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New York Times: “When a conspiracy theory started circulating in China suggesting that the coronavirus escaped from an American military lab, it had largely stayed on the fringe. Now, the ruling Communist Party has propelled the idea firmly into the mainstream.”
“This week, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman repeatedly used an official podium to elevate unproven ideas that the coronavirus may have first leaked from a research facility in Fort Detrick, Md.”
Peter Feaman, a top RNC official in Florida, has spread anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation, comparing the Biden administration’s vaccine efforts to Nazi-era “brown shirts,” and twice calling the vaccines “the mark of the beast,” a reference to a symbol from the biblical Book of Revelations showing allegiance to Satan, CNN reports.
A new PRRI poll finds that 42% of vaccine refusers are also QAnon believers.
Among the vaccine hesitant, 22% are QAnon believers.
Elliot Morris: “Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) and others have argued that a decline in religiosity in America has left people vulnerable to the false spiritual satisfaction of conspiracy theories and sectarianism, for example in QAnon.”
“But we find the opposite. The least religious are the least credulous.”
Lin Wood, a prominent purveyor of election conspiracy theories, may face additional punishment from a federal judge in Michigan after he shared a video recording of a portion of a court hearing on sanctions related to a debunked election fraud lawsuit, the Detroit Free Press reports.
Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn nurtured and then profited from the QAnon conspiracy theorists, the Intercept reports.
“Most media outlets treated Flynn’s videotaped oath last summer, in which he uttered a well-known QAnon slogan, as a sort of coming-out story about a onetime Trump insider who had gone off the rails. The video has since become the subject of a lawsuit by members of Flynn’s family who claim that ‘left-wing media outlets began to spread false narratives’ about the Flynn family’s connections to QAnon. An Intercept investigation has found that Flynn’s ties to the QAnon phenomenon stretch back much further than the July 4 weekend last year when the video first appeared, however, to the days immediately following Trump’s 2016 election victory.”
Washington Post: “Two firms led by Virginia business executive Michele Roosevelt Edwards promoted outlandish claims that an Italian defense contractor switched votes from Trump to Biden by satellite, swinging the outcome of the race.”
“The discovery of her firms’ involvement and the roles played by others sheds new light on the origins of a claim that the Trump White House pushed the Justice Department to investigate.”
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“The FBI said this month that QAnon adherents could turn to violence as some of the conspiracy theory’s major predictions, including that Democrats would be subject to mass arrest and detention, have not come to pass,” the New York Times reports.
“The conspiracy theory holds that a corrupt cabal of global elites and career government employees who run a Satan-worshiping, child sex-trafficking ring will soon be rounded up and punished for their misdeeds; and that former President Donald Trump will be restored to the presidency.”
Related for members: American Democracy Is Not Safe
“A Trump appointee serving on West Point’s advisory board has repeatedly spread a conspiracy that the Biden administration is bringing in non-White immigrants as part of a ‘grand plan’ to have them outnumber White Americans of European ancestry in the United States,” CNN reports.
“He also attacked women serving in the military in combat roles.”
A new PRRI-IFYC study finds that 15% of Americans agree with the QAnon statement that the U.S. government, media and financial worlds “are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
And 20% agree with this statement: “There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”
First Read: “It’s hard to call something fringe when approximately one-in-five Americans believe these statements, especially one that true patriots ‘may have to resort to violence’ to save the country.”
New research shows “a sprawling online network tied to Chinese businessman Guo Wengui has become a potent platform for disinformation in the United States, attacking the safety of coronavirus vaccines, promoting false election-fraud claims and spreading baseless QAnon conspiracies,” the Washington Post reports.
Guo’s association with former Trump White House adviser Stephen Bannon “became a focus of news coverage last year after Bannon was arrested aboard Guo’s yacht on federal fraud charges.”
Vice News: “A group of Arizona citizens, including one Republican Congressional candidate, is asking the state’s Supreme Court to invalidate all election results since 2018 and remove all elected officials from their offices immediately.”
A Michigan legislative hearing to pre-emptively ban governmental “vaccine passports” in Michigan devolved into the realm of conspiracy theory, Michigan Bridge reports.
Author and activist Naomi Wolf told lawmakers that New York residents are being “discriminated against already” because of a voluntary Excelsior Pass system developed by the state government.
Said Wolf: “If you gather after this hearing with your friends in a bar to discuss opposition to the vaccine passport, your app will know who you’re meeting with because you’ll have to swipe a QR code.”
Michael Flynn botched the Pledge of Allegiance at a “Bikers for Trump” rally in South Carolina.
Flynn was in South Carolina to support Lin Wood’s bid for state GOP chair.
The Forward: “Multiple news stories have reported how Miami’s influential Spanish-language talk radio, the traditional bastion of anti-communist Cuba rhetoric, and conservative Hispanic social media groups have become dominated by far-right conspiracy theories, with frequent denunciations of George Soros as emblematic of a powerful Jewish cabal.”
“This shift toward insinuating Jews-as-communists arises from an intensive and successful branding of Democrats as socialists that has come to dominate Republican Hispanic political circles and messaging in South Florida.”
Vice: “A Republican operative who helped propel QAnon into the mainstream back in 2017 has just been elected to a leadership role in a local Republican party in South Carolina.”
“Tracy Diaz, also known online as Tracy Beanz, won a landslide victory Saturday in Horry County, a working-class coastal haven, where she was overwhelmingly voted onto the state executive committee.”
The keynote speaker at a Minnesota county Republican Party’s event told members that George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police was “planned since 2016,” the Bemidji Pioneer reports.
He also said more than a hundred Democratic members of Congress deserve to be investigated for espionage for “working with foreign governments and the communist and Islamic movements.”
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Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.