second post, this from a Bill O’Reilly fan page, contains yet another image stolen from a 2016 protest, this one at the University of Wisconsin in Madison:

Students at UW-Madison were protesting a visit from Donald Trump, who at the time was running for president, but there is no mention of anyone urinating on any flag in the original story:

Not one photograph exists of any people traveling with the caravan burning the flag of the country that represents their hopes for a safer life and economic opportunity, because there is no record of anyone ever having done so.

An Associated Press photographer, Fernando Antonio, did capture two people burning a flag with a swastika painted on it at the American embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to protest the United States’ rhetoric and treatment of asylum-seekers — but by then the caravan itself was at a bridge between Guatemala and Mexico, more than a country and at least 800 kilometers (500 miles) away.

In this case, however, these images appear to be more than simple misunderstandings. Instead, the way they were chosen make it appear as though they were cherry-picked to cynically fuel maximum outrage and take advantage of emotional responses during a particularly high-stakes election season in the United States.

The post Are Members of a Refugee Caravan Defiling American Flags on Their Way to the United States? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

2018 midterms, billboard, Fact Checks, gospel, missouri, Politics, religion, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, viral content

Was a Large ‘Make the Gospel Great Again’ Billboard Put Up in Missouri?

On November 3th, 2018, just days before the United States held hotly-contested midterm elections, rumors appeared of a billboard by the side of a Missouri interstate that featured United States President Donald Trump’s face with a strange, slightly ominous Biblical message:

It references John 1:14, which reads in full:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The billboard also displayed the phrase “Make the Gospel great again.”

The billboard is real, although it is as yet not clear who commissioned it and why. Local reports make it clear that it was taken down on November 5th, just hours after the first news stories appeared. DDI Media, the company that handled the billboard, made the announcement in a terse Facebook post:

A recent billboard with an image of President Trump has been removed because of its political nature and the fact that it did not disclose the sponsoring organization. The ad did not meet our requirements for political ads and was taken down just a few days after it was placed.

As there is no official word on who sponsored the billboard, it remains unclear whether it was intended as satire, commentary, or true belief.

The post Was a Large ‘Make the Gospel Great Again’ Billboard Put Up in Missouri? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

2018 midterms, asylum seekers, caravana migrante, disinformation, Fact Checks, guatemala, honduras, judicial watch, Politics, refugees, TruthOrFiction, washington times, What's True?

Were Seven Children Rescued From Smugglers Embedded in a ‘Migrant Caravan’ in Guatemala?

On October 25th, 2018, as bots and paid trolls pushed talking points on social media about a caravan of people from Honduras on their way to Mexico’s border with the United States to turn themselves in to seek asylum, the Judicial Watch blog published a shocking story about seven children who were saved from human smugglers by Guatemalan authorities:

Judicial Watch has obtained exclusive information and photos from Guatemalan authorities revealing that they have recovered seven unaccompanied minors from human smugglers working inside the caravan. The children have been taken into custody and they are being provided with food, water and medical attention, according to a high-level Guatemalan government official. The smugglers have been arrested and the broader investigation into criminal activity in the caravan is ongoing.

A Judicial Watch team, headed by Director of Investigations Chris Farrell, spent several days on the Guatemala-Honduras border covering the illegal alien caravan, which originated in the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula. The team filed a number of exclusive reports and videos and met with Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales and other top government officials.

The story was accompanied by an image. The text heavily hints that it shows at least some of the seven supposedly smuggled children, but stops short of outright making the claim:

The article describes the exodus of people walking north as an “illegal alien caravan.” This is completely inaccurate, as this caravan — like every caravan before it since at least 2010, just after a military coup d’etat in Honduras ousted its leftist then-president José Manuel Zelaya and turned the country into a cauldron of chaotic violence and adding to the instability in the region — is filled with asylum-seekers.

Seeking asylum in the United States is completely legal under both American and international law by design:

The Refugee Convention states that nations shall not penalize asylum seekers for irregular entry. Indeed, since 1987, the Board of Immigration Appeals, our highest immigration tribunal has directed immigration judges to forgive irregular entry because of the circumstances of seeking asylum.

The story was quickly picked up by other disreputable sites, including the Washington Times (an online outlet which is perhaps best known for having to publicly retract and apologize for repeatedly pushing the fully-discredited Seth Rich conspiracy theory, in which the murder of a Democratic National Committee employee was spun into a global plot by the Clintons, resulting in ongoing harassment of Rich’s family.)

The inaccuracy around a legal term by a blog called “Judicial Watch” is curious. Another curious part of the story is the complete lack of detail about the photograph it provides. It’s not clear who the photograph shows, where it is, or even who took the picture to begin with; Judicial Watch remains coy about the source, saying only that it came from a high-level government official in Guatemala. However, despite Judicial Watch’s claim of exclusivity, Washington Times is running the same image, which it somehow obtained without pixelation over the faces in the images:

The Washington Times story credited Judicial Watch in its caption, but without further explanation:

Judicial Watch obtained a photo of the children from a senior Guatemalan official who alerted the organization to the rescue. (Judicial Watch)

Repeated requests to Judicial Watch for more information, such as who took the photograph, where the photograph was taken, who was in the photograph, and how the Washington Times obtained a different version of a photograph that was supposedly “an exclusive” were met with no response; nor were repeated queries about the children who were purportedly taken in and the Guatemalan authorities responsible for their safety.

Stories in Spanish-language media offered no more information, and instead appeared to all have been written from the same Judicial Watch blog post.

The post Were Seven Children Rescued From Smugglers Embedded in a ‘Migrant Caravan’ in Guatemala? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

2018 midterms, antisemitism, connecticut, News, TruthOrFiction, What's True?

Connecticut GOP Sends Mailer Showing Jewish Candidate Grinning at Fistful of Money

In late October 2018, just days after a gunman — reportedly encouraged by racist political  rhetoric — slaughtered eleven people during a service at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, Connecticut’s Republican candidate for a state senate seat sent out a flyer that showed his Democratic opponent Rep. Matthew Lesser (who is Jewish) grinning over a fistful of cash:

The tagline read: “Matt Lesser will take everything you worked for.” It also appears as though his face was digitally changed:

Lesser told The Washington Post that he was incredulous when he first heard of the issue from some people in the district, which includes Middletown.

“I did not believe them, because we live in America,” he said. “I assumed it was some sort of mistake or misunderstanding.”

He said that his likeness had been photoshopped significantly in the mailer, raising further questions about his opponent’s aim. In addition to the hands grabbing $100 bills that were added to the picture, Lesser’s face has been altered with a smile and a crooked look in his eyes, he said.

“When I look at that I don’t see Jewish,” State Republican Chairman J.R. Romano told the Hartfort Courant:

“That’s all this is, pointing out the fact that Matt Lesser is a tax-and-spend Democrat. If you criticize any Democrat for failures and their record, they run into this shield that you’re a racist. The Democrats have false outrage all the time.”

When told that Jewish community members raised objections to the mailer, Romano said, “Did you look to see their political affiliation?”

By Halloween, however, the outrage became too much for Connecticut’s once-defiant Republican candidate to ignore. Republican contender Ed Charamut finally apologized in writing to Lesser:

“However, it is clear now that the imagery could be interpreted as anti-Semitic,” the campaign said in a statement emailed to reporters. “And for that we deeply apologize as hate speech of any kind does not belong in our society and especially not in our politics.”

Chairman J.R. Romano also amended his defense:

“I reached out and talked to several friends and Republicans who are Jewish,” he said Wednesday in an interview. “In the course of the day, I reached a broader understanding of the history and context.”

Lesser says he has not heard directly from Charamut or anyone in Charamut’s campaign.

The post Connecticut GOP Sends Mailer Showing Jewish Candidate Grinning at Fistful of Money appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

disinformation, gateway pundit, jack burkman, jacob wohl, reporting, robert mueller, russia investigation, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, What's True?

Special Counsel’s Office Asks FBI to Investigate Smear Scheme

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has referred a possible scam to the Federal Bureau of Investigation after a number of reporters were contacted by someone apparently shopping a story about him sexually assaulting unidentified women:

Disinformation purveyors had already been teasing a major story involving Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation into the 2016 presidential campaign and election has been going on since May 17th, 2017.

“Several media sources tell me that a scandalous story about Mueller is breaking tomorrow,” Wohl, a former teenage hedge fund manager who is now permanently banned by the National Futures Association for fraudulent activity and failure to comply with the ensuing investigation, tweeted on October 29th. “Stay tuned!”

“Some sad news,” added Jack Burkman, a self-styled “political operative” who until now was perhaps best known for pushing baseless conspiracy theories about murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich that Fox News and the Washington Times then had to fully retract (although Fox’s statement has promised to “continue to investigate this story and will provide updates as warranted” since May 2017.) “On Thursday, November 1, at the Rosslyn Holiday Inn at noon, we will reveal the first of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sex assault victims. I applaud the courage and dignity and grace and strength of my client.”

Disinformation site GatewayPundit.com, which was sued more than once in 2017 over its unreliable and misleading coverage of what happened in Charlottesville (including publicly naming and smearing an innocent teenager who the site falsely claimed murdered Heather Heyer) picked up on the clarion call almost immediately:

What we know: The woman is a “very credible witness.” Her story are corroborated. The incident happened in 2010 in New York City. The woman is a professional.
The Mueller apologists are already trashing the accuser — and don’t even know who she is!

The story was bolstered by documents not from law enforcement or even a lawyer, but from shadowy “private investigation firms.”

The story fell apart almost immediately, not least because left-leaning political news site HillReporter.com published a story on the scheme just before it started to go viral:
A little over a week ago several journalists, including myself, received an email from an individual claiming to have been offered money in exchange for alleging sexual misconduct on the part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Peter Carr, spokesman for the Special Counsel’s office to Hill Reporter:“When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation.”

A little over a week ago several journalists, including myself, received an email from an individual claiming to have been offered money in exchange for alleging sexual misconduct on the part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

“I was contacted via phone call by a man named Bill Christensen, who had a British accent, and said that he would like to ask me a couple of questions about Robert Mueller, whom I worked with when I was a paralegal for Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro in 1974 (now called Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman),” the individual claimed. “I asked him who he was working for, and he told me his boss was some sort of politics guy in Washington named Jack Burkman (or Berkman… Not sure how it’s spelled)…….….He (Bill Christensen) then offered to pay off all of my credit card debt, plus bring me a check for $20,000 if I would do one thing.

In more of an effort to get him to go away than anything else, I asked him what in the hell he wanted me to do. He said that we could not talk about it on the phone, and he asked me to download an app on my phone called Signal, which he said was more secure. Reluctantly, I downloaded the app and he called me on that app a few minutes later. He said (and I will never forget exactly what it was) ‘I want you to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller, and I want you to sign a sworn affidavit to that effect’.”

As more political reporters came forward to say they had had similar experiences, law professor Jennifer Taub revealed that she had been approached by someone offering to pay her to discuss her encounters with Robert Mueller, whom she does not know:

Jennifer Taub, an associate professor at Vermont Law School, received an email from a man using a Surefire Intelligence email address around the same time, on October 22. “It’s my understanding that you may have had some past encounters with Robert Mueller,” he told Taub, according to the email she forwarded me on Tuesday afternoon. “I would like to discuss those encounters with you.” (Taub told me she has never had any encounters with Mueller, though she does appear on CNN at times as an expert commentator on the Mueller probe.)

“I believe a basic telephone call, for which I would compensate you at whatever rate you see fit (inside reason), would be a good place to start,” the man continued. “My organization is conducting an examination of Robert Mueller’s past. Tell me a decent method to contact you by telephone (or Signal, which would be ideal) and a beginning rate to talk with you about all encounters you’ve had with Special Counsel Mueller. We would likewise pay you for any references that you may have. Lastly, I would appreciate your discretion here, as this is a very sensitive matter.” Taub told me she forwarded the email to the special counsel’s office, noting that she did not plan to respond.

The investigative team at Bellingcat dug into Surefire Intelligence, quickly tracing it back to none other than Jacob Wohl:

The “intelligence firm” that prepared the allegation, SureFire Intelligence, was linked to Wohl due to DNS registration records saved on CuteStat.com. These records show that someone using the email jacob.wohl@nexmanagement.com was involved with the domain registration for surefireintelligence.com.

[…]

When searching for the various employees who list their employment as SureFire Intelligence, nearly all of them use stolen profile photographs. In particular, many of these photographs use the sepia-toned filter that was likely used to disrupt reverse image search algorithms.

Their “Tel Aviv Station Chief” uses the a photograph of Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli.

It is an uncommonly clear look into how the “fake news” ecosystem is managed and how disinformation is pushed into the public discourse via coordinated efforts, including — but not limited to — shell companies, fake employees, and calculated timing.

Not long after its original story fell apart, GatewayPundit.com removed the text and replaced it with the following:

Earlier today we were given information on accusations against former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

We took the documents down and we are currently investigating these accusations.

There are also very serious allegations against Jacob Wohl.
We are also looking into this.

The press conference, however, will proceed as planned.

The post Special Counsel’s Office Asks FBI to Investigate Smear Scheme appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

birthright citizenship, disinformation, Fact Checks, Immigration, Politics, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, What's True?

Is the United States the Only Country that Offers Birthright Citizenship?

On October 30th, 2018, three days after a Pennsylvania white supremacist stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue with guns and murdered eleven people during a service and four days after a Florida man was arrested for mailing a series of glass-packed pipe bombs to public figures, United States President Donald Trump spoke out at length not against domestic terrorism, but against birthright citizenship:

“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” Trump said, declaring he can do it by executive order.

When told that’s very much in dispute, Trump replied: “You can definitely do it with an Act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States … with all of those benefits,” Trump continued. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

Trump added that the United States is the only country to allow birthright citizenship. This is not true. In reality, the United States is one of more than 30 countries that allow birthright citizenship, also called jus soli. It is enshrined in the Constitution by the Fourteenth Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Nor can the United States Constitution be amended by executive fiat, by design:

Since the President does not have a constitutional role in the amendment process, the joint resolution does not go to the White House for signature or approval. The original document is forwarded directly to NARA’s Office of the Federal Register (OFR) for processing and publication. The OFR adds legislative history notes to the joint resolution and publishes it in slip law format. The OFR also assembles an information package for the States which includes formal “red-line” copies of the joint resolution, copies of the joint resolution in slip law format, and the statutory procedure for ratification under 1 U.S.C. 106b.

The Archivist submits the proposed amendment to the States for their consideration by sending a letter of notification to each Governor along with the informational material prepared by the OFR. The Governors then formally submit the amendment to their State legislatures or the state calls for a convention, depending on what Congress has specified. In the past, some State legislatures have not waited to receive official notice before taking action on a proposed amendment. When a State ratifies a proposed amendment, it sends the Archivist an original or certified copy of the State action, which is immediately conveyed to the Director of the Federal Register. The OFR examines ratification documents for facial legal sufficiency and an authenticating signature. If the documents are found to be in good order, the Director acknowledges receipt and maintains custody of them. The OFR retains these documents until an amendment is adopted or fails, and then transfers the records to the National Archives for preservation.

A proposed amendment becomes part of the Constitution as soon as it is ratified by three-fourths of the States (38 of 50 States). When the OFR verifies that it has received the required number of authenticated ratification documents, it drafts a formal proclamation for the Archivist to certify that the amendment is valid and has become part of the Constitution. This certification is published in the Federal Register and U.S. Statutes at Large and serves as official notice to the Congress and to the Nation that the amendment process has been completed.

The American Civil Liberties Union added its analysis on Twitter:

The post Is the United States the Only Country that Offers Birthright Citizenship? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

cesar sayoc, Crime / Police, disinformation, Fact Checks, false flag, florida, mail bombs, Politics, TruthOrFiction

The Florida Mail Bombs Are Not ‘False Flags’

In the final days of October 2018, after a series of glass-packed pipe bombs were delivered to high-profile critics of United States President Donald Trump, rumors ran wild about who the suspect was and what he wanted.

Few of these theories were organic, and instead appeared to have originated from the usual suspects — throwaway social media accounts and paid trolls who work to muddy the waters and direct the national conversation and the useful idiots who disseminate them.

One such cluster of theories coalesced around a photograph of Florida bombing suspect Cesar Sayoc, Jr. standing next to soccer coach Izzy Hernandez:

The caption says:

The #LiberalBomber suspect is pictured here with Izzy Hernandez just last year. He doesn’t appear to be destitute. Why would an alleged @realDonaldTrump enthusiast attend a banquet and take pictures in a photo OP with a known Democrat? Facebook has been taking this picture down.

This is part of a larger attempt to falsely cast the bombings — an act of politically motivated domestic terrorism — as a left-wing “false flag” event. An entire ecosystem of conspiracy theories has sprung up around these efforts.

This truly is a photograph of Sayoc with Israel “Izzy” Hernandez. However, this is not proof of anything except for one salient fact: Sayoc knew Hernandez from his days playing at Brevard College in North Carolina:

Pictures of Sayoc’s van that circulated around the web Friday morning depicted a number of bizarre references to the soccer world. One banner on the van’s side mentioned “Top Youth Soccer Recruits for Trump” and appeared to feature a picture of a youth soccer team as well as pictures of a dozen unidentified soccer players in action. The rear windows of the van included a U.S. Soccer sticker and a testimonial to Carolinas schools, including Brevard, UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Greensboro, Duke, Wake Forest and Clemson, as well as where those schools ranked in the NCAA in the last two seasons.

[…]

Sayoc’s apparent connection to the soccer world stems from his own intercollegiate soccer career. He played first in 1980 at Brevard College in Brevard, N.C., which was then a junior college program. A photograph in the 1981 school yearbook shows Sayoc sitting in the front row in the team photo; another picture shows him kicking a ball in a game.

You can check the Brevard College yearbook from 1981 yourself here.

That a former soccer player took a photograph with a soccer coach is not proof of anything but the fact that he remained interested in the sport and took a photograph with someone he had known for many years. It is not known whether Sayoc and Hernandez discussed politics, there is no proof that Facebook keeps removing the photograph, and even if social media networks have this image blacklisted (which remains uncertain) there is no proof whatsoever that it was done to cover up any salient political information.

Another attempt to prove a point about Sayoc’s political leanings came from conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer:

The caption says:

The media is reporting that #CesarSayoc is a Registered Republican.

Documentation actually shows he is a registered DEMOCRAT!

More lies from the media.

Voter registration and political leanings are not always in line with one another, as personal and party politics are in constant flux. But that is irrelevant here, because Loomer’s source was MyLife.com, an aggregation site that displays information that can be changed by anyone, as later versions of the same profile clearly indicate:

Given that the investigation is ongoing, it is safe to say that any conclusion based on still-unverified claims has very little chance of being accurate.

The post The Florida Mail Bombs Are Not ‘False Flags’ appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

bombs, florida, News, stochastic terrorism, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, What's True?

Suspect in Attempted Bomb Attacks Had History of Crime, Conspiracy Theories

An unsettling week of threats and bombs sent to various high-profile political figures and pundits culminated in the arrest of a suspect in south Florida, a reckoning online, and a whole slew of conspiracy theories around the bombs and the culprit.

Cesar Sayoc, Jr. already had a long list of convictions by the time he was arrested for and quickly charged with sending homemade pipe bombs to various high-profile critics of United States president Donald Trump, including a history of domestic violence, petty crime, and at least one previous bomb threat:

In 2002, he called FPL because he was upset about the amount of his bill, court records show. “The defendant then stated that he didn’t deserve it and that he was going to blow up FPL,” according to files released by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.

“FPL will get what they deserve and will be worse than 9/11,” Sayoc said, according to the case notes.

Sayoc also told an FPL employee that he “was going to blow her head off,” according to the case file. The call was recorded and Sayoc was later arrested by state law enforcement agents. He was sentenced to one year of probation.

Sayoc also showed a marked bent toward conspiracy theories and violent imagery. He had reportedly been behaving erratically for years and had been driving a van covered in strange pictures for some time before he sent the bombs:

Gureghian, the general manager of New River Pizza and Fresh Kitchen, said that Sayoc worked as a delivery-truck driver for several months but quit in January. The white van he drove to deliver pizzas was covered in disturbing images, she said, so the restaurant required him to park it on the side where it could not be seen.

“It was puppets with their heads cut off, mannequins with their heads cut off, Ku Klux Klan, a black person being hung, anti-gay symbols, torchings, bombings, you name it, it was all over his truck,” Gureghian said.

But at some point he changed. “This is not a criminal mastermind by any stretch of the imagination, but he has had numerous interactions with law enforcement,” Miami defense attorney David Weinstein, who formerly served as the chief of the counter-terrorism section in the U.S. attorney’s office, told the Miami Herald. “Something obviously triggered in him to take it one step further than he had ever gone before.”

Reporters and disinformation experts who looked over his social media presence say that his posts and tweets showed a clear, marked transformation — what they call his radicalization — in 2016:

The genesis of Mr. Sayoc’s partisan awakening may never be known, but hints of it first appeared on his Facebook feed in early 2016, as the primary season for the presidential election was starting.

That February, he posted a link to a conspiracy theory video on YouTube titled, “Is Barack Obama THE ANTICHRIST — 100% PROOF Is There!” Days later, he posted a second YouTube video, “Satan Sent Obama to Destroy America,” and a clip featuring Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, which was called, “MUST HEAR: Sean Exposes Illegal Immigrant Crime Stats.” He posted several anti-Obama videos multiple times on his feed, interspersed with stories about personal finance and his favorite soccer players.

By the summer, Mr. Sayoc’s social media activity was all politics, all the time.

Before that, Sayoc’s social media presence had been innocuous and relatively quiet. Suddenly, though, things changed, says media and disinformation expert Jonathan Albright:

What caused this leap? It’s not clear, but his radicalization seems to have truly begun in April 2016:

By 2018, he was posting obsessively about people like the Clintons, the Obamas, George Soros, and others, culminating in glass-packed bombs sent by courier or hand-delivered to the objects of his hatred — at least thirteen in all. His former boss told the Washington Post that he was very angry at the world, particularly black, Jewish, and gay people:

Gureghian, who is lesbian, said that Sayoc made constant remarks about her sexuality.

“He used to tell me all the time that I was deformed and Jesus made a mistake in me,” she said.

She said Sayoc quit in January and told her he had trained to be a truck driver hauling hazardous materials, with a “top secret” clearance.

“He would categorize himself as a white supremacist,” she said. “He would just say, ‘Take back the world. That’s what he would always say, ‘Take back the world.’ ”

He openly threatened public figures on social media, but platforms did nothing about it:

Many recipients of Mr. Sayoc’s social media wrath most likely disregarded it, or wrote him off as just another overzealous troll. But the few who tried to sound the alarm appear to have been ignored. This month, Rochelle Ritchie, a Democratic political commentator, complained to Twitter that Mr. Sayoc had sent her a threatening message after she appeared on Fox News. The company replied that Mr. Sayoc’s tweet did not violate its rules against abuse.

Disinformation purveyors and professional trolls had been pushing the line that the attacks were “false flag” events, designed to frighten the populace with fake news of planned (but ultimately harmless) attacks. Most of them went abruptly silent on the topic immediately after the suspect was arrested.

The post Suspect in Attempted Bomb Attacks Had History of Crime, Conspiracy Theories appeared first on What's True?.

bombs, florida, News, stochastic terrorism, trump administration, TruthOrFiction

Suspect in Attempted Bomb Attacks Had History of Crime, Conspiracy Theories

An unsettling week of threats and bombs sent to various high-profile political figures and pundits culminated in the arrest of a suspect in south Florida, a reckoning online, and a whole slew of conspiracy theories around the bombs and the culprit.

Cesar Sayoc, Jr. already had a long list of convictions by the time he was arrested for and quickly charged with sending homemade pipe bombs to various high-profile critics of United States president Donald Trump, including a history of domestic violence, petty crime, and at least one previous bomb threat:

In 2002, he called FPL because he was upset about the amount of his bill, court records show. “The defendant then stated that he didn’t deserve it and that he was going to blow up FPL,” according to files released by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.

“FPL will get what they deserve and will be worse than 9/11,” Sayoc said, according to the case notes.

Sayoc also told an FPL employee that he “was going to blow her head off,” according to the case file. The call was recorded and Sayoc was later arrested by state law enforcement agents. He was sentenced to one year of probation.

Sayoc also showed a marked bent toward conspiracy theories and violent imagery. He had reportedly been behaving erratically for years and had been driving a van covered in strange pictures for some time before he sent the bombs:

Gureghian, the general manager of New River Pizza and Fresh Kitchen, said that Sayoc worked as a delivery-truck driver for several months but quit in January. The white van he drove to deliver pizzas was covered in disturbing images, she said, so the restaurant required him to park it on the side where it could not be seen.

“It was puppets with their heads cut off, mannequins with their heads cut off, Ku Klux Klan, a black person being hung, anti-gay symbols, torchings, bombings, you name it, it was all over his truck,” Gureghian said.

But at some point he changed. “This is not a criminal mastermind by any stretch of the imagination, but he has had numerous interactions with law enforcement,” Miami defense attorney David Weinstein, who formerly served as the chief of the counter-terrorism section in the U.S. attorney’s office, told the Miami Herald. “Something obviously triggered in him to take it one step further than he had ever gone before.”

Reporters and disinformation experts who looked over his social media presence say that his posts and tweets showed a clear, marked transformation — what they call his radicalization — in 2016:

The genesis of Mr. Sayoc’s partisan awakening may never be known, but hints of it first appeared on his Facebook feed in early 2016, as the primary season for the presidential election was starting.

That February, he posted a link to a conspiracy theory video on YouTube titled, “Is Barack Obama THE ANTICHRIST — 100% PROOF Is There!” Days later, he posted a second YouTube video, “Satan Sent Obama to Destroy America,” and a clip featuring Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, which was called, “MUST HEAR: Sean Exposes Illegal Immigrant Crime Stats.” He posted several anti-Obama videos multiple times on his feed, interspersed with stories about personal finance and his favorite soccer players.

By the summer, Mr. Sayoc’s social media activity was all politics, all the time.

Before that, Sayoc’s social media presence had been innocuous and relatively quiet. Suddenly, though, things changed, says media and disinformation expert Jonathan Albright:

What caused this leap? It’s not clear, but his radicalization seems to have truly begun in April 2016:

By 2018, he was posting obsessively about people like the Clintons, the Obamas, George Soros, and others, culminating in glass-packed bombs sent by courier or hand-delivered to the objects of his hatred — at least thirteen in all. His former boss told the Washington Post that he was very angry at the world, particularly black, Jewish, and gay people:

Gureghian, who is lesbian, said that Sayoc made constant remarks about her sexuality.

“He used to tell me all the time that I was deformed and Jesus made a mistake in me,” she said.

She said Sayoc quit in January and told her he had trained to be a truck driver hauling hazardous materials, with a “top secret” clearance.

“He would categorize himself as a white supremacist,” she said. “He would just say, ‘Take back the world. That’s what he would always say, ‘Take back the world.’ ”

He openly threatened public figures on social media, but platforms did nothing about it:

Many recipients of Mr. Sayoc’s social media wrath most likely disregarded it, or wrote him off as just another overzealous troll. But the few who tried to sound the alarm appear to have been ignored. This month, Rochelle Ritchie, a Democratic political commentator, complained to Twitter that Mr. Sayoc had sent her a threatening message after she appeared on Fox News. The company replied that Mr. Sayoc’s tweet did not violate its rules against abuse.

Disinformation purveyors and professional trolls had been pushing the line that the attacks were “false flag” events, designed to frighten the populace with fake news of planned (but ultimately harmless) attacks. Most of them went abruptly silent on the topic immediately after the suspect was arrested.

The post Suspect in Attempted Bomb Attacks Had History of Crime, Conspiracy Theories appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

antarctica, climate change, Fact Checks, ice shelves, icebergs, TruthOrFiction, viral content, What's True?

About That Perfectly Rectangular Iceberg…

In October 2018, an image floating around the internet caused a stir. The photograph appeared to show something statistically implausible, if not impossible — a perfectly rectangular iceberg like a tabletop, serenely circling Antarctic waters:

Although the oddly-shaped piece of ice looks like it either is the product of digital editing software or perhaps some unusually motivated pranksters (or aliens), the truth is at once more interesting and more pedestrian than the theories, as it usually is. The original photograph appeared on October 17th, courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and photographer Jeremy Harbeck:

There are two types of icebergs, tabular and non-tabular. Tabular icebergs, as their name implies, have steep sides and a flat top, like a table, according to the United States Coast Guard’s Navigation Center’s terse description:

An iceberg with steep sides and flat top having a length-to-height ratio greater than 5:1. Many show horizontal banding.

By comparison, non-tabular icebergs (also known as everything else) are described as follows: Dome, pinnacle, wedge, dry-dock and blocky. Different sizes have different designations, as well. Glaciers and icebergs are well-known descriptors, but the smaller chunks of ice have the most delightful names: bergy bits, for bergs between one and four meters tall, and growlers, which are a meter high or less.

But tabular icebergs are common, even prosaic. Whereas non-tabular icebergs often come into the world as the result of a spectacular calving or crashing, tabular icebergs tend to split relatively quietly away from ice shelves, which are (again, as the name suggests) long, flat sheets of ice connected to landmasses:

Most of the world’s ice shelves hug the coast of Antarctica. However, ice shelves can also form wherever ice flows from land into cold ocean waters, including some glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere. The northern coast of Canada’s Ellesmere Island is home to several well-known ice shelves, among them the Markham and the Ward Hunt ice shelves.

Given that these “ice shelves” are already elongated and flattened by nature, it makes sense that chunks break off at angles:

The Thurston Island calving front off of western Antarctica as seen from the window of NASA's DC-8 on Nov. 5, 2014.

Sometimes, those ice chunks break into perfectly aligned right angles that look as though they might have been sculpted before they are eroded away by water, sunlight, marine creatures, and other pressures:

But it’s not all good news. Climate change has so accelerated the warming process that ice shelves are disintegrating at a record pace:

Most ice shelves are fed by inland glaciers. Together, an ice shelf and the glaciers feeding it can form a stable system, with the forces of outflow and back pressure balanced. Warmer temperatures can destabilize this system by increasing glacier flow speed and—more dramatically—by disintegrating the ice shelf. Without a shelf to slow its speed, the glacier accelerates. After the 2002 Larsen B Ice Shelf disintegration, nearby glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula accelerated up to eight times their original speed over the next 18 months. Similar losses of ice tongues in Greenland have caused speed-ups of two to three times the flow rate in just one year.

While calving or disintegrating ice shelves don’t raise ocean level, the resulting glacier acceleration does, and this poses a potential threat to coastal communities around the globe. Worldwide, more than 100 million people currently live within 1 meter of mean sea level. Greenland contains enough ice to raise sea level by 7 meters, and Antarctica holds enough ice to raise sea level by 57 meters. While these ice sheets are unlikely to disappear anytime soon, even partial loss of the grounded ice could present a significant problem. In the coming decades of a climate warming era, ice shelves and ice tongues are likely to play a prominent role in changing the rate of ice flow off the major ice sheets.

Waters around the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed 2.5 degrees Celsius, or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, since 1950, alarming climate scientists and accelerating other changes. However, whatever fate of this hunk of ice might meet in the end, it is real and formed not by pranksters or playful extraterrestrials, but by natural forces.

The post About That Perfectly Rectangular Iceberg… appeared first on What's True?.

antarctica, climate change, Fact Checks, ice shelves, icebergs, TruthOrFiction, viral content

About That Perfectly Rectangular Iceberg…

In October 2018, an image floating around the internet caused a stir. The photograph appeared to show something statistically implausible, if not impossible — a perfectly rectangular iceberg like a tabletop, serenely circling Antarctic waters:

Although the oddly-shaped piece of ice looks like it either is the product of digital editing software or perhaps some unusually motivated pranksters (or aliens), the truth is at once more interesting and more pedestrian than the theories, as it usually is. The original photograph appeared on October 17th, courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and photographer Jeremy Harbeck:

There are two types of icebergs, tabular and non-tabular. Tabular icebergs, as their name implies, have steep sides and a flat top, like a table, according to the United States Coast Guard’s Navigation Center’s terse description:

An iceberg with steep sides and flat top having a length-to-height ratio greater than 5:1. Many show horizontal banding.

By comparison, non-tabular icebergs (also known as everything else) are described as follows: Dome, pinnacle, wedge, dry-dock and blocky. Different sizes have different designations, as well. Glaciers and icebergs are well-known descriptors, but the smaller chunks of ice have the most delightful names: bergy bits, for bergs between one and four meters tall, and growlers, which are a meter high or less.

But tabular icebergs are common, even prosaic. Whereas non-tabular icebergs often come into the world as the result of a spectacular calving or crashing, tabular icebergs tend to split relatively quietly away from ice shelves, which are (again, as the name suggests) long, flat sheets of ice connected to landmasses:

Most of the world’s ice shelves hug the coast of Antarctica. However, ice shelves can also form wherever ice flows from land into cold ocean waters, including some glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere. The northern coast of Canada’s Ellesmere Island is home to several well-known ice shelves, among them the Markham and the Ward Hunt ice shelves.

Given that these “ice shelves” are already elongated and flattened by nature, it makes sense that chunks break off at angles:

The Thurston Island calving front off of western Antarctica as seen from the window of NASA's DC-8 on Nov. 5, 2014.

Sometimes, those ice chunks break into perfectly aligned right angles that look as though they might have been sculpted before they are eroded away by water, sunlight, marine creatures, and other pressures:

But it’s not all good news. Climate change has so accelerated the warming process that ice shelves are disintegrating at a record pace:

Most ice shelves are fed by inland glaciers. Together, an ice shelf and the glaciers feeding it can form a stable system, with the forces of outflow and back pressure balanced. Warmer temperatures can destabilize this system by increasing glacier flow speed and—more dramatically—by disintegrating the ice shelf. Without a shelf to slow its speed, the glacier accelerates. After the 2002 Larsen B Ice Shelf disintegration, nearby glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula accelerated up to eight times their original speed over the next 18 months. Similar losses of ice tongues in Greenland have caused speed-ups of two to three times the flow rate in just one year.

While calving or disintegrating ice shelves don’t raise ocean level, the resulting glacier acceleration does, and this poses a potential threat to coastal communities around the globe. Worldwide, more than 100 million people currently live within 1 meter of mean sea level. Greenland contains enough ice to raise sea level by 7 meters, and Antarctica holds enough ice to raise sea level by 57 meters. While these ice sheets are unlikely to disappear anytime soon, even partial loss of the grounded ice could present a significant problem. In the coming decades of a climate warming era, ice shelves and ice tongues are likely to play a prominent role in changing the rate of ice flow off the major ice sheets.

Waters around the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed 2.5 degrees Celsius, or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, since 1950, alarming climate scientists and accelerating other changes. However, whatever fate of this hunk of ice might meet in the end, it is real and formed not by pranksters or playful extraterrestrials, but by natural forces.

The post About That Perfectly Rectangular Iceberg… appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, barack obama, bill clinton, eric holder, george soros, hillary clinton, john brennan, maxine waters, michelle obama, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, vladimir putin, What's True?

Makeshift Bombs Sent to Subjects of Major Conspiracy Theories

In the final weeks of October 2018, following months of increasingly shrill, increasingly baroque conspiracy theories pushed by official after elected official, someone began sending mail bombs out to their favorite subjects.

The first person to receive a mail bomb was philanthropist billionaire George Soros, who has been the American far right’s favorite bugbear at least since Russian president Vladimir Putin, piqued by Soros’s mild criticism in 2014 of what he saw as encroaching nationalism and expansionism, threw Soros’s Open Societies Foundation out of the country and began weaponizing antisemitic smears against him, including during an appearance with U.S. president Donald Trump in Helsinki in mid-2018:

In response to a question about election interference, Putin brushed off allegations that the Russian government was involved. He compared the company that allegedly gave cover to the Russian intelligence agents to Soros — essentially arguing that an individual company doesn’t represent Russia, just like how Soros doesn’t represent America.

“You have a lot of individuals in the United States, take George Soros, for instance, with multibillion capitals, but does it make him — his position, his posture, the posture of the United States? No, it does not,” Putin said.

Putin could have named a big American company as an example. He could have named any wealthy American, like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. But he didn’t. Instead, he mentioned a man who’s been smeared by the far right as a liberal puppet master and, worse, a Nazi collaborator (though Soros is actually a Holocaust survivor). In elections from Hungary to Italy, Soros has been referenced by far-right political figures, often with anti-Semitic rhetoric following closely.

A few days after someone targeted Soros’s home, makeshift bombs and explosives appeared nearly simultaneously at the homes of the Obamas and the Clintons. At the same time, others were sent to CNN’s New York offices (addressed to former CIA director John Brennan, care of CNN; Brennan does not work for the network), and intercepted in Maryland en route to Rep. Maxine Waters’ office. Yet another was sent to Eric Holder, but the address was wrong. The packages had the return address of Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, so they would be “returned” to her.

Each of the targets share commonalities. Each has criticized United States President Donald Trump, many are Democrats, and all of them have been singled out as the subjects of massive interconnected conspiracy theories that have for years been pushed out through fair means (debunkings) and foul (baseless accusations) on social media networks. In fact, their conspiracy theories are so interconnected that they are almost one grand unifying theory.

According to this worldview, George Soros is more than simply a philanthropic billionaire who spends enormous sums of his great personal fortune to bolster democracies around the world; he is a banker and a puppetmaster sitting like a great spider on a globalist web to heartlessly manipulate current events. That these descriptions bear a striking resemblance to Nazi-era tropes about Jewish people is no coincidence; Soros, who was born in Hungary, is Jewish, and famously survived the Holocaust:

The far right has ecstatically embraced the spectacle of elected political figures such as Trump and Gaetz theorizing about Soros. After Trump’s Soros tweet about Kavanaugh, the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer echoed and surpassed Trump’s assertion that anti-Kavanaugh dissent was a nefarious, paid-for plot.

“It is impossible to deny that subversive anti-American Jews were the primary force involved in a sinister plot to destroy Kavanaugh,” Lee Rogers wrote on the site a couple of days later. “These Jews do not represent the interest of America. They represent the interest of their diabolical and evil race first and foremost.”

In response to an Oct. 19 Trump speech in Missoula, Mont., in which Trump again suggested that protesters were paid by “Soros or somebody,” a commenter on anonymous message board 4chan exulted, “TRUMP NAMED THE IMMIGRATION JEW.” (“Naming the Jew” is an anti-Semitic term that refers to pointing out purported nefarious Jewish influence on world events.)

Hillary Clinton, who infuriated Putin as U.S. Secretary of State before running against Donald Trump, has been the topic of conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, not least Pizzagate, in which she and husband Bill Clinton were purportedly smuggling babies through the basement of a Washington, D.C. area pizza restaurant in order to sell them, sacrifice them to Satan, or do some other equally outlandish and horrible thing. That rumor came to an abrupt end when Edgar Maddison Welch traveled from North Carolina to the pizzeria loaded down with weapons, shot into the ceiling, and demanded to be taken to the basement to free the babies, only to discover that the restaurant has no basement:

Finally, Welch responded to police calls for him to leave the building and surrender. He put his AR-15 on top of a beer keg and his revolver on a table. He came out with his hands up, following police commands to walk backward toward them.

Welch was handcuffed, and Sgt. Benjamin Firehock asked him why he had done it. Welch said, according to the arrest affidavit, “that he had read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there. [Welch] stated that he was armed to help rescue them. [Welch] surrendered peacefully when he found no evidence that underage children were being harbored in the restaurant.”

This conspiracy theory was later recycled as part of “QAnon,” proving that in the conspiracy world, nothing ever really goes away:

Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by the satanic Democratic Party, and of course, countless logical leaps and paranoid assumptions that fail to hold up under the slightest fact-based scrutiny. However, unlike Pizzagate, the Storm isn’t focused on a single block of shops in D.C., or John Podesta’s emails. It’s much, much bigger than that.

[…]

In this fantasy world, all of the far right’s wildest dreams come true: Q promises that Clinton, Obama, Podesta, Abedin, and even McCain are all either arrested and wearing secret police-issued ankle monitors, or justabout to be indicted; that the Steele dossier is a total fabrication personally paid for by Clinton and Obama; and that the Las Vegas massacre was most definitely an inside job connected to the Saudi-Clinton cabal.

They believe all of this will be coming to a head any day now. That “The Storm” — of arrests, political turmoil, and Republican vindication — is coming. Though there have been some, uh, miscalculations as for exactly when.

Former United States President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama have been targeted by the racist far right for years. For example, the “Birther” conspiracy theory was enthusiastically pushed by Trump and his supporters, who heavily implied and saying outright that Obama was not eligible to be President of the United States, because he had been born in Kenya, not the United States and thus was not a U.S. citizen. This racist conspiracy theory was debunked time and again, not least by Obama himself, who finally released his birth records (from Hawaii, not Kenya) with little effect. That Kenya itself did not exist the year Barack Obama was born (Kenya did not gain independence from British rule until 1963; Obama was born in 1961) was apparently of no consequence to people pushing the conspiracy theory.

Rep. Maxine Waters has been singled out time and again by Trump as a “low IQ individual” due to her unflinching criticism of his policies and behavior. She has also been subjected to shadowy accusations of various unsavory activities, never with any proof to back them up. Eric Holder has been a common ingredient in many conspiracy theories that have to do with false flags and guns along with the usual racialized commentary, thanks to his role and testimonials in the “Operation Fast and Furious” controversy. John Brennan, another Trump critic, has been smeared as a “secret Muslim” and a communist — whose security clearance was abruptly revoked by Trump in August 2018, seemingly out of nothing more than spite:

President Trump on Wednesday followed through on threats to strip the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan, igniting a firestorm of criticism that the president was recklessly attempting to distract from his own political problems and silence high-profile critics.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced the decision at a White House briefing, reading a statement from Trump that accused Brennan of making “a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations — wild outbursts on the internet and television — about this Administration.”

Brennan, who led the CIA during most of President Barack Obama’s second term, has emerged as one of Trump’s fiercest critics, denouncing his performance at a summit with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin last month as “treasonous.” On Tuesday, Brennan lambasted Trump’s personal character after he derided former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman as a “dog.”

Each of the people listed have been singled out repeatedly by the Trump administration and folded into a larger conspiracy theory without any factual basis to go from. However, stochastic terrorism needs no foundation in truth to be encouraged. Study after study shows that online radicalization is rampant and operates by the same mechanisms, no matter who the target group is, and once credulous people have been brought into the cult, it’s difficult to lead them back out again.

And because the internet is the way it is, it’s possible for small groups of people to speak to millions over time, again and again, saying whatever they like, until someone decides to act on what they’re saying. That these conspiracy theories and charges are being floated by elected officials in public with no attempts to either verify or retract their ludicrous statements makes it a certainty that people will continue to act out on them in a way that is statistically inevitable but individually impossible to predict — stochastic terrorism:

Michael Jetter, a professor at the School of Economics and Finance at Universidad EAFIT in Medellín, Colombia, and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labour in Bonn, Germany, analysed more than 60,000 terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2012 as reported in the New York Times. Jetter notes that over the past 15 years “the world has experienced a terrifying, exponential increase in the number of terrorist attacks”. The Global Terrorism Database listed 1,395 attacks in 1998, a figure that has steadily risen since then, reaching a record high of 8,441 in 2012.

The total number of casualties from terrorist attacks in the past 15 years has soared from 3,387 to 15,396. At the same time, terrorist groups have increasingly sought to use the media to promote their agendas.

Graphic videos of beheadings filmed by Islamic State and released on the internet have turned the group into a globally feared brand. But they have also prompted anguished questions about how much such organisations should be given “the oxygen of publicity”.

As researchers point out, mass communication and publicity are key components of this particular type of terrorism.

Given that House Republicans put out yet another attack ad against George Soros (who is not running for office, nor has he announced any plans to) mere days after he was targeted in a coordinated domestic terrorism attack, it seems as though these conspiracy theories will not stop lurching into real life any time soon.

The post Makeshift Bombs Sent to Subjects of Major Conspiracy Theories appeared first on What's True?.

analysis, barack obama, bill clinton, eric holder, george soros, hillary clinton, john brennan, maxine waters, michelle obama, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, vladimir putin

Makeshift Bombs Sent to Subjects of Major Conspiracy Theories

In the final weeks of October 2018, following months of increasingly shrill, increasingly baroque conspiracy theories pushed by official after elected official, someone began sending mail bombs out to their favorite subjects.

The first person to receive a mail bomb was philanthropist billionaire George Soros, who has been the American far right’s favorite bugbear at least since Russian president Vladimir Putin, piqued by Soros’s mild criticism in 2014 of what he saw as encroaching nationalism and expansionism, threw Soros’s Open Societies Foundation out of the country and began weaponizing antisemitic smears against him, including during an appearance with U.S. president Donald Trump in Helsinki in mid-2018:

In response to a question about election interference, Putin brushed off allegations that the Russian government was involved. He compared the company that allegedly gave cover to the Russian intelligence agents to Soros — essentially arguing that an individual company doesn’t represent Russia, just like how Soros doesn’t represent America.

“You have a lot of individuals in the United States, take George Soros, for instance, with multibillion capitals, but does it make him — his position, his posture, the posture of the United States? No, it does not,” Putin said.

Putin could have named a big American company as an example. He could have named any wealthy American, like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. But he didn’t. Instead, he mentioned a man who’s been smeared by the far right as a liberal puppet master and, worse, a Nazi collaborator (though Soros is actually a Holocaust survivor). In elections from Hungary to Italy, Soros has been referenced by far-right political figures, often with anti-Semitic rhetoric following closely.

A few days after someone targeted Soros’s home, makeshift bombs and explosives appeared nearly simultaneously at the homes of the Obamas and the Clintons. At the same time, others were sent to CNN’s New York offices (addressed to former CIA director John Brennan, care of CNN; Brennan does not work for the network), and intercepted in Maryland en route to Rep. Maxine Waters’ office. Yet another was sent to Eric Holder, but the address was wrong. The packages had the return address of Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, so they would be “returned” to her.

Each of the targets share commonalities. Each has criticized United States President Donald Trump, many are Democrats, and all of them have been singled out as the subjects of massive interconnected conspiracy theories that have for years been pushed out through fair means (debunkings) and foul (baseless accusations) on social media networks. In fact, their conspiracy theories are so interconnected that they are almost one grand unifying theory.

According to this worldview, George Soros is more than simply a philanthropic billionaire who spends enormous sums of his great personal fortune to bolster democracies around the world; he is a banker and a puppetmaster sitting like a great spider on a globalist web to heartlessly manipulate current events. That these descriptions bear a striking resemblance to Nazi-era tropes about Jewish people is no coincidence; Soros, who was born in Hungary, is Jewish, and famously survived the Holocaust:

The far right has ecstatically embraced the spectacle of elected political figures such as Trump and Gaetz theorizing about Soros. After Trump’s Soros tweet about Kavanaugh, the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer echoed and surpassed Trump’s assertion that anti-Kavanaugh dissent was a nefarious, paid-for plot.

“It is impossible to deny that subversive anti-American Jews were the primary force involved in a sinister plot to destroy Kavanaugh,” Lee Rogers wrote on the site a couple of days later. “These Jews do not represent the interest of America. They represent the interest of their diabolical and evil race first and foremost.”

In response to an Oct. 19 Trump speech in Missoula, Mont., in which Trump again suggested that protesters were paid by “Soros or somebody,” a commenter on anonymous message board 4chan exulted, “TRUMP NAMED THE IMMIGRATION JEW.” (“Naming the Jew” is an anti-Semitic term that refers to pointing out purported nefarious Jewish influence on world events.)

Hillary Clinton, who infuriated Putin as U.S. Secretary of State before running against Donald Trump, has been the topic of conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, not least Pizzagate, in which she and husband Bill Clinton were purportedly smuggling babies through the basement of a Washington, D.C. area pizza restaurant in order to sell them, sacrifice them to Satan, or do some other equally outlandish and horrible thing. That rumor came to an abrupt end when Edgar Maddison Welch traveled from North Carolina to the pizzeria loaded down with weapons, shot into the ceiling, and demanded to be taken to the basement to free the babies, only to discover that the restaurant has no basement:

Finally, Welch responded to police calls for him to leave the building and surrender. He put his AR-15 on top of a beer keg and his revolver on a table. He came out with his hands up, following police commands to walk backward toward them.

Welch was handcuffed, and Sgt. Benjamin Firehock asked him why he had done it. Welch said, according to the arrest affidavit, “that he had read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there. [Welch] stated that he was armed to help rescue them. [Welch] surrendered peacefully when he found no evidence that underage children were being harbored in the restaurant.”

This conspiracy theory was later recycled as part of “QAnon,” proving that in the conspiracy world, nothing ever really goes away:

Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by the satanic Democratic Party, and of course, countless logical leaps and paranoid assumptions that fail to hold up under the slightest fact-based scrutiny. However, unlike Pizzagate, the Storm isn’t focused on a single block of shops in D.C., or John Podesta’s emails. It’s much, much bigger than that.

[…]

In this fantasy world, all of the far right’s wildest dreams come true: Q promises that Clinton, Obama, Podesta, Abedin, and even McCain are all either arrested and wearing secret police-issued ankle monitors, or justabout to be indicted; that the Steele dossier is a total fabrication personally paid for by Clinton and Obama; and that the Las Vegas massacre was most definitely an inside job connected to the Saudi-Clinton cabal.

They believe all of this will be coming to a head any day now. That “The Storm” — of arrests, political turmoil, and Republican vindication — is coming. Though there have been some, uh, miscalculations as for exactly when.

Former United States President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama have been targeted by the racist far right for years. For example, the “Birther” conspiracy theory was enthusiastically pushed by Trump and his supporters, who heavily implied and saying outright that Obama was not eligible to be President of the United States, because he had been born in Kenya, not the United States and thus was not a U.S. citizen. This racist conspiracy theory was debunked time and again, not least by Obama himself, who finally released his birth records (from Hawaii, not Kenya) with little effect. That Kenya itself did not exist the year Barack Obama was born (Kenya did not gain independence from British rule until 1963; Obama was born in 1961) was apparently of no consequence to people pushing the conspiracy theory.

Rep. Maxine Waters has been singled out time and again by Trump as a “low IQ individual” due to her unflinching criticism of his policies and behavior. She has also been subjected to shadowy accusations of various unsavory activities, never with any proof to back them up. Eric Holder has been a common ingredient in many conspiracy theories that have to do with false flags and guns along with the usual racialized commentary, thanks to his role and testimonials in the “Operation Fast and Furious” controversy. John Brennan, another Trump critic, has been smeared as a “secret Muslim” and a communist — whose security clearance was abruptly revoked by Trump in August 2018, seemingly out of nothing more than spite:

President Trump on Wednesday followed through on threats to strip the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan, igniting a firestorm of criticism that the president was recklessly attempting to distract from his own political problems and silence high-profile critics.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced the decision at a White House briefing, reading a statement from Trump that accused Brennan of making “a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations — wild outbursts on the internet and television — about this Administration.”

Brennan, who led the CIA during most of President Barack Obama’s second term, has emerged as one of Trump’s fiercest critics, denouncing his performance at a summit with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin last month as “treasonous.” On Tuesday, Brennan lambasted Trump’s personal character after he derided former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman as a “dog.”

Each of the people listed have been singled out repeatedly by the Trump administration and folded into a larger conspiracy theory without any factual basis to go from. However, stochastic terrorism needs no foundation in truth to be encouraged. Study after study shows that online radicalization is rampant and operates by the same mechanisms, no matter who the target group is, and once credulous people have been brought into the cult, it’s difficult to lead them back out again.

And because the internet is the way it is, it’s possible for small groups of people to speak to millions over time, again and again, saying whatever they like, until someone decides to act on what they’re saying. That these conspiracy theories and charges are being floated by elected officials in public with no attempts to either verify or retract their ludicrous statements makes it a certainty that people will continue to act out on them in a way that is statistically inevitable but individually impossible to predict — stochastic terrorism:

Michael Jetter, a professor at the School of Economics and Finance at Universidad EAFIT in Medellín, Colombia, and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labour in Bonn, Germany, analysed more than 60,000 terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2012 as reported in the New York Times. Jetter notes that over the past 15 years “the world has experienced a terrifying, exponential increase in the number of terrorist attacks”. The Global Terrorism Database listed 1,395 attacks in 1998, a figure that has steadily risen since then, reaching a record high of 8,441 in 2012.

The total number of casualties from terrorist attacks in the past 15 years has soared from 3,387 to 15,396. At the same time, terrorist groups have increasingly sought to use the media to promote their agendas.

Graphic videos of beheadings filmed by Islamic State and released on the internet have turned the group into a globally feared brand. But they have also prompted anguished questions about how much such organisations should be given “the oxygen of publicity”.

As researchers point out, mass communication and publicity are key components of this particular type of terrorism.

Given that House Republicans put out yet another attack ad against George Soros (who is not running for office, nor has he announced any plans to) mere days after he was targeted in a coordinated domestic terrorism attack, it seems as though these conspiracy theories will not stop lurching into real life any time soon.

The post Makeshift Bombs Sent to Subjects of Major Conspiracy Theories appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

ayotzinapa, disinformation, Fact Checks, ginni thomas, guerrero, honduras, mexico, michoacán, police violence, Politics, TruthOrFiction, What's True?

Did a Caravan of Central Americans Beat Up Police in Mexico?

As a group of desperate women, men, and children traveled north from Central America to try to turn themselves in at the United States border in the hopes of receiving asylum, disinformation and smears about the group and their motives flew thick and fast:

An image shared by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, showed two men in battered riot gear bearing the insignia of Mexico’s federal police, one with blood pouring down his face. She wrote:

The media won’t share THIS, will they? It is an invasion, and thank GOD for President Trump.

The cry was naturally picked up by the usual suspects, all sharing the same image and similar descriptions.

Unfortunately for Thomas, she was wrong about the year, about whether media would cover it, and what the confrontation was about — in fact, she was completely wrong on all counts.

The image comes from an incident in Michoacán in 2012 between Mexico’s federal police and a group of student teachers known as normalistas, so called because they attend schools that hew to specific norms for teaching purposes — normal schools. Normalistas in Mexico frequently come from impoverished rural areas by design:

The ‘normalista’ schools, the educational centers that provide professional teachers with an undergraduate education, were born during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 when the country was still mostly made up of farmers. José Vasconcelos, rector of Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) and Minister of Education from 1921 to 1924 embarked on an educational crusade using rural teachers. He chose them because they were the figures that could widen the spread of the spirit of the Revolution. “He attempted to give Mexicans a sense of their country. The teacher taught reading and writing and how to make soap or undertake carpentry work,” explains historian Lorenzo Meyer. “It was a difficult time. In the 1920s teachers were being treated badly. The Cristeros (Catholics in arms against the Revolution) did not accept them and ended up killing or mutilating a great many of their number.”

Problems arose when Mexico stopped being rural and the government ceased being revolutionary: “These schools had a left-wing, radical outlook, so much so that they wanted to close them. But that proved no easy task because they provided the only opportunities for people from the countryside.” Two of Mexico’s greatest guerrilla leaders of the 1960s and 1970s came from the Raúl Isidro Burgos school: Genaro Váquez Rojas and Lucio Cabañas. The students still venerate them. Cabañas was the teacher who organized and aided peasants by defending their rights. He began the armed group, the Partido de los Pobres (the Party of the Poor). Guerrero suffered military and political repression during the so-called Dirty War of the 1960s and 1970s. Even today, in the local mountains, you can come across townships that have some of the country’s lowest human development indicators.

These schools never forgot their past and as part of their tradition continue to press for egalitarianism and an end to brutal state repression, which over the years has laid a heavy hand on Mexico’s rural and agricultural centers. Sometimes their students are able to bring about changes. Sometimes, the confrontations erupt into violence.

One particularly horrible example of the latter took place in 2014, when 43 students from Ayotzinapa’s famous Raúl Isidro Burgos teacher training school in Guerrero state were “disappeared” by officials in nearby Iguala, Mexico (police first fired wildly at them, killing six people, including a pregnant woman and a young rising sports star, neither of whom were involved with the confrontation, which along with the ongoing government cover-up has become a symbol of state repression.) Few traces of the missing students have been found since, although the remains of one man, Julio César Mondragón, were found in a field days after the disappearance. His body showed clear signs of torture; his face had been flayed.

The misappropriated photograph purporting to be from the caravan actually comes from an incident two years before Ayotzinapa in 2012, far north of Guerrero in the state of Michoacán, when federal police forcibly and violently removed, beat, and arrested dozens of students who opposed education reforms. Students fought back with rocks and bottles, but were eventually taken into custody. The photograph shows an officer who had been hit and injured by projectiles.

Far from some sort of “invasion” by a violent horde, or whatever other vivid Camp of the Saints-inspired imagery bots and trolls are spawning on social media, this photograph shows a conflict between Mexican police and Mexican students that took place six years before it was unearthed and reappropriated for propaganda purposes.

The post Did a Caravan of Central Americans Beat Up Police in Mexico? appeared first on What's True?.

ayotzinapa, disinformation, Fact Checks, ginni thomas, guerrero, honduras, mexico, michoacán, police violence, Politics, TruthOrFiction

Did a Caravan of Central Americans Beat Up Police in Mexico?

As a group of desperate women, men, and children traveled north from Central America to try to turn themselves in at the United States border in the hopes of receiving asylum, disinformation and smears about the group and their motives flew thick and fast:

An image shared by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, showed two men in battered riot gear bearing the insignia of Mexico’s federal police, one with blood pouring down his face. She wrote:

The media won’t share THIS, will they? It is an invasion, and thank GOD for President Trump.

The cry was naturally picked up by the usual suspects, all sharing the same image and similar descriptions.

Unfortunately for Thomas, she was wrong about the year, about whether media would cover it, and what the confrontation was about — in fact, she was completely wrong on all counts.

The image comes from an incident in Michoacán in 2012 between Mexico’s federal police and a group of student teachers known as normalistas, so called because they attend schools that hew to specific norms for teaching purposes — normal schools. Normalistas in Mexico frequently come from impoverished rural areas by design:

The ‘normalista’ schools, the educational centers that provide professional teachers with an undergraduate education, were born during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 when the country was still mostly made up of farmers. José Vasconcelos, rector of Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) and Minister of Education from 1921 to 1924 embarked on an educational crusade using rural teachers. He chose them because they were the figures that could widen the spread of the spirit of the Revolution. “He attempted to give Mexicans a sense of their country. The teacher taught reading and writing and how to make soap or undertake carpentry work,” explains historian Lorenzo Meyer. “It was a difficult time. In the 1920s teachers were being treated badly. The Cristeros (Catholics in arms against the Revolution) did not accept them and ended up killing or mutilating a great many of their number.”

Problems arose when Mexico stopped being rural and the government ceased being revolutionary: “These schools had a left-wing, radical outlook, so much so that they wanted to close them. But that proved no easy task because they provided the only opportunities for people from the countryside.” Two of Mexico’s greatest guerrilla leaders of the 1960s and 1970s came from the Raúl Isidro Burgos school: Genaro Váquez Rojas and Lucio Cabañas. The students still venerate them. Cabañas was the teacher who organized and aided peasants by defending their rights. He began the armed group, the Partido de los Pobres (the Party of the Poor). Guerrero suffered military and political repression during the so-called Dirty War of the 1960s and 1970s. Even today, in the local mountains, you can come across townships that have some of the country’s lowest human development indicators.

These schools never forgot their past and as part of their tradition continue to press for egalitarianism and an end to brutal state repression, which over the years has laid a heavy hand on Mexico’s rural and agricultural centers. Sometimes their students are able to bring about changes. Sometimes, the confrontations erupt into violence.

One particularly horrible example of the latter took place in 2014, when 43 students from Ayotzinapa’s famous Raúl Isidro Burgos teacher training school in Guerrero state were “disappeared” by officials in nearby Iguala, Mexico (police first fired wildly at them, killing six people, including a pregnant woman and a young rising sports star, neither of whom were involved with the confrontation, which along with the ongoing government cover-up has become a symbol of state repression.) Few traces of the missing students have been found since, although the remains of one man, Julio César Mondragón, were found in a field days after the disappearance. His body showed clear signs of torture; his face had been flayed.

The misappropriated photograph purporting to be from the caravan actually comes from an incident two years before Ayotzinapa in 2012, far north of Guerrero in the state of Michoacán, when federal police forcibly and violently removed, beat, and arrested dozens of students who opposed education reforms. Students fought back with rocks and bottles, but were eventually taken into custody. The photograph, which was taken by journalist Gustavo Aguado, shows an officer who had been hit and injured by projectiles.

Far from some sort of “invasion” by a violent horde, or whatever other vivid Camp of the Saints-inspired imagery bots and trolls are spawning on social media, this photograph shows a conflict between Mexican police and Mexican students that took place six years before it was unearthed and reappropriated for propaganda purposes.

The post Did a Caravan of Central Americans Beat Up Police in Mexico? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

caravana migrante, disinformation, Fact Checks, hurricane willa, mexico, patriotic express, TruthOrFiction, viral content, What's True?

Will Hurricane Willa Hit a Refugee Caravan in Mexico?

As a caravan of thousands of hopeful asylum-seekers from Central America continued to swell as the annual pilgrimage entered Mexico, so did rumors about them in the United States.

One such rumor appeared on October 21, 2018, just after the group left Guatemala and entered Mexico:

It appears that the migrant caravan, which has been reported to upward of 10,000 strong, might run into some extra trouble on their march to seek American asylum. A massive hurricane (named Willa) is set to cross the path that the migrants will eventually cross.

The story accurately references Weather.com, which ran a story about two major storms affecting Mexico’s Pacific coast:

Hurricane Willa has rapidly intensified into a dangerous Category 4 hurricane and is expected to strengthen further early this week. Damaging winds, flooding rain and a potentially destructive storm surge will threaten Mexico’s Pacific coastline by midweek.

Tropical Storm Vicente also poses a heavy rain threat to Mexico in the week ahead.

Willa is tracking north-northwestward but is expected to slowly recurve toward the north Monday and the north-northeast by Tuesday. It should approach landfall along the southwestern coast of mainland Mexico by late Tuesday, which is expected to occur anywhere from near or north of Mazatlán to near Puerto Vallarta.

What this story and others like it don’t take into account is Mexico itself. The country’s immensity is often overlooked on a map, dominated as it is by the rest of North America above it and all of Central and South America below. (The way countries are assigned size on various maps, particularly the extremely common Mercator projection map, may also have something to do with it.)

Hurricane Willa was projected to make landfall between Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán, according to the article:

By comparison, the caravan that is creating such a stir among certain members of American elected officials remains so far south that it is barely visible on the above map. As of October 23, 2018, the caravan had entered Huixtla in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas (Mexico is a federation of 32 states, including its capital and federal seat, Mexico City; its full name is Estados Unidos Mexicanos, or the United Mexican States) more than 1,100 miles (1,900 km) away from Puerto Vallarta, a fact belied by every headline reporting that the caravan was “marching” or “advancing” on the United States as though their arrival at its border was imminent when really the distance from Huixtla to Puerto Vallarta, let alone Mazatlán, is greater than the distance between Los Angeles, California, and Portland, Oregon:

Not even the hardiest supercell would be able to make that journey intact, and certainly not Willa, which is already weakening — although the hurricane is nothing to sneeze at by either Mexico or the United States.

Tropical Storm Vicente has already left at least eleven people dead on Mexico’s southern coast, making landfall in Oaxaca state. That was closer to the caravan’s location on October 23, but not enough to make a difference, as the two regions remain at least 400 miles (650 km) apart.

The post Will Hurricane Willa Hit a Refugee Caravan in Mexico? appeared first on What's True?.

caravana migrante, disinformation, Fact Checks, hurricane willa, mexico, patriotic express, TruthOrFiction, viral content

Will Hurricane Willa Hit a Refugee Caravan in Mexico?

As a caravan of thousands of hopeful asylum-seekers from Central America continued to swell as the annual pilgrimage entered Mexico, so did rumors about them in the United States.

One such rumor appeared on October 21, 2018, just after the group left Guatemala and entered Mexico:

It appears that the migrant caravan, which has been reported to upward of 10,000 strong, might run into some extra trouble on their march to seek American asylum. A massive hurricane (named Willa) is set to cross the path that the migrants will eventually cross.

The story accurately references Weather.com, which ran a story about two major storms affecting Mexico’s Pacific coast:

Hurricane Willa has rapidly intensified into a dangerous Category 4 hurricane and is expected to strengthen further early this week. Damaging winds, flooding rain and a potentially destructive storm surge will threaten Mexico’s Pacific coastline by midweek.

Tropical Storm Vicente also poses a heavy rain threat to Mexico in the week ahead.

Willa is tracking north-northwestward but is expected to slowly recurve toward the north Monday and the north-northeast by Tuesday. It should approach landfall along the southwestern coast of mainland Mexico by late Tuesday, which is expected to occur anywhere from near or north of Mazatlán to near Puerto Vallarta.

What this story and others like it don’t take into account is Mexico itself. The country’s immensity is often overlooked on a map, dominated as it is by the rest of North America above it and all of Central and South America below. (The way countries are assigned size on various maps, particularly the extremely common Mercator projection map, may also have something to do with it.)

Hurricane Willa was projected to make landfall between Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán, according to the article:

By comparison, the caravan that is creating such a stir among certain members of American elected officials remains so far south that it is barely visible on the above map. As of October 23, 2018, the caravan had entered Huixtla in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas (Mexico is a federation of 32 states, including its capital and federal seat, Mexico City; its full name is Estados Unidos Mexicanos, or the United Mexican States) more than 1,100 miles (1,900 km) away from Puerto Vallarta, a fact belied by every headline reporting that the caravan was “marching” or “advancing” on the United States as though their arrival at its border was imminent when really the distance from Huixtla to Puerto Vallarta, let alone Mazatlán, is greater than the distance between Los Angeles, California, and Portland, Oregon:

Not even the hardiest supercell would be able to make that journey intact, and certainly not Willa, which is already weakening — although the hurricane is nothing to sneeze at by either Mexico or the United States.

Tropical Storm Vicente has already left at least eleven people dead on Mexico’s southern coast, making landfall in Oaxaca state. That was closer to the caravan’s location on October 23, but not enough to make a difference, as the two regions remain at least 400 miles (650 km) apart.

The post Will Hurricane Willa Hit a Refugee Caravan in Mexico? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, communities digital news, El Salvador, honduras, MS-13, refugees, refugees welcome, TruthOrFiction, What's True?

Rumors About Caravan of Asylum-Seekers Reach New Heights

As a caravan consisting of thousands of asylum-seekers from Central America drew ever closer to Mexico’s border with the United States to prepare to turn themselves in to border authorities en masse and request asylum, the usual fearmongering suspects did what they do best: whipping up racial hatred with disinformation and propaganda.

“Democrat approved migrant caravan,” read a typical headline from an opinion piece, “MS-13 and human trafficking.”

The anatomy of this particular propaganda is similar to many that have been polluting American (and global) mainstream political discourse. It is inaccurate, deliberately misleading, uses emotional language to bypass rational discussion of the points it raises, and the few citations and quotes lifted from other sites that do not support its headline.

This particular story is no exception to the pattern, pulling together xenophobia, cheap political shots, and misdirection in one fell swoop. It opens with the following:

WASHINGTON: Democrats seeking reelection can’t be happy that an estimated 4,000 migrant caravan of mostly Hondurans are marching toward the US southern border.

If the caravan is “Democrat-approved,” then why would they be unhappy that it is taking place?

Marching just in time to remind voting Americans what’s at stake if Democrats win control of the House and Senate this November. An influx of illegal aliens, including MS-13 gang members and human traffickers, among those honestly seeking life in America.

The article goes on to pin the rise of MS-13 to socialism, although it’s not entirely clear the writer made the leap from one to the other, and ignores the long history of the caravan itself.

The caravana migrante, or migrant’s caravan, is a yearly international pilgrimage that is intended to bring awareness to the plight of people living under intense and untenable violence in Central America, even as its participants seek refuge elsewhere. The volunteer group helping to organize the caravans along the way, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, has been doing so since 2010 — although now the group is recommending that the caravans stop because they have become too fraught and dangerous, even more so than the violence that people are trying to escape.

Initially, the journeys were set to take place every year during and after Easter to symbolize the Viacrucis, or the Way of the Cross, evoking Jesus Christ’s Biblical journey to his own crucifixion:

The caravans are referred to in Spanish as Via Crucis Migrantes, or Migrants’ Way of the Cross. They are fashioned after the Stations of the Cross processions celebrated by Latin American and Latino Catholics to mark and “re-enact” the final days of Jesus from prosecution to his burial in a tomb.

In such processions, someone plays Christ carrying a wooden cross and people from the congregation or community follow him. Similarly, the volunteers from Pueblos Sin Fronteras and other groups accompany migrants in a caravan that travels in buses, on trains and on foot.

The journey ends at the United States border, where individuals and families turn themselves in at ports of entry and are taken into custody so that they can apply for asylum, which can only be sought from within the United States, as opposed to refugee status. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services explains the difference as follows:

Refugee status is a form of protection that may be granted to people who meet the definition of refugee and who are of special humanitarian concern to the United States. Refugees are generally people outside of their country who are unable or unwilling to return home because they fear serious harm. For a legal definition of refugee, see section 101(a)(42) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

You may seek a referral for refugee status only from outside of the United States.

[…]

Asylum status is a form of protection available to people who:

  • Meet the definition of refugee
  • Are already in the United States
  • Are seeking admission at a port of entry

You may apply for asylum in the United States regardless of your country of origin or your current immigration status.

The International Rescue Committee, a non-governmental organization that aids survivors of conflicts around the world to find safe refuge, makes its stance on caravan participants exceptionally clear in its own explainer on the difference between the two categories:

An asylum seeker is someone who is also seeking international protection from dangers in his or her home country, but whose claim for refugee status hasn’t been determined legally. Asylum seekers must apply for protection in the country of destination—meaning they must arrive at or cross a border in order to apply.

Then, they must be able to prove to authorities there that they meet the criteria to be covered by refugee protections. Not every asylum seeker will be recognized as a refugee.

Tens of thousands of children and families from Central America have fled extreme danger—murder, kidnapping, violence against women and forced recruitment by gangs. Those arriving at the U.S. border are being depicted as “illegal immigrants,” but in reality, crossing an international border for asylum is not illegal and an asylum seeker’s case must be heard, according to U.S. and international law.

And where does MS-13 fit into all of this? The vicious international gang, short for Mara Salvatrucha, has been used as a stand-in for many xenophobic and racial fears, particularly directed at Latin American people. Opportunistic pundits and politicians have wasted no time stoking fears of a violent “invasion” or “uprising” by MS-13 cartel members, neglecting in every case to mention one important detail: this particular gang started in the early 1980s on the streets of Los Angeles, California:

As the civil war in El Salvador deepened in the 1980s, more Salvadorans arrived in LA and found their way to Mara Salvatrucha.

This influx of new recruits, ones hardened by the horrors of the civil war back home, helped make the Maras better able to strike back at their rivals.

The gang went international when it was exported with young immigrants in wave after wave of deportations in the 1990s.

A 2008 FBI threat assessment put the size of MS-13 between 6,000 and 10,000 members in the US, making it one of the largest criminal enterprises in the country.

It is now larger outside the country, according to the agency. An anti-gang crackdown in the late 1990s saw hundreds of early members shipped back to Central American countries, where they established offshoots. Estimates put the number of members in Central American countries at at least 60,000.

The gang’s annual revenue is about $31.2m (£23.4m) according to information from a large-scale Salvadorean police operation obtained by the El Faro newspaper – mainly from from drugs and extortion.

That has proved to be disastrous for Central American countries in particular, with entire regions now run by MS-13 members in some countries by brute force and terror:

MS 13 in the Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—has not yet coalesced around a coherent political ideology; however, since 2014 the gang has been exercising real political power, utilizing a three-pronged strategy that leverages the gang’s unity as a voting bloc. Rather than presenting a specific political platform beyond seeking direct benefits for the gang, MS 13 uses the sheer numbers of its members (more than 35,000 in El Salvador—a country geographically the size of Massachusetts—and an equal or greater number in Honduras, according to police intelligence estimates) and its vast territorial control as both carrots and sticks to subvert the electoral process in new and dangerous ways:

MS 13 charges individual candidates from all parties several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars to be able set up a party organization and campaign in a neighborhood the gang controls.

The gang also bans certain politicians or political parties they view as enemies from campaigning in those areas. Most notably in 2017, MS 13 banned supporters of Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández from campaigning for his party’s nomination in some sectors of San Pedro Sula—the country’s main transport hub. Although Hernández won the primary, the gang in areas they control on the outskirts of the city also forced campaign workers to quit, refused to allow propaganda to be displayed, and threatened to kill anyone found voting for the President. MS 13 has threatened to employ similar tactics against the governing FMLN in El Salvador in upcoming elections.

MS 13 has yet to participate financially in national campaigns but has directly financed mayors and local legislatures. This has allowed the gang to move some of their own (or those willing to do their bidding) into municipal strongholds, and in some documented cases the mayors have hired gang members as municipal employees.

This means, of course, that statistically speaking, the men, women, and children in this caravan and every other that have passed through over the years are running from ultraviolence that is either directly or indirectly related to MS-13, including murders, rapes, and human trafficking.

At the same time, members of international cartels have the financial means to come to the United States in comfort, which is to say not visibly, on foot, and through some of the most dangerous and hostile countries in the world.

All of these facts have been part of the conversation for years, and they are facts that American politicians and pundits surely know; they have, it seems, simply chosen to ignore them in favor of made-up claims from sites that contain no actual journalism and decided to ignore the most simple and obvious explanation, which is that people are leaving their homes for an uncertain future for the only reason that most people would — because they have no other choice.

The post Rumors About Caravan of Asylum-Seekers Reach New Heights appeared first on What's True?.

analysis, communities digital news, El Salvador, honduras, MS-13, refugees, refugees welcome, TruthOrFiction

Rumors About Caravan of Asylum-Seekers Reach New Heights

As a caravan consisting of thousands of asylum-seekers from Central America drew ever closer to Mexico’s border with the United States to prepare to turn themselves in to border authorities en masse and request asylum, the usual fearmongering suspects did what they do best: whipping up racial hatred with disinformation and propaganda.

“Democrat approved migrant caravan,” read a typical headline from an opinion piece, “MS-13 and human trafficking.”

The anatomy of this particular propaganda is similar to many that have been polluting American (and global) mainstream political discourse. It is inaccurate, deliberately misleading, uses emotional language to bypass rational discussion of the points it raises, and the few citations and quotes lifted from other sites that do not support its headline.

This particular story is no exception to the pattern, pulling together xenophobia, cheap political shots, and misdirection in one fell swoop. It opens with the following:

WASHINGTON: Democrats seeking reelection can’t be happy that an estimated 4,000 migrant caravan of mostly Hondurans are marching toward the US southern border.

If the caravan is “Democrat-approved,” then why would they be unhappy that it is taking place?

Marching just in time to remind voting Americans what’s at stake if Democrats win control of the House and Senate this November. An influx of illegal aliens, including MS-13 gang members and human traffickers, among those honestly seeking life in America.

The article goes on to pin the rise of MS-13 to socialism, although it’s not entirely clear the writer made the leap from one to the other, and ignores the long history of the caravan itself.

The caravana migrante, or migrant’s caravan, is a yearly international pilgrimage that is intended to bring awareness to the plight of people living under intense and untenable violence in Central America, even as its participants seek refuge elsewhere. The volunteer group helping to organize the caravans along the way, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, has been doing so since 2010 — although now the group is recommending that the caravans stop because they have become too fraught and dangerous, even more so than the violence that people are trying to escape.

Initially, the journeys were set to take place every year during and after Easter to symbolize the Viacrucis, or the Way of the Cross, evoking Jesus Christ’s Biblical journey to his own crucifixion:

The caravans are referred to in Spanish as Via Crucis Migrantes, or Migrants’ Way of the Cross. They are fashioned after the Stations of the Cross processions celebrated by Latin American and Latino Catholics to mark and “re-enact” the final days of Jesus from prosecution to his burial in a tomb.

In such processions, someone plays Christ carrying a wooden cross and people from the congregation or community follow him. Similarly, the volunteers from Pueblos Sin Fronteras and other groups accompany migrants in a caravan that travels in buses, on trains and on foot.

The journey ends at the United States border, where individuals and families turn themselves in at ports of entry and are taken into custody so that they can apply for asylum, which can only be sought from within the United States, as opposed to refugee status. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services explains the difference as follows:

Refugee status is a form of protection that may be granted to people who meet the definition of refugee and who are of special humanitarian concern to the United States. Refugees are generally people outside of their country who are unable or unwilling to return home because they fear serious harm. For a legal definition of refugee, see section 101(a)(42) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

You may seek a referral for refugee status only from outside of the United States.

[…]

Asylum status is a form of protection available to people who:

  • Meet the definition of refugee
  • Are already in the United States
  • Are seeking admission at a port of entry

You may apply for asylum in the United States regardless of your country of origin or your current immigration status.

The International Rescue Committee, a non-governmental organization that aids survivors of conflicts around the world to find safe refuge, makes its stance on caravan participants exceptionally clear in its own explainer on the difference between the two categories:

An asylum seeker is someone who is also seeking international protection from dangers in his or her home country, but whose claim for refugee status hasn’t been determined legally. Asylum seekers must apply for protection in the country of destination—meaning they must arrive at or cross a border in order to apply.

Then, they must be able to prove to authorities there that they meet the criteria to be covered by refugee protections. Not every asylum seeker will be recognized as a refugee.

Tens of thousands of children and families from Central America have fled extreme danger—murder, kidnapping, violence against women and forced recruitment by gangs. Those arriving at the U.S. border are being depicted as “illegal immigrants,” but in reality, crossing an international border for asylum is not illegal and an asylum seeker’s case must be heard, according to U.S. and international law.

And where does MS-13 fit into all of this? The vicious international gang, short for Mara Salvatrucha, has been used as a stand-in for many xenophobic and racial fears, particularly directed at Latin American people. Opportunistic pundits and politicians have wasted no time stoking fears of a violent “invasion” or “uprising” by MS-13 cartel members, neglecting in every case to mention one important detail: this particular gang started in the early 1980s on the streets of Los Angeles, California:

As the civil war in El Salvador deepened in the 1980s, more Salvadorans arrived in LA and found their way to Mara Salvatrucha.

This influx of new recruits, ones hardened by the horrors of the civil war back home, helped make the Maras better able to strike back at their rivals.

The gang went international when it was exported with young immigrants in wave after wave of deportations in the 1990s.

A 2008 FBI threat assessment put the size of MS-13 between 6,000 and 10,000 members in the US, making it one of the largest criminal enterprises in the country.

It is now larger outside the country, according to the agency. An anti-gang crackdown in the late 1990s saw hundreds of early members shipped back to Central American countries, where they established offshoots. Estimates put the number of members in Central American countries at at least 60,000.

The gang’s annual revenue is about $31.2m (£23.4m) according to information from a large-scale Salvadorean police operation obtained by the El Faro newspaper – mainly from from drugs and extortion.

That has proved to be disastrous for Central American countries in particular, with entire regions now run by MS-13 members in some countries by brute force and terror:

MS 13 in the Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—has not yet coalesced around a coherent political ideology; however, since 2014 the gang has been exercising real political power, utilizing a three-pronged strategy that leverages the gang’s unity as a voting bloc. Rather than presenting a specific political platform beyond seeking direct benefits for the gang, MS 13 uses the sheer numbers of its members (more than 35,000 in El Salvador—a country geographically the size of Massachusetts—and an equal or greater number in Honduras, according to police intelligence estimates) and its vast territorial control as both carrots and sticks to subvert the electoral process in new and dangerous ways:

MS 13 charges individual candidates from all parties several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars to be able set up a party organization and campaign in a neighborhood the gang controls.

The gang also bans certain politicians or political parties they view as enemies from campaigning in those areas. Most notably in 2017, MS 13 banned supporters of Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández from campaigning for his party’s nomination in some sectors of San Pedro Sula—the country’s main transport hub. Although Hernández won the primary, the gang in areas they control on the outskirts of the city also forced campaign workers to quit, refused to allow propaganda to be displayed, and threatened to kill anyone found voting for the President. MS 13 has threatened to employ similar tactics against the governing FMLN in El Salvador in upcoming elections.

MS 13 has yet to participate financially in national campaigns but has directly financed mayors and local legislatures. This has allowed the gang to move some of their own (or those willing to do their bidding) into municipal strongholds, and in some documented cases the mayors have hired gang members as municipal employees.

This means, of course, that statistically speaking, the men, women, and children in this caravan and every other that have passed through over the years are running from ultraviolence that is either directly or indirectly related to MS-13, including murders, rapes, and human trafficking.

At the same time, members of international cartels have the financial means to come to the United States in comfort, which is to say not visibly, on foot, and through some of the most dangerous and hostile countries in the world.

All of these facts have been part of the conversation for years, and they are facts that American politicians and pundits surely know; they have, it seems, simply chosen to ignore them in favor of made-up claims from sites that contain no actual journalism and decided to ignore the most simple and obvious explanation, which is that people are leaving their homes for an uncertain future for the only reason that most people would — because they have no other choice.

The post Rumors About Caravan of Asylum-Seekers Reach New Heights appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

Fact Checks, Politics, russia, shareblue, the american independent, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, united states, vladimir putin, What's True?

Did Vladimir Putin Say the United States’ Influence in the World Is ‘Waning’?

Russian president Vladimir Putin criticized the United States in his annual address to the nation in October 2018, saying that American influence in the world has irrevocably waned.

Left-leaning political news site AmericanIndependent.com reported on his comments in a story that was later picked up by Shareblue.com:

Speaking about the position of the U.S. on the global stage, Putin celebrated the waning influence of what he described as America’s “monopoly” on power, saying it would give Russia the ability to exert more influence in the world.

“Empires often think they can make some little mistakes. Because they’re so powerful,” Putin said, according to the Financial Times. ”But when the number of these mistakes keeps growing, it reaches a level they cannot sustain.”

He admonished the U.S. for having a “sense of impunity,” saying, “This is the result of the monopoly from a unipolar world.”

“Luckily this monopoly is disappearing,” he added. “It’s almost done.”

And Russia’s time has come, he said, claiming that America’s downfall meant that Russia had an opportunity to establish itself as a major player on the global stage.

Whether or not it is true that the United States is losing its foothold as a global power — or whether Putin actually believes it — is a matter of political debate, but what is not is whether Russia’s president actually said this: he did.

“Thank God, this situation of a unipolar world, of a monopoly, is coming to an end,” Putin said. “It’s practically already over.”

Putin added that he wasn’t trying to offend anyone with his remarks and that he believed the end of American dominance would make the world more balanced and allow for more international dialogue.

Russia, Putin said, was ready for a better relationship with the U.S. at any time.

The Russian president also defended President Donald Trump, saying he didn’t agree with characterizations that Trump only listened to himself.

The October 18, 2018 statement came the same week that the United States Department of Justice formally announced charges against Russian national Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynov for interfering in the U.S.’s 2016 presidential and general elections to attempt to bring about specific outcomes and spread chaos within the public discourse:

“This case serves as a stark reminder to all Americans: Our foreign adversaries continue their efforts to interfere in our democracy by creating social and political division, spreading distrust in our political system, and advocating for the support or defeat of particular political candidates,” said Director Wray. “We take all threats to our democracy very seriously, and we’re committed to working with our partners to identify and stop these unlawful influence operations. Together, we must remain diligent and determined to protect our democratic institutions and maintain trust in our electoral process.”

According to the criminal complaint, the 44-year-old Khusyaynova served as the chief accountant of “Project Lakhta,” a Russian umbrella effort funded by Putin-linked Russian oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin (also known as “Putin’s Chef“) along with two of his companies, Concord Management and Consulting LLC, and Concord Catering:

The alleged conspiracy, in which Khusyaynova is alleged to have played a central financial management role, sought to conduct what it called internally “information warfare against the United States.” This effort was not only designed to spread distrust towards candidates for U.S. political office and the U.S. political system in general, but also to defraud the United States by impeding the lawful functions of government agencies in administering relevant federal requirements.

The conspirators allegedly took extraordinary steps to make it appear that they were ordinary American political activists. This included the use of virtual private networks and other means to disguise their activities and to obfuscate their Russian origin. They used social media platforms to create thousands of social media and email accounts that appeared to be operated by U.S. persons, and used them to create and amplify divisive social and political content targeting U.S. audiences. These accounts also were used to advocate for the election or electoral defeat of particular candidates in the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections. Some social media accounts posted tens of thousands of messages, and had tens of thousands of followers.

The post Did Vladimir Putin Say the United States’ Influence in the World Is ‘Waning’? appeared first on What's True?.

Fact Checks, Politics, russia, shareblue, the american independent, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, united states, vladimir putin

Did Vladimir Putin Say the United States’ Influence in the World Is ‘Waning’?

Russian president Vladimir Putin criticized the United States in his annual address to the nation in October 2018, saying that American influence in the world has irrevocably waned.

Left-leaning political news site AmericanIndependent.com reported on his comments in a story that was later picked up by Shareblue.com:

Speaking about the position of the U.S. on the global stage, Putin celebrated the waning influence of what he described as America’s “monopoly” on power, saying it would give Russia the ability to exert more influence in the world.

“Empires often think they can make some little mistakes. Because they’re so powerful,” Putin said, according to the Financial Times. ”But when the number of these mistakes keeps growing, it reaches a level they cannot sustain.”

He admonished the U.S. for having a “sense of impunity,” saying, “This is the result of the monopoly from a unipolar world.”

“Luckily this monopoly is disappearing,” he added. “It’s almost done.”

And Russia’s time has come, he said, claiming that America’s downfall meant that Russia had an opportunity to establish itself as a major player on the global stage.

Whether or not it is true that the United States is losing its foothold as a global power — or whether Putin actually believes it — is a matter of political debate, but what is not is whether Russia’s president actually said this: he did.

“Thank God, this situation of a unipolar world, of a monopoly, is coming to an end,” Putin said. “It’s practically already over.”

Putin added that he wasn’t trying to offend anyone with his remarks and that he believed the end of American dominance would make the world more balanced and allow for more international dialogue.

Russia, Putin said, was ready for a better relationship with the U.S. at any time.

The Russian president also defended President Donald Trump, saying he didn’t agree with characterizations that Trump only listened to himself.

The October 18, 2018 statement came the same week that the United States Department of Justice formally announced charges against Russian national Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynov for interfering in the U.S.’s 2016 presidential and general elections to attempt to bring about specific outcomes and spread chaos within the public discourse:

“This case serves as a stark reminder to all Americans: Our foreign adversaries continue their efforts to interfere in our democracy by creating social and political division, spreading distrust in our political system, and advocating for the support or defeat of particular political candidates,” said Director Wray. “We take all threats to our democracy very seriously, and we’re committed to working with our partners to identify and stop these unlawful influence operations. Together, we must remain diligent and determined to protect our democratic institutions and maintain trust in our electoral process.”

According to the criminal complaint, the 44-year-old Khusyaynova served as the chief accountant of “Project Lakhta,” a Russian umbrella effort funded by Putin-linked Russian oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin (also known as “Putin’s Chef“) along with two of his companies, Concord Management and Consulting LLC, and Concord Catering:

The alleged conspiracy, in which Khusyaynova is alleged to have played a central financial management role, sought to conduct what it called internally “information warfare against the United States.” This effort was not only designed to spread distrust towards candidates for U.S. political office and the U.S. political system in general, but also to defraud the United States by impeding the lawful functions of government agencies in administering relevant federal requirements.

The conspirators allegedly took extraordinary steps to make it appear that they were ordinary American political activists. This included the use of virtual private networks and other means to disguise their activities and to obfuscate their Russian origin. They used social media platforms to create thousands of social media and email accounts that appeared to be operated by U.S. persons, and used them to create and amplify divisive social and political content targeting U.S. audiences. These accounts also were used to advocate for the election or electoral defeat of particular candidates in the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections. Some social media accounts posted tens of thousands of messages, and had tens of thousands of followers.

The post Did Vladimir Putin Say the United States’ Influence in the World Is ‘Waning’? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

2018 midterms, cost of living, democrats, disinformation, elections, Fact Checks, Politics, social security, TruthOrFiction, What's True?

The ‘All Democrats Voted Against a Social Security Raise’ Meme

Weeks before the 2018 United States’ midterm elections, propaganda from across the political spectrum flew thick and fast. Some of it contained grains of truth, while other stories were completely made up, such as a particularly lazy cut-and-paste meme that appeared in mid-October:

Meme that claims, falsely: "Were any of you aware that ALL the Democrats voted AGAINST the 2.8% Social Security cost of living increase?"
The meme asks rhetorically, without citation or supporting evidence:

Were any of you aware that ALL the Democrats voted AGAINST the 2.8% Social Security cost of living increase?

As can be seen by the share count, maybe people were not aware of it, were shocked to hear it, and were anxious to share it with their friends so that they, too, would know better.

The only problem is that it is completely untrue. Congressional Democrats didn’t vote either for or against a cost-of-living increase, because no one did. Cost of living allowance adjustments to Social Security have been pegged to annual increases in consumer prices and spending since 1975, as its own site says quite clearly:

In 1972 legislation the law was changed to provide, beginning in 1975, for automatic annual cost-of-living allowances (i.e., COLAs) based on the annual increase in consumer prices. No longer do beneficiaries have to await a special act of Congress to receive a benefit increase and no longer does inflation drain value from Social Security benefits.

A fact-sheet and a press release (both also available on the official Social Security page) add more context to the raises (emphasis ours):

The purpose of the COLA is to ensure that the purchasing power of Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits is not eroded by inflation. It is based on the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) from the third quarter of the last year a COLA was determined to the third quarter of the current year. If there is no increase, there can be no COLA.

The CPI-W is determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Department of Labor. By law, it is the official measure used by the Social Security Administration to calculate COLAs.

Congress enacted the COLA provision as part of the 1972 Social Security Amendments, and automatic annual COLAs began in 1975. Before that, benefits were increased only when Congress enacted special legislation.

Beginning in 1975, Social Security started automatic annual cost-of-living allowances. The change was enacted by legislation that ties COLAs to the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI-W).

Congressional Democrats didn’t vote for or against the Social Security cost of living increase, because no one voted on it — by design. In other words, the factoid spread through this meme on social media wasn’t just a little wrong or slightly misinformed; it was completely made up.

The post The ‘All Democrats Voted Against a Social Security Raise’ Meme appeared first on What's True?.

2018 midterms, cost of living, democrats, disinformation, elections, Fact Checks, Politics, social security, TruthOrFiction

The ‘All Democrats Voted Against a Social Security Raise’ Meme

Weeks before the 2018 United States’ midterm elections, propaganda from across the political spectrum flew thick and fast. Some of it contained grains of truth, while other stories were completely made up, such as a particularly lazy cut-and-paste meme that appeared in mid-October:

Meme that claims, falsely: "Were any of you aware that ALL the Democrats voted AGAINST the 2.8% Social Security cost of living increase?"
The meme asks rhetorically, without citation or supporting evidence:

Were any of you aware that ALL the Democrats voted AGAINST the 2.8% Social Security cost of living increase?

As can be seen by the share count, maybe people were not aware of it, were shocked to hear it, and were anxious to share it with their friends so that they, too, would know better.

The only problem is that it is completely untrue. Congressional Democrats didn’t vote either for or against a cost-of-living increase, because no one did. Cost of living allowance adjustments to Social Security have been pegged to annual increases in consumer prices and spending since 1975, as its own site says quite clearly:

In 1972 legislation the law was changed to provide, beginning in 1975, for automatic annual cost-of-living allowances (i.e., COLAs) based on the annual increase in consumer prices. No longer do beneficiaries have to await a special act of Congress to receive a benefit increase and no longer does inflation drain value from Social Security benefits.

A fact-sheet and a press release (both also available on the official Social Security page) add more context to the raises (emphasis ours):

The purpose of the COLA is to ensure that the purchasing power of Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits is not eroded by inflation. It is based on the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) from the third quarter of the last year a COLA was determined to the third quarter of the current year. If there is no increase, there can be no COLA.

The CPI-W is determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Department of Labor. By law, it is the official measure used by the Social Security Administration to calculate COLAs.

Congress enacted the COLA provision as part of the 1972 Social Security Amendments, and automatic annual COLAs began in 1975. Before that, benefits were increased only when Congress enacted special legislation.

Beginning in 1975, Social Security started automatic annual cost-of-living allowances. The change was enacted by legislation that ties COLAs to the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI-W).

Congressional Democrats didn’t vote for or against the Social Security cost of living increase, because no one voted on it — by design. In other words, the factoid spread through this meme on social media wasn’t just a little wrong or slightly misinformed; it was completely made up.

The post The ‘All Democrats Voted Against a Social Security Raise’ Meme appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

donald trump, Fact Checks, jamal khashoggi, montana, Politics, saudi arabia, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, turkey, What's True?

Did United States President Donald Trump Praise an Elected Official Who Body Slammed Reporter?

In late October 2018, as the hideous story of journalist and United States resident Jamal Khashoggi‘s disappearance and suspected brutal murder at the behest of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince continued to unfold, the Trump administration and its allies appeared to brush off any sense of urgency about ongoing investigations. “My assessment from these meetings is that there is serious commitment to determine all the facts and ensure accountability, including accountability for Saudi Arabia’s senior leaders or senior officials,” United States Secretary of State Michael Pompeo told reporters.

On October 16th, Pompeo traveled to Turkey — where Khashoggi purportedly had been murdered and then dismembered in the Saudi consulate two weeks earlier — to meet with Saudi Arabian leaders:

“I’ve heard no tape, I’ve seen no transcript,” Pompeo told reporters in the only question he would take on the topic. After initially declining to take questions on the matter in favor of questions regarding his trip, Pompeo denied ABC News’ report, calling it “factually false.”

On his way back from Istanbul on Wednesday, Pompeo was asked if he had heard the audio.

“I don’t have anything to say about that,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post (to whom Khashoggi was a regular contributor) reported on a new whisper campaign smearing the missing journalist:

In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights.

The whisper campaign spilled into the open during one of Trump’s perennial rallies, as his audience applauded and cheered:

This particular rally was in Montana on the night of October 18th, 2018 — just sixteen days after Khashoggi’s disappearance — when Trump praised a congressman who physically attacked a Guardian reporter during an interview in May 2017 because he didn’t like the questions who was being asked, and who was subsequently elected on the strength of absentee ballots:

“Greg is smart,” Mr Trump said of Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte, adding “By the way, never wrestle him”.

“Any guy that can do a body slam… he’s my guy,” he said to cheers and laughter at a rally in Montana.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Guardian newspaper have called on Mr Trump to apologise.

This latest praise from Mr Trump is unlikely to improve his relationship with the media, which he has previously labelled the “enemy of the people”.

He said he had feared that the 2017 assault could have hindered Mr Gianforte’s chances of winning the special congressional election that followed. Mr Trump told supporters: “I said wait a minute, I know Montana pretty well, I think it might help him – and it did”.

After praising Mr Gianforte, Mr Trump also mimicked a person being thrown forcefully to the ground.

His praise of violence against reporters doing their job received swift domestic and international condemnation, but journalists pointed out that his words, coming so soon after Khashoggi’s disappearance and probable murder, are likely to  have effects that will continue to reverberate globally for some time.

Meanwhile, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia is getting new scrutiny after a rumor appeared that the United States knew about the Saudi plan to kidnap Khashoggi, but did nothing about it.

The post Did United States President Donald Trump Praise an Elected Official Who Body Slammed Reporter? appeared first on What's True?.

donald trump, Fact Checks, jamal khashoggi, montana, Politics, saudi arabia, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, turkey

Did United States President Donald Trump Praise an Elected Official Who Body Slammed Reporter?

In late October 2018, as the hideous story of journalist and United States resident Jamal Khashoggi‘s disappearance and suspected brutal murder at the behest of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince continued to unfold, the Trump administration and its allies appeared to brush off any sense of urgency about ongoing investigations. “My assessment from these meetings is that there is serious commitment to determine all the facts and ensure accountability, including accountability for Saudi Arabia’s senior leaders or senior officials,” United States Secretary of State Michael Pompeo told reporters.

On October 16th, Pompeo traveled to Turkey — where Khashoggi purportedly had been murdered and then dismembered in the Saudi consulate two weeks earlier — to meet with Saudi Arabian leaders:

“I’ve heard no tape, I’ve seen no transcript,” Pompeo told reporters in the only question he would take on the topic. After initially declining to take questions on the matter in favor of questions regarding his trip, Pompeo denied ABC News’ report, calling it “factually false.”

On his way back from Istanbul on Wednesday, Pompeo was asked if he had heard the audio.

“I don’t have anything to say about that,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post (to whom Khashoggi was a regular contributor) reported on a new whisper campaign smearing the missing journalist:

In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights.

The whisper campaign spilled into the open during one of Trump’s perennial rallies, as his audience applauded and cheered:

This particular rally was in Montana on the night of October 18th, 2018 — just sixteen days after Khashoggi’s disappearance — when Trump praised a congressman who physically attacked a Guardian reporter during an interview in May 2017 because he didn’t like the questions who was being asked, and who was subsequently elected on the strength of absentee ballots:

“Greg is smart,” Mr Trump said of Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte, adding “By the way, never wrestle him”.

“Any guy that can do a body slam… he’s my guy,” he said to cheers and laughter at a rally in Montana.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Guardian newspaper have called on Mr Trump to apologise.

This latest praise from Mr Trump is unlikely to improve his relationship with the media, which he has previously labelled the “enemy of the people”.

He said he had feared that the 2017 assault could have hindered Mr Gianforte’s chances of winning the special congressional election that followed. Mr Trump told supporters: “I said wait a minute, I know Montana pretty well, I think it might help him – and it did”.

After praising Mr Gianforte, Mr Trump also mimicked a person being thrown forcefully to the ground.

His praise of violence against reporters doing their job received swift domestic and international condemnation, but journalists pointed out that his words, coming so soon after Khashoggi’s disappearance and probable murder, are likely to  have effects that will continue to reverberate globally for some time.

Meanwhile, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia is getting new scrutiny after a rumor appeared that the United States knew about the Saudi plan to kidnap Khashoggi, but did nothing about it.

The post Did United States President Donald Trump Praise an Elected Official Who Body Slammed Reporter? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

border, caravana migrante, disinformation, donald trump, guatemala, honduras, matt gaetz, reporting, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, western journal, What's True?

The Truth About the Migrant Caravan Approaching the United States

On October 18th, 2018, United States President Donald Trump fired off a volley of tweets about a large caravan of people wending their way from Honduras to the southern United States border:

These statements were duly picked up and breathlessly repeated by news channels and pundits, spreading the story with crucial context omitted from the story, such as who the people traveling to the United States are and what they actually want.

The truth is that these caravans have taken place on a yearly basis for many years (sometimes called the Caravana del Migrante or the Viacrucis del Migrante) and they are always well-publicized in Spanish-language and some English-language media, because its participants want the world to see their journey and understand why they choose to leave their homes and undertake physically arduous and perilous journeys.

The caravans generally start around Easter in order to represent Jesus Christ’s Biblical journey to be crucified (hence the name “via crucis,” which means “the way of the cross” or, more figuratively, “the path of suffering.”) Some caravans have a theme, such as the high rate of brutal murders of women in countries all over the world (2016) or people who are “disappeared” by corrupt states (2012), but in every case they are a last-ditch effort for individuals and families to escape endemic violence in their home countries while bringing attention to their plight:

The caravan was organized in part by a former Honduran lawmaker named Bartolo Fuentes. Fuentes had been posting Facebook Live videos along the way, talking about the bloodshed and hunger the people are fleeing.

“They don’t go because they want to, they go because they have to,” Fuentes said. “Sirs of the government and sirs of the U.S., be reasonable. Use your head. Your repressive actions are not going to stop people. The reasons they’re leaving are more powerful than all the risks.”

He addressed President Trump directly, saying: “Sir Trump, you are supporting a corrupt government.”

When participants reach the border of the United States, they plan not to “storm” the border wall or cause violence, but instead they hope to turn themselves in to border authorities en masse and request asylum, just as they have in preceding years — because non-citizens have to already be within the borders of the United States or at a port of entry in order to do so, per U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services:

Refugees
Refugee status is a form of protection that may be granted to people who meet the definition of refugee and who are of special humanitarian concern to the United States. Refugees are generally people outside of their country who are unable or unwilling to return home because they fear serious harm. For a legal definition of refugee, see section 101(a)(42) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

You may seek a referral for refugee status only from outside of the United States. For more information about refugees, see the Refugees section.

Asylum
Asylum status is a form of protection available to people who:

-Meet the definition of refugee
-Are already in the United States
-Are seeking admission at a port of entry

It is worth noting here that Trump’s “family separation” policy was, and is, used against families turning themselves in to authorities to request asylum — which means that families are still being held without charge for participating in an act that is, as USCIS clearly notes, entirely legal by both international and American standards.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), perhaps best known for inviting a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union address, added another paranoid spin to the already off-kilter national commentary when he accused Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist and favorite right-wing bugaboo George Soros of funding the caravans:

That his accusation came with no supporting evidence at all didn’t deter the usual disinformation purveyors like WesternJournal.com from adding to the baseless speculation, even as the site admitted it had no idea what Gaetz was actually talking about:

Information was not immediately available regarding where the video came from or what, precisely, it showed. More than 15,000 Twitter users responded to the post online, and the comments about the video were overwhelmingly against illegal immigration.

While many details about the clip are still missing, Gaetz’s allegation would have serious implications if it is accurate. A scheme that paid poor Central American citizens to leave their country and march toward the U.S. border would help explain the speed at which the latest caravan has grown in size.

The video actually shows a scene outside a shelter in Chiquimula, Guatemala, not Honduras, where a group of people with babies and small children changed their money from Honduran to Guatemalan currency so that they could take buses to keep up with the rest of the caravan:

No George Soros was in sight. However, Pueblo Sin Fronteras (a volunteer group that helps organize the journeys) is now warning Hondurans that there should be no more caravans for now, because the risks have become too great.

The post The Truth About the Migrant Caravan Approaching the United States appeared first on What's True?.

border, caravana migrante, disinformation, donald trump, guatemala, honduras, matt gaetz, reporting, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, western journal

The Truth About the Migrant Caravan Approaching the United States

On October 18th, 2018, United States President Donald Trump fired off a volley of tweets about a large caravan of people wending their way from Honduras to the southern United States border:

These statements were duly picked up and breathlessly repeated by news channels and pundits, spreading the story with crucial context omitted from the story, such as who the people traveling to the United States are and what they actually want.

The truth is that these caravans have taken place on a yearly basis for many years (sometimes called the Caravana del Migrante or the Viacrucis del Migrante) and they are always well-publicized in Spanish-language and some English-language media, because its participants want the world to see their journey and understand why they choose to leave their homes and undertake physically arduous and perilous journeys.

The caravans generally start around Easter in order to represent Jesus Christ’s Biblical journey to be crucified (hence the name “via crucis,” which means “the way of the cross” or, more figuratively, “the path of suffering.”) Some caravans have a theme, such as the high rate of brutal murders of women in countries all over the world (2016) or people who are “disappeared” by corrupt states (2012), but in every case they are a last-ditch effort for individuals and families to escape endemic violence in their home countries while bringing attention to their plight:

The caravan was organized in part by a former Honduran lawmaker named Bartolo Fuentes. Fuentes had been posting Facebook Live videos along the way, talking about the bloodshed and hunger the people are fleeing.

“They don’t go because they want to, they go because they have to,” Fuentes said. “Sirs of the government and sirs of the U.S., be reasonable. Use your head. Your repressive actions are not going to stop people. The reasons they’re leaving are more powerful than all the risks.”

He addressed President Trump directly, saying: “Sir Trump, you are supporting a corrupt government.”

When participants reach the border of the United States, they plan not to “storm” the border wall or cause violence, but instead they hope to turn themselves in to border authorities en masse and request asylum, just as they have in preceding years — because non-citizens have to already be within the borders of the United States or at a port of entry in order to do so, per U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services:

Refugees
Refugee status is a form of protection that may be granted to people who meet the definition of refugee and who are of special humanitarian concern to the United States. Refugees are generally people outside of their country who are unable or unwilling to return home because they fear serious harm. For a legal definition of refugee, see section 101(a)(42) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

You may seek a referral for refugee status only from outside of the United States. For more information about refugees, see the Refugees section.

Asylum
Asylum status is a form of protection available to people who:

-Meet the definition of refugee
-Are already in the United States
-Are seeking admission at a port of entry

It is worth noting here that Trump’s “family separation” policy was, and is, used against families turning themselves in to authorities to request asylum — which means that families are still being held without charge for participating in an act that is, as USCIS clearly notes, entirely legal by both international and American standards.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), perhaps best known for inviting a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union address, added another paranoid spin to the already off-kilter national commentary when he accused Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist and favorite right-wing bugaboo George Soros of funding the caravans:

That his accusation came with no supporting evidence at all didn’t deter the usual disinformation purveyors like WesternJournal.com from adding to the baseless speculation, even as the site admitted it had no idea what Gaetz was actually talking about:

Information was not immediately available regarding where the video came from or what, precisely, it showed. More than 15,000 Twitter users responded to the post online, and the comments about the video were overwhelmingly against illegal immigration.

While many details about the clip are still missing, Gaetz’s allegation would have serious implications if it is accurate. A scheme that paid poor Central American citizens to leave their country and march toward the U.S. border would help explain the speed at which the latest caravan has grown in size.

The video actually shows a scene outside a shelter in Chiquimula, Guatemala, not Honduras, where a group of people with babies and small children changed their money from Honduran to Guatemalan currency so that they could take buses to keep up with the rest of the caravan:

No George Soros was in sight. However, Pueblo Sin Fronteras (a volunteer group that helps organize the journeys) is now warning Hondurans that there should be no more caravans for now, because the risks have become too great.

The post The Truth About the Migrant Caravan Approaching the United States appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

disinformation, Fact Checks, jamal khashoggi, saudi arabia, thomas wictor, TruthOrFiction, turkey, washington post, What's True?

Is the Media Covering Up ‘the Real Story’ About Jamal Khashoggi?

A hideous story unspooled before the international media in October 2018, when Saudi Arabian journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi — who had been living in Washington, D.C. after fleeing his home country a year before due to persistent death threats in response to his criticism of its government — abruptly vanished.

On Monday, sources told CNN that the report will acknowledge that Khashoggi died in a botched interrogation, one that was intended to lead to his abduction from Turkey. A Turkish official told CNN on Tuesday that Khashoggi’s body was cut into pieces after he was killed two weeks ago at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The claim, which was first made to the New York Times earlier in the investigation into Khashoggi’s fate, comes after Turkish officials searched the consulate for nine hours on Monday night.

Khashoggi had entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018 to finish up what should have been a relatively quick errand: he was getting routine paperwork finalized so that he could marry his Turkish fiancée. The errand was so quick, in fact, that his fiancée stayed outside to wait for him. He never came out. He has been missing ever since.

Since that day, reports have been accumulating slowly but surely, all of which so far seem to indicate a horrific state-sponsored murder.

Reports from Turkish sources that the Saudis allegedly murdered and dismembered the dissident writer, a Washington Post contributor, have fanned a growing backlash against Riyadh in Western capitals. But the kingdom has circled the wagons and angrily hit back at the accusations — and it seems to have found a willing ally in President Trump.

On Monday morning, Trump held a 20-minute phone call with the Saudi king and then parroted Riyadh’s denials to reporters. “I don’t want to get into his mind, but it sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers,” Trump said. “Who knows? We’re going to try getting to the bottom of it very soon, but his was a flat denial.”

Initial calls for an investigation were met with more denials, then attempts to muddy the narrative from Saudi Arabian officials and their assorted supporters. Those denials were then boosted by an eager bevy of conspiracy theorists and true believers. One of the latter, a conspiracy theorist named Thomas Wictor (who is perhaps best known for being banned by Twitter for openly speculating, without any proof whatsoever, that actress Alyssa Milano was plotting to assassinate controversial Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh) produced a strange, evidence-free monologue from a filthy room — complete with a colander on his head, presumably as a trolling attempt — supporting the line that Khashoggi had left the consulate twenty minutes later after he entered it in a video that was immediately picked up by Twitter accounts supporting Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman:

Wictor, who has no known expertise in geopolitics, claimed that he just “knew it was bullshit” from the media, and claims that a global conspiracy forced Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera to change its reporting to indicate Saudi Arabia was behind his murder, and “the Turks are lying their asses off.” Despite the utter lack of any supporting evidence (not to mention the strainer) the video was picked up and disseminated in Saudi social media circles with an Arabic translation.

The biggest solid claim Wictor makes in his video is that Khashoggi left after twenty minutes. This opinion (originally made by the Saudi government) has been already disputed by Khashoggi’s fiancée Hatice Cengiz, who unlike Wictor, was there, but this seems to have made no difference at all to his narrative. As Cengiz wrote in the New York Times on October 13:

He was cheerful the morning we were going to the Saudi consulate to get a document certifying his divorce. I decided not to go to my university that day, and we traveled there together. He had no foreboding of what was to come. The consular official, who had informed him that the paperwork had come through, had told him to be at the Saudi consulate at 1 p.m.

On our way there, we made plans for the rest of the day. We were going to browse appliances for our new home and meet with our friends and family members over dinner. When we arrived at the consulate, he went right in. He told me to alert the Turkish authorities if I did not hear from him soon. Had I known it would be the last time I would see Jamal, I would have rather entered the Saudi consulate myself. The rest is history: He never walked out of that building. And with him, I also got lost there.

The Trump administration also appeared to have its doubts about Turkey’s accounting of what exactly happened to Khashoggi:

In separate remarks Wednesday, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued their effort to create time for leaders in Riyadh to provide an explanation for Khashoggi’s disappearance after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

“I’m not giving cover at all,” Trump said. “I just want to find out what’s happening.”

“With that being said, Saudi Arabia has been a very important ally of ours in the Middle East,” he added, pointing to a US-Saudi arms deal that he valued at $110 billion, even though just $14.5 billion of that figure has actually begun to materialize.

What exactly happened to Jamal Khashoggi is not yet known. However, when the real story does emerge, it will emerge out of the efforts of dedicated investigators and international journalists, not a random conspiracy theorist sitting thousands of miles away from Istanbul spouting opinions while sporting a strainer on his head.

The post Is the Media Covering Up ‘the Real Story’ About Jamal Khashoggi? appeared first on What's True?.

disinformation, Fact Checks, jamal khashoggi, saudi arabia, thomas wictor, TruthOrFiction, turkey, washington post

Is the Media Covering Up ‘the Real Story’ About Jamal Khashoggi?

A hideous story unspooled before the international media in October 2018, when Saudi Arabian journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi — who had been living in Washington, D.C. after fleeing his home country a year before due to persistent death threats in response to his criticism of its government — abruptly vanished.

On Monday, sources told CNN that the report will acknowledge that Khashoggi died in a botched interrogation, one that was intended to lead to his abduction from Turkey. A Turkish official told CNN on Tuesday that Khashoggi’s body was cut into pieces after he was killed two weeks ago at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The claim, which was first made to the New York Times earlier in the investigation into Khashoggi’s fate, comes after Turkish officials searched the consulate for nine hours on Monday night.

Khashoggi had entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018 to finish up what should have been a relatively quick errand: he was getting routine paperwork finalized so that he could marry his Turkish fiancée. The errand was so quick, in fact, that his fiancée stayed outside to wait for him. He never came out. He has been missing ever since.

Since that day, reports have been accumulating slowly but surely, all of which so far seem to indicate a horrific state-sponsored murder.

Reports from Turkish sources that the Saudis allegedly murdered and dismembered the dissident writer, a Washington Post contributor, have fanned a growing backlash against Riyadh in Western capitals. But the kingdom has circled the wagons and angrily hit back at the accusations — and it seems to have found a willing ally in President Trump.

On Monday morning, Trump held a 20-minute phone call with the Saudi king and then parroted Riyadh’s denials to reporters. “I don’t want to get into his mind, but it sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers,” Trump said. “Who knows? We’re going to try getting to the bottom of it very soon, but his was a flat denial.”

Initial calls for an investigation were met with more denials, then attempts to muddy the narrative from Saudi Arabian officials and their assorted supporters. Those denials were then boosted by an eager bevy of conspiracy theorists and true believers. One of the latter, a conspiracy theorist named Thomas Wictor (who is perhaps best known for being banned by Twitter for openly speculating, without any proof whatsoever, that actress Alyssa Milano was plotting to assassinate controversial Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh) produced a strange, evidence-free monologue from a filthy room — complete with a colander on his head, presumably as a trolling attempt — supporting the line that Khashoggi had left the consulate twenty minutes later after he entered it in a video that was immediately picked up by Twitter accounts supporting Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman:

Wictor, who has no known expertise in geopolitics, claimed that he just “knew it was bullshit” from the media, and claims that a global conspiracy forced Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera to change its reporting to indicate Saudi Arabia was behind his murder, and “the Turks are lying their asses off.” Despite the utter lack of any supporting evidence (not to mention the strainer) the video was picked up and disseminated in Saudi social media circles with an Arabic translation.

The biggest solid claim Wictor makes in his video is that Khashoggi left after twenty minutes. This opinion (originally made by the Saudi government) has been already disputed by Khashoggi’s fiancée Hatice Cengiz, who unlike Wictor, was there, but this seems to have made no difference at all to his narrative. As Cengiz wrote in the New York Times on October 13:

He was cheerful the morning we were going to the Saudi consulate to get a document certifying his divorce. I decided not to go to my university that day, and we traveled there together. He had no foreboding of what was to come. The consular official, who had informed him that the paperwork had come through, had told him to be at the Saudi consulate at 1 p.m.

On our way there, we made plans for the rest of the day. We were going to browse appliances for our new home and meet with our friends and family members over dinner. When we arrived at the consulate, he went right in. He told me to alert the Turkish authorities if I did not hear from him soon. Had I known it would be the last time I would see Jamal, I would have rather entered the Saudi consulate myself. The rest is history: He never walked out of that building. And with him, I also got lost there.

The Trump administration also appeared to have its doubts about Turkey’s accounting of what exactly happened to Khashoggi:

In separate remarks Wednesday, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued their effort to create time for leaders in Riyadh to provide an explanation for Khashoggi’s disappearance after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

“I’m not giving cover at all,” Trump said. “I just want to find out what’s happening.”

“With that being said, Saudi Arabia has been a very important ally of ours in the Middle East,” he added, pointing to a US-Saudi arms deal that he valued at $110 billion, even though just $14.5 billion of that figure has actually begun to materialize.

What exactly happened to Jamal Khashoggi is not yet known. However, when the real story does emerge, it will emerge out of the efforts of dedicated investigators and international journalists, not a random conspiracy theorist sitting thousands of miles away from Istanbul spouting opinions while sporting a strainer on his head.

On October 18th, BBC reported that Arabic-language bots picked up the story to attempt to push different fewpoints into the mainstream, expressing support for Mohammad bin Salman and condemnation for Al Jazeera, which they claim is a “channel of deception” for publishing stories on Khashoggi’s disappearance.

Turkey’s English-language Hürriyet Daily News also reports that according to Yeni Şafak (a conservative pro-Turkish government daily) a suspect in Khashoggi’s possible murder was apparently killed in a car crash, but with few details and no citations, further confusing the story:

Mashal Saad al-Bostani, a 31-year-old lieutenant of the Saudi Royal Air Forces, was among the 15 suspects who arrived and left Turkey on Oct. 2 after going to Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate when Khashoggi visited there, according to daily Yeni Şafak.

The newspaper said sources did not release any details about the traffic accident in Riyadh and Bostani’s role in the “murder” was not yet clear.

 

The post Is the Media Covering Up ‘the Real Story’ About Jamal Khashoggi? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

2016 elections, analysis, atlantic council, digital forensics labs, disinformation, Facebook, iran, propaganda, russia, TruthOrFiction, twitter, What's True?

Foreign Influence Operations Infiltrated, Polarized Online Communities

The ongoing scandals over data privacy, in which social media giants were found to be (among other things) flooding selected readers with hypertargeted and corrosive political advertising, is still unfolding — and it will continue to evolve for some time as new pieces of evidence and data are unearthed and put together to get a true idea of its scope.

Although the broad brushstrokes of how disinformation and propaganda work to affect elections are already known, subsequent reports help to further flesh out the attempts to mislead Americans in the lead-up to 2016’s elections, effectively further disintegrating social bonds within the country, rattling trust in its national institutions, and finally trying to dissuade people from voting en masse.

The organization Stop Online Violence Against Women (which is aimed at strengthening laws and polices to protect women online, started by tech nonprofit founder Shireen Mitchell) released a study in October 2018 detailing how black and Latino Americans were particularly targeted by the now-notorious Internet Research Agency out of St. Petersburg, Russia.

The preliminary report, which details methodology and examples of how the dark ads worked, pulls no punches:

Facebook’s statement, in Politico’s 2017 article, in reference to the ads were misleading:

“The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election or voting for a particular candidate. Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”

Our report shows that the depth and breadth of the ads specifically targeting black voters led to criminal acts of voter suppression. Our interactive data visualization reveals that if we focus on volume, the order of identity targets and issue areas were: 1. Black Identity 2. Chicano Identity, 3. Policing, 4. Second Amendment Concerns and 5. Immigration. Those categories would be followed by religious ads citing Christianity and Islam and then Texas. Texas is the only state specifically targeted in these ads.

The ads were initially intended to build up “a trusted network of Black and Latino voters,” the report says. “These were highly active and intense voter suppression campaigns targeting Black and Latino voters.” The report also indicates that voter suppression efforts were being built as early as 2013.

Twitter, meanwhile, released its own data on messaging attempts from Russian and Iranian interests just a few days later, saying in a blog post:

In line with our strong principles of transparency and with the goal of improving understanding of foreign influence and information campaigns, we are releasing the full, comprehensive archives of the Tweets and media that are connected with these two previously disclosed and potentially state-backed operations on our service. We are making this data available with the goal of encouraging open research and investigation of these behaviors from researchers and academics around the world.

These large datasets comprise 3,841 accounts affiliated with the IRA, originating in Russia, and 770 other accounts, potentially originating in Iran. They include more than 10 million Tweets and more than 2 million images, GIFs, videos, and Periscope broadcasts, including the earliest on-Twitter activity from accounts connected with these campaigns, dating back to 2009.

The report was quickly analyzed and picked over by experts:

A study conducted by the Digital Forensics Lab (a project of the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan American think tank that focuses on international issues) concluded that much of Russia’s efforts — as with Facebook’s dark ads — was aimed at infiltrating, then polarizing American communities to deepen and widen societal divisions, particularly regarding issues of racism and ethnicity, but there were other goals as well:

One main purpose was to interfere in the U.S. presidential election and prevent Hillary Clinton’s victory, but it was also aimed at dividing polarized online communities in the U.S., unifying support for Russia’s international interests, and breaking down trust in U.S. institutions.

Iranian efforts seemed to be more focused on pushing its government’s messaging than breaking down trust in American institutions, but each operation inflames the public discourse in its own way:

The Russian and Iranian troll farm operations show that American society was deeply vulnerable, not to all troll farm operations, but to troll accounts of a particular type. That type hid behind carefully crafted personalities, produced original and engaging content, infiltrated activist and engaged communities, and posted in hyper-partisan, polarizing terms.

Content spread from the troll farm accounts was designed to capitalize on, and corrupt, genuine political activism. The trolls encapsulated the twin challenges of online anonymity — since they were able to operate under false personas — and online “filter bubbles,” using positive feedback loops to make their audiences ever more radical.

Despite efforts by social media giants to stop disinformation, propaganda, and threats, trolls and bots continue to evolve in sophistication and messaging, leaving vulnerable people and messages open to online attacks. “Identifying future foreign influence operations, and reducing their impact, will demand awareness and resilience from the activist communities targeted,” says the Digital Forensics Lab, “not just the platforms and the open source community.”

These studies indicate that unity and coöperation is not just a high-minded utopian ideal; it’s also anathema to corrosive trolling tactics.

The Stop Online Violence Against Women report recommends further solutions from tech companies:

These current measures will not address the misinformation techniques and population targeting described herein. In particular, Facebook’s new policy to require submitters of ads deemed by Facebook to be political to present valid identification will miss the majority of malicious ads as executed in effect and form in previous elections cycles. The tech and social media solutions offered in response to the post-election questions from Congress fail to adequately address either voter suppression or hate speech. More sophisticated social media and online ad monitoring measures must be developed and deployed.

The post Foreign Influence Operations Infiltrated, Polarized Online Communities appeared first on What's True?.

2016 elections, analysis, atlantic council, digital forensics labs, disinformation, Facebook, iran, propaganda, russia, TruthOrFiction, twitter

Foreign Influence Operations Infiltrated, Polarized Online Communities

The ongoing scandals over data privacy, in which social media giants were found to be (among other things) flooding selected readers with hypertargeted and corrosive political advertising, is still unfolding — and it will continue to evolve for some time as new pieces of evidence and data are unearthed and put together to get a true idea of its scope.

Although the broad brushstrokes of how disinformation and propaganda work to affect elections are already known, subsequent reports help to further flesh out the attempts to mislead Americans in the lead-up to 2016’s elections, effectively further disintegrating social bonds within the country, rattling trust in its national institutions, and finally trying to dissuade people from voting en masse.

The organization Stop Online Violence Against Women (which is aimed at strengthening laws and polices to protect women online, started by tech nonprofit founder Shireen Mitchell) released a study in October 2018 detailing how black and Latino Americans were particularly targeted by the now-notorious Internet Research Agency out of St. Petersburg, Russia.

The preliminary report, which details methodology and examples of how the dark ads worked, pulls no punches:

Facebook’s statement, in Politico’s 2017 article, in reference to the ads were misleading:

“The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election or voting for a particular candidate. Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”

Our report shows that the depth and breadth of the ads specifically targeting black voters led to criminal acts of voter suppression. Our interactive data visualization reveals that if we focus on volume, the order of identity targets and issue areas were: 1. Black Identity 2. Chicano Identity, 3. Policing, 4. Second Amendment Concerns and 5. Immigration. Those categories would be followed by religious ads citing Christianity and Islam and then Texas. Texas is the only state specifically targeted in these ads.

The ads were initially intended to build up “a trusted network of Black and Latino voters,” the report says. “These were highly active and intense voter suppression campaigns targeting Black and Latino voters.” The report also indicates that voter suppression efforts were being built as early as 2013.

Twitter, meanwhile, released its own data on messaging attempts from Russian and Iranian interests just a few days later, saying in a blog post:

In line with our strong principles of transparency and with the goal of improving understanding of foreign influence and information campaigns, we are releasing the full, comprehensive archives of the Tweets and media that are connected with these two previously disclosed and potentially state-backed operations on our service. We are making this data available with the goal of encouraging open research and investigation of these behaviors from researchers and academics around the world.

These large datasets comprise 3,841 accounts affiliated with the IRA, originating in Russia, and 770 other accounts, potentially originating in Iran. They include more than 10 million Tweets and more than 2 million images, GIFs, videos, and Periscope broadcasts, including the earliest on-Twitter activity from accounts connected with these campaigns, dating back to 2009.

The report was quickly analyzed and picked over by experts:

A study conducted by the Digital Forensics Lab (a project of the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan American think tank that focuses on international issues) concluded that much of Russia’s efforts — as with Facebook’s dark ads — was aimed at infiltrating, then polarizing American communities to deepen and widen societal divisions, particularly regarding issues of racism and ethnicity, but there were other goals as well:

One main purpose was to interfere in the U.S. presidential election and prevent Hillary Clinton’s victory, but it was also aimed at dividing polarized online communities in the U.S., unifying support for Russia’s international interests, and breaking down trust in U.S. institutions.

Iranian efforts seemed to be more focused on pushing its government’s messaging than breaking down trust in American institutions, but each operation inflames the public discourse in its own way:

The Russian and Iranian troll farm operations show that American society was deeply vulnerable, not to all troll farm operations, but to troll accounts of a particular type. That type hid behind carefully crafted personalities, produced original and engaging content, infiltrated activist and engaged communities, and posted in hyper-partisan, polarizing terms.

Content spread from the troll farm accounts was designed to capitalize on, and corrupt, genuine political activism. The trolls encapsulated the twin challenges of online anonymity — since they were able to operate under false personas — and online “filter bubbles,” using positive feedback loops to make their audiences ever more radical.

Despite efforts by social media giants to stop disinformation, propaganda, and threats, trolls and bots continue to evolve in sophistication and messaging, leaving vulnerable people and messages open to online attacks. “Identifying future foreign influence operations, and reducing their impact, will demand awareness and resilience from the activist communities targeted,” says the Digital Forensics Lab, “not just the platforms and the open source community.”

These studies indicate that unity and coöperation is not just a high-minded utopian ideal; it’s also anathema to corrosive trolling tactics.

The Stop Online Violence Against Women report recommends further solutions from tech companies:

These current measures will not address the misinformation techniques and population targeting described herein. In particular, Facebook’s new policy to require submitters of ads deemed by Facebook to be political to present valid identification will miss the majority of malicious ads as executed in effect and form in previous elections cycles. The tech and social media solutions offered in response to the post-election questions from Congress fail to adequately address either voter suppression or hate speech. More sophisticated social media and online ad monitoring measures must be developed and deployed.

The post Foreign Influence Operations Infiltrated, Polarized Online Communities appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

deer, disinformation, Fact Checks, monsanto, roundup, TruthOrFiction, viral content, warts, What's True?

The Case of the Monsanto Deer

A photograph of a deer riddled with skin tumors appeared on social media in October 2018 with a description that appeared to be a quote, but without any citation or link:

A deer that became riddled with tumors from eating plants sprayed with Monsanto’s Roundup. It seems fairly common.

Deer covered in skin tumors
This description is inaccurate, as a simple reverse image search shows. The photograph originally appeared on a Facebook page for hunters along with the actual reason for the growths, which are called, appropriately enough, “deer warts.”

Deer warts are not caused by Roundup or any other pesticide. Cutaneous papillomae are evidently painless growths, often caused by a virus; similar issues can appear with scarring from injury or infection:

An array of wart-like viruses also appears on domestic livestock. These viruses are different from the ones found on white-tailed deer, therefore spreading of the deer fibromas to livestock is considered to be of no consequence.

No human infection from cutaneous fibromas has been reported. The only concern for hunters would be from an animal with extensive bacterial infection, which would render the deer unsuitable for human consumption. These animals would be readily apparent due to the unpleasant exudate produced at the infection site.

In summary, cutaneous fibromas are merely skin blemishes of white-tailed deer. They are of no significance to the health of the deer population.

And if you’re a hunter, don’t worry — experts say that the warts do not affect the taste of the meat unless they become infected, leaving the decision to eat a warty deer almost entirely up to individual taste.

The post The Case of the Monsanto Deer appeared first on What's True?.

deer, disinformation, Fact Checks, monsanto, roundup, TruthOrFiction, viral content, warts

The Case of the Monsanto Deer

A photograph of a deer riddled with skin tumors appeared on social media in October 2018 with a description that appeared to be a quote, but without any citation or link:

A deer that became riddled with tumors from eating plants sprayed with Monsanto’s Roundup. It seems fairly common.

Deer covered in skin tumors
This description is inaccurate, as a simple reverse image search shows. The photograph originally appeared on a Facebook page for hunters along with the actual reason for the growths, which are called, appropriately enough, “deer warts.”

Deer warts are not caused by Roundup or any other pesticide. Cutaneous papillomae are evidently painless growths, often caused by a virus; similar issues can appear with scarring from injury or infection:

An array of wart-like viruses also appears on domestic livestock. These viruses are different from the ones found on white-tailed deer, therefore spreading of the deer fibromas to livestock is considered to be of no consequence.

No human infection from cutaneous fibromas has been reported. The only concern for hunters would be from an animal with extensive bacterial infection, which would render the deer unsuitable for human consumption. These animals would be readily apparent due to the unpleasant exudate produced at the infection site.

In summary, cutaneous fibromas are merely skin blemishes of white-tailed deer. They are of no significance to the health of the deer population.

And if you’re a hunter, don’t worry — experts say that the warts do not affect the taste of the meat unless they become infected, leaving the decision to eat a warty deer almost entirely up to individual taste.

The post The Case of the Monsanto Deer appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

disenfranchisement, elections, Fact Checks, midterms, Politics, provisional voting, TruthOrFiction, voting, voting rights, What's True?

Voting Rights and Provisional Ballots

The United States’ 2018 midterm elections approached with far more fanfare than is normal for what is usually a relatively sleepy electoral affair, including an unusual focus on voter disenfranchisement.

Stories of people discovering that they were suddenly not eligible to vote and and other voter suppression tactics appeared over and over again:

In Georgia, a coalition of civil rights groups is suing Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp after an Associated Press report found 53,000 people — nearly 70% of them black — had their registrations put on hold because minor mismatches on documents like their driver’s licenses violate the state’s new “exact match” requirement. Kemp’s office says voters who have pending registrations will still be able to vote on November 6.

[…]

In North Dakota, meanwhile, Native American tribes, who largely vote for Democrats, are confronting the implementation of a law that requires voters to provide a form of identification that includes their legal name, current street address and date of birth. The problem, for some Native Americans, is the street address requirement. Native Americans who live on reservations or in rural areas that lack street addresses often instead use P.O. boxes.The two states are the latest examples in a wave of battles over restrictive voting measures passed in largely Republican-dominated states in the name of preventing voter fraud. The trend began after the GOP wave of 2010 and picked up steam after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision that gutted major provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

As a response, the following cut-and-paste meme appeared on Facebook and Twitter:

If you are turned away at the polls your response is, “Give me a provisional ballot with a receipt as required by law.” Pass it on.

Many were rightly skeptical of this message, as it was short, simple, and came with no supporting evidence or citations — in other words, it smelled like possible misinformation, or worse.

This is true, though — at least, in theory. It’s a part of the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which was signed into law after the controversy surrounding the results of the 2000 U.S. presidential election (at which point only about half of the United States had some form of backup for eligible voters who were turned away at the polls.) It was intended to make sweeping upgrades to the American voting system:

(a) Provisional Voting Requirements.–If an individual declares that such individual is a registered voter in the jurisdiction in which the individual desires to vote and that the individual is eligible to vote in an election for Federal office, but the name of the individual does not appear on the official list of eligible voters for the polling place or an election official asserts that the individual is not eligible to vote, such individual shall be permitted to cast a provisional ballot as follows:
(1) <> An election official at the polling place shall notify the individual that the individual may cast a provisional ballot in that election.
(2) The individual shall be permitted to cast a provisional ballot at that polling place upon the execution of a written affirmation by the individual before an election official at the polling place stating that the individual is–
(A) a registered voter in the jurisdiction in which the individual desires to vote; and
(B) eligible to vote in that election.
(3) An election official at the polling place shall transmit the ballot cast by the individual or the voter information contained in the written affirmation executed by the individual under paragraph (2) to an appropriate State or local election official for prompt verification under paragraph (4).
(4) If the appropriate State or local election official to whom the ballot or voter information is transmitted under paragraph (3) determines that the individual is eligible under State law to vote, the individual’s provisional ballot shall be counted as a vote in that election in accordance with State law.
(5)(A) At the time that an individual casts a provisional ballot, the appropriate State or local election official shall give the individual written information that states that any individual who casts a provisional ballot will be able to ascertain under the system established under subparagraph (B) whether the vote was counted, and, if the vote was not counted, the reason that the vote was not counted.
(B) The appropriate State or local election official shall establish a free access system (such as a toll-free telephone number or an Internet website) that any individual who casts a provisional ballot may access to discover whether the vote of that individual was counted, and, if the vote was not counted, the reason that the vote was not counted.

The bipartisan, nongovernmental National Conference of State Legislatures put up a page further explaining the role of provisional ballots in elections:

Also referred to as “challenge ballots” or “affidavit ballots” in some states, they are required by the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). When there is uncertainty about a voter’s eligibility—the potential voter’s name is not on the voter rolls, a required identification document isn’t available or other issues—the election official is required to offer the voter a provisional ballot instead of a regular ballot.

As NCSL points out, though, the process varies by region, and a provisional ballot is not necessarily a failsafe against losing your ability to vote.

States vary in how they handle provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct.  This most commonly happens when a voter goes to the wrong precinct because he or she can’t get to the home precinct, and therefore votes on a provisional ballot.  (As part of get-out-the-vote efforts toward the end of Election Day, candidates, campaigns and advocacy groups may encourage this choice.)

Some states count a portion of the provisional ballot if it is cast in the wrong precinct or jurisdiction. Generally they will count the votes for races that the voter would have been eligible to vote in, if they did so in the correct precinct or jurisdiction. This may include just votes for federal offices, as in Rhode Island, or for state or local races that would be shared among precincts.

In other states, the entire ballot will be rejected.

Organizations like Ballotpedia keep lists of provisional ballot laws by state and voters can double-check regional policy on the site for their home state’s election offices. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab says that provisional voting is an effective, if imperfect, solution:

According to the 2016 Election Administration and Voting Survey compiled by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.5 million provisional ballots were issued in the 2016 federal election; 1.7 million were counted, at least in part, and 600,000 were rejected. (About 100,000 were statistically unaccounted for.) These 1.7 million provisional ballots accounted for 1.2% of all votes counted in the 2016 election. Conversely, the 600,000 rejected provisional ballots amounted to 0.4% of ballots cast.

The cut-and-paste meme is, then, true — but American voters who encounters irregularities or difficulties should know their rights by state in order to effectively cast a provisional ballot.

The post Voting Rights and Provisional Ballots appeared first on What's True?.

disenfranchisement, elections, Fact Checks, midterms, Politics, provisional voting, TruthOrFiction, voting, voting rights

Voting Rights and Provisional Ballots

The United States’ 2018 midterm elections approached with far more fanfare than is normal for what is usually a relatively sleepy electoral affair, including an unusual focus on voter disenfranchisement.

Stories of people discovering that they were suddenly not eligible to vote and and other voter suppression tactics appeared over and over again:

In Georgia, a coalition of civil rights groups is suing Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp after an Associated Press report found 53,000 people — nearly 70% of them black — had their registrations put on hold because minor mismatches on documents like their driver’s licenses violate the state’s new “exact match” requirement. Kemp’s office says voters who have pending registrations will still be able to vote on November 6.

[…]

In North Dakota, meanwhile, Native American tribes, who largely vote for Democrats, are confronting the implementation of a law that requires voters to provide a form of identification that includes their legal name, current street address and date of birth. The problem, for some Native Americans, is the street address requirement. Native Americans who live on reservations or in rural areas that lack street addresses often instead use P.O. boxes.The two states are the latest examples in a wave of battles over restrictive voting measures passed in largely Republican-dominated states in the name of preventing voter fraud. The trend began after the GOP wave of 2010 and picked up steam after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision that gutted major provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

As a response, the following cut-and-paste meme appeared on Facebook and Twitter:

If you are turned away at the polls your response is, “Give me a provisional ballot with a receipt as required by law.” Pass it on.

Many were rightly skeptical of this message, as it was short, simple, and came with no supporting evidence or citations — in other words, it smelled like possible misinformation, or worse.

This is true, though — at least, in theory. It’s a part of the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which was signed into law after the controversy surrounding the results of the 2000 U.S. presidential election (at which point only about half of the United States had some form of backup for eligible voters who were turned away at the polls.) It was intended to make sweeping upgrades to the American voting system:

(a) Provisional Voting Requirements.–If an individual declares that such individual is a registered voter in the jurisdiction in which the individual desires to vote and that the individual is eligible to vote in an election for Federal office, but the name of the individual does not appear on the official list of eligible voters for the polling place or an election official asserts that the individual is not eligible to vote, such individual shall be permitted to cast a provisional ballot as follows:
(1) <> An election official at the polling place shall notify the individual that the individual may cast a provisional ballot in that election.
(2) The individual shall be permitted to cast a provisional ballot at that polling place upon the execution of a written affirmation by the individual before an election official at the polling place stating that the individual is–
(A) a registered voter in the jurisdiction in which the individual desires to vote; and
(B) eligible to vote in that election.
(3) An election official at the polling place shall transmit the ballot cast by the individual or the voter information contained in the written affirmation executed by the individual under paragraph (2) to an appropriate State or local election official for prompt verification under paragraph (4).
(4) If the appropriate State or local election official to whom the ballot or voter information is transmitted under paragraph (3) determines that the individual is eligible under State law to vote, the individual’s provisional ballot shall be counted as a vote in that election in accordance with State law.
(5)(A) At the time that an individual casts a provisional ballot, the appropriate State or local election official shall give the individual written information that states that any individual who casts a provisional ballot will be able to ascertain under the system established under subparagraph (B) whether the vote was counted, and, if the vote was not counted, the reason that the vote was not counted.
(B) The appropriate State or local election official shall establish a free access system (such as a toll-free telephone number or an Internet website) that any individual who casts a provisional ballot may access to discover whether the vote of that individual was counted, and, if the vote was not counted, the reason that the vote was not counted.

The bipartisan, nongovernmental National Conference of State Legislatures put up a page further explaining the role of provisional ballots in elections:

Also referred to as “challenge ballots” or “affidavit ballots” in some states, they are required by the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). When there is uncertainty about a voter’s eligibility—the potential voter’s name is not on the voter rolls, a required identification document isn’t available or other issues—the election official is required to offer the voter a provisional ballot instead of a regular ballot.

As NCSL points out, though, the process varies by region, and a provisional ballot is not necessarily a failsafe against losing your ability to vote.

States vary in how they handle provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct.  This most commonly happens when a voter goes to the wrong precinct because he or she can’t get to the home precinct, and therefore votes on a provisional ballot.  (As part of get-out-the-vote efforts toward the end of Election Day, candidates, campaigns and advocacy groups may encourage this choice.)

Some states count a portion of the provisional ballot if it is cast in the wrong precinct or jurisdiction. Generally they will count the votes for races that the voter would have been eligible to vote in, if they did so in the correct precinct or jurisdiction. This may include just votes for federal offices, as in Rhode Island, or for state or local races that would be shared among precincts.

In other states, the entire ballot will be rejected.

Organizations like Ballotpedia keep lists of provisional ballot laws by state and voters can double-check regional policy on the site for their home state’s election offices. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab says that provisional voting is an effective, if imperfect, solution:

According to the 2016 Election Administration and Voting Survey compiled by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.5 million provisional ballots were issued in the 2016 federal election; 1.7 million were counted, at least in part, and 600,000 were rejected. (About 100,000 were statistically unaccounted for.) These 1.7 million provisional ballots accounted for 1.2% of all votes counted in the 2016 election. Conversely, the 600,000 rejected provisional ballots amounted to 0.4% of ballots cast.

The cut-and-paste meme is, then, true — but American voters who encounters irregularities or difficulties should know their rights by state in order to effectively cast a provisional ballot.

The post Voting Rights and Provisional Ballots appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

disenfranchisement, Fact Checks, native americans, north dakota, Politics, supreme court, TruthOrFiction, voting rights, What's True?

Did the Supreme Court Make Voting More Difficult in a Key Battleground State?

As the 2018 midterms approached in the United States, the national conversation turned more and more toward the right to vote — and whether all Americans are truly able to exercise that right.

The conversation took a new turn just weeks before the November 6th election, when the Supreme Court declined to overturn a controversial North Dakota law that could effectively disenfranchise thousands of Native American voters by making identification that requires a street address (rather than, for example, a post office box) a requirement:

A group of Native American voters in North Dakota have challenged the law, telling the courts that the requirement that voters present identification bearing a street address could pose an obstacle to voting for Native Americans in several ways. Native Americans often live on reservations or in other rural areas where people do not have street addresses; even if they do, lawyers for the challengers argue, those addresses are frequently not included on tribal IDs. Moreover, the lawyers add, Native Americans in North Dakota are “disproportionately homeless.”

In April, a federal district court in North Dakota ordered the state to allow voters to cast ballots as long as they could show IDs that had either a current street address or a current mailing address, such as a P.O. box. The state followed that order in the June primaries, but in September the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit put the district court’s order on hold.

“The risk of voter confusion appears severe here because the injunction against requiring residential-address identification was in force during the primary election and because the Secretary of State’s website announced for months the ID requirements as they existed under that injunction,” noted Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent:

Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election. If the Eighth Circuit’s stay is not vacated, the risk of disfranchisement is large.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the move is likely to create major issues for people trying to vote in the midterm elections (which were less than a month away at the time of the ruling) because thousands of likely voters will probably not be able to produce any street address in time to cast a vote:

The Native American Rights Fund sued North Dakota in early 2016, arguing that the law was unconstitutional and a violation of the Voting Rights Act. A federal district judge agreed, issuing a ruling in April that blocked the ID requirement, but the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit overturned that ruling in a 2-1 decision in September. The Supreme Court’s denial of the Native American Rights Fund’s emergency appeal means that the law will stand, creating a huge amount of confusion for thousands of voters whose IDs were valid for the June primaries but are no longer adequate for them to vote on Nov. 6.

Jacqueline De León, staff attorneys for the Native American Rights Fund, said in a statement that the ruling appears to be an intentional effort to disenfranchise minority voters in a key state:

Access to voting should not be dependent on whether one lives in a city or on a reservation. The District Court in North Dakota has found this voter identification law to be discriminatory; nothing in the law has changed since that finding. North Dakota Native American voters will now have to vote under a system that unfairly burdens them more than other voters. We will continue to fight this discriminatory law.

Activists have created plans to counter the ruling’s effects on the midterm elections, including a push to create addresses for voters on the spot.

Tribal officials will stand outside polling stations on Nov. 6 with laptops and access to rural addressing software and a shared database of voter names. North Dakota is the only state that does not require voter registration, meaning eligible voters can generally show up at the polls and cast a ballot so long as they have proper identification.

O.J. Semans, chief executive of Four Directions, a national Native American voting rights group, said the strategy was “legally watertight” and necessary to counter the “devastating” court ruling.

“Even if it doesn’t change the overall result, it’s about fighting back,” Semans said. “We have to fight back.”

In one of the country’s least-populous states — and where Heitkamp, one of the Senate’s most endangered Democratic incumbents, eked out a victory of fewer than 3,000 votes in 2012 — the Supreme Court ruling could prove decisive.

A related rumor, that the most junior Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh cast the deciding vote, is false. That is invalidated in the very first paragraph of the court document:

The application to vacate the stay entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on September 24, 2018, presented to JUSTICE GORSUCH and by him referred to the Court, is denied. JUSTICE KAVANAUGH took no part in the consideration or decision of this application.

The post Did the Supreme Court Make Voting More Difficult in a Key Battleground State? appeared first on What's True?.

disenfranchisement, Fact Checks, native americans, north dakota, Politics, supreme court, TruthOrFiction, voting rights

Did the Supreme Court Make Voting More Difficult in a Key Battleground State?

As the 2018 midterms approached in the United States, the national conversation turned more and more toward the right to vote — and whether all Americans are truly able to exercise that right.

The conversation took a new turn just weeks before the November 6th election, when the Supreme Court declined to overturn a controversial North Dakota law that could effectively disenfranchise thousands of Native American voters by making identification that requires a street address (rather than, for example, a post office box) a requirement:

A group of Native American voters in North Dakota have challenged the law, telling the courts that the requirement that voters present identification bearing a street address could pose an obstacle to voting for Native Americans in several ways. Native Americans often live on reservations or in other rural areas where people do not have street addresses; even if they do, lawyers for the challengers argue, those addresses are frequently not included on tribal IDs. Moreover, the lawyers add, Native Americans in North Dakota are “disproportionately homeless.”

In April, a federal district court in North Dakota ordered the state to allow voters to cast ballots as long as they could show IDs that had either a current street address or a current mailing address, such as a P.O. box. The state followed that order in the June primaries, but in September the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit put the district court’s order on hold.

“The risk of voter confusion appears severe here because the injunction against requiring residential-address identification was in force during the primary election and because the Secretary of State’s website announced for months the ID requirements as they existed under that injunction,” noted Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent:

Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election. If the Eighth Circuit’s stay is not vacated, the risk of disfranchisement is large.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the move is likely to create major issues for people trying to vote in the midterm elections (which were less than a month away at the time of the ruling) because thousands of likely voters will probably not be able to produce any street address in time to cast a vote:

The Native American Rights Fund sued North Dakota in early 2016, arguing that the law was unconstitutional and a violation of the Voting Rights Act. A federal district judge agreed, issuing a ruling in April that blocked the ID requirement, but the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit overturned that ruling in a 2-1 decision in September. The Supreme Court’s denial of the Native American Rights Fund’s emergency appeal means that the law will stand, creating a huge amount of confusion for thousands of voters whose IDs were valid for the June primaries but are no longer adequate for them to vote on Nov. 6.

Jacqueline De León, staff attorneys for the Native American Rights Fund, said in a statement that the ruling appears to be an intentional effort to disenfranchise minority voters in a key state:

Access to voting should not be dependent on whether one lives in a city or on a reservation. The District Court in North Dakota has found this voter identification law to be discriminatory; nothing in the law has changed since that finding. North Dakota Native American voters will now have to vote under a system that unfairly burdens them more than other voters. We will continue to fight this discriminatory law.

Activists have created plans to counter the ruling’s effects on the midterm elections, including a push to create addresses for voters on the spot.

Tribal officials will stand outside polling stations on Nov. 6 with laptops and access to rural addressing software and a shared database of voter names. North Dakota is the only state that does not require voter registration, meaning eligible voters can generally show up at the polls and cast a ballot so long as they have proper identification.

O.J. Semans, chief executive of Four Directions, a national Native American voting rights group, said the strategy was “legally watertight” and necessary to counter the “devastating” court ruling.

“Even if it doesn’t change the overall result, it’s about fighting back,” Semans said. “We have to fight back.”

In one of the country’s least-populous states — and where Heitkamp, one of the Senate’s most endangered Democratic incumbents, eked out a victory of fewer than 3,000 votes in 2012 — the Supreme Court ruling could prove decisive.

A related rumor, that the most junior Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh cast the deciding vote, is false. That is invalidated in the very first paragraph of the court document:

The application to vacate the stay entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on September 24, 2018, presented to JUSTICE GORSUCH and by him referred to the Court, is denied. JUSTICE KAVANAUGH took no part in the consideration or decision of this application.

The post Did the Supreme Court Make Voting More Difficult in a Key Battleground State? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

Animals, bear, daily mail, Fact Checks, pennsylvania, TruthOrFiction, viral content, What's True?

The Friends, the Video, and the Bear in the Bucket

October 2018 was, like the months immediately preceding it, a seemingly endless march of stressful news stories and increasing political tensions globally as elections loomed in countries around the world. That naturally led a subsection of internet regulars to seek out more uplifting, simple stories, preferably those involving rescuing cute animals.

The Daily Mail got in on the action, confusing readers and viewers by putting up an improbable-but-true story about a group of friends trapping a bear in order to free it from a bucket stuck on its head, obscuring its vision as it wandered around:

Awe-inspiring footage shows a group of men rescuing a 300lb bear after it got it’s head stuck in a bucket for over a month.

The bear, dubbed the bucket bear, had managed to get a bucket stuck around its head and was left panicking, unable to see or eat and roaming the woods in Pennsylvania.

Passersby had seen the bear in distress and desperate to be freed but were afraid to come close to him.

The article was accompanied by a video:

The story received some notoriety when it happened — in 2014. Apparently, a group of friends went looking for the web-famous “Bucket Bear,” which had what was thought to be a bucket impeding its vision, after spotting the cub on a webcam. (The Pennsylvania Game Commission was aware of the bear and had set out traps, but its press secretary, Travis Lau, said: “But we were never able to get there before the bear had moved on. We set a trap, which was kind of a long shot given the bear’s head was covered. That didn’t work either.”)

The Daily Mail story does get a few details wrong. The offending item wasn’t a bucket but a “maxi,” a black rubber airbag that provides cushioning between a tractor and its trailer, and it was’t just one man but a group of friends who sought out the bear after learning about it on social media.

That particular story also gives the impression that it is a fairly recent event, a perception that is heightened by the fact that its text did not include a date at all, which is odd because the last time the publication covered this story, it was fairly accurate:

Hornberger and Eigenbrod had been searching for two hours and were about to call it quits for the day, when they came across the Bucket Bear near the highway.

Hornberger approached it and attempted to wrestle off the rubber container, which turned out to be an air bag that likely broke off a tractor trailer.

The bear slipped out of his grasp and led the group on a 20-minute chase through the woods towards ‘the biggest mud hole in the area,’ as Hornberger described it.

The post The Friends, the Video, and the Bear in the Bucket appeared first on What's True?.

abortion, Fact Checks, pregnancy, TruthOrFiction, viral content, What's True?, world news daily report

Pro-Choice Activist Breaks World Record With 27th Abortion?

A story about a woman cheerfully embarking on her 27th straight abortion hit social media in October 2018, shocking readers who learned about Elena Travis, the 34-year-old med school student with an unusual hobby (but a heart of gold):

The historic operation was performed at the Sacramento Street Health Center and required Elena Travis, 34, to visit the abortion clinic three consecutive times because she was 24 weeks pregnant.

Elena Travis, 34, a medical school student who hopes to one day perform abortions herself, believes abortion is a right and hopes to inspire other women to have it practiced on them by showing others that it is a safe and healthy procedure.

“I feel great. I love the feeling of being pregnant, but I would never want to bring a newborn baby into this miserable world,” she told reporters.

This story was red meat to certain corners of the internet as readers decried Travis’s behavior, but the story is a hoax. World News Daily Report is a years-old, well-known satire site that has taken in large amounts of readers over the years, despite its disclaimer at the bottom of every page:

The text of the disclaimer reads:

World News Daily Report assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or undead, is purely a miracle.

The very happy pregnant woman that accompanies this hoax story is actually a model in a stock photograph.

The post Pro-Choice Activist Breaks World Record With 27th Abortion? appeared first on What's True?.