Supreme Court To Rule On Clearing The Way For 2024 Election Lies
In a speech in Dayton, Ohio, on Saturday, trump, who has told more than 30,000 documented lies in past months, accused Democrats of telling lies about him.
“Disinformation and misinformation, they’re masters at it,” he said with outrageous temerity and without a hint of irony. “They lie, they cheat. These people, they lie, they cheat.”
Trump, who has dubbed himself, “Honest Don,” cannot stand it when people do to him what he has done to them. Now he is asking the Supreme Court to punish his enemies for what he claims is disinformation, misinformation, lying and cheating. A victory for trump would surely open up the flood gates to rile up his followers that in event he loses in November, he can claim that he had once again been robbed.
Trump is the gold standard for lying and his behavior has reached the Supreme Court which is primed to rule whether the government can try to prompt news organizations and social platforms to stop spreading hatred and lies, like trump’s whopper that he lost the 2020 election because of rampant voter fraud, which was never there.
Republican attorneys general from redder than red Missouri and Louisiana brought the case in a challenge to the administration’s efforts to curb misinformation online. The states’ top law enforcement officers claimed the government is waging a “campaign of censorship” to “identify disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.”
Essentially, the Republican case is nothing more than disinformation, misinformation and lies.
The main examples of alleged improper actions by the government involve the Biden administration’s efforts to police online misinformation about the legitimacy of the 2020 election and to stem the rampant unfounded claims about the COVID-19 vaccines.
The Republican plaintiffs have claimed that the White House, FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention crossed the line from suggestions into coercion.
A key to trump’s campaign is his allegation that a “deep state” in the Biden administration is trying to discredit and undercut the Republican campaign. If he is reelected, trump pledged that he will ban the federal government from using the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” to describe domestic speech. Trump made the pledge as part of a broader “free speech” platform in which he promised to impose a seven-year ban on former FBI and CIA workers handling private-sector US consumer records.
Trump said he is the self-anointed enemy of a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media (who) have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American People.”
“The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed — and it must happen immediately,” trump said. “I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information’. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship — directly or indirectly — whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.”
In the suit before the Supreme Court, Republicans claim the White House has tried to attack conservatives by pressuring social networks to not print lies or calls for violence, that often emanate from the trump supporters on the right wing. If the court rules against the administration, the far right social networks will not have to fear government interference to stop them from posting lies or calls for violence.
The lawsuit has its roots in the days immediately following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by trump supporters at the Capitol. After the insurrection, trump was banned by Facebook (now Meta), Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok.
A two-year ban by Meta ended in February and trump has been using the site for fundraising. Trump remains suspended from You Tube and Twitter (now “X”) but the suspension by TikTok has ended.
Currently, platforms like YouTube, Facebook and TikTok have policies of either removing or posting warnings about content that is untruthful or violent. The government currently contacts the platforms with signs of violent content and the platforms are free to either follow the administration’s warning or not.
Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of “X,” formerly known as Twitter, has said he will not edit content, in the name of what Musk calls, the first amendment right to free speech.
In addition to election lies, rhetoric that could go unchallenged include the anti-Semitic lies express by such far right personalities as the
Daily Wire’s, Candace Owens. Last week, Owens took to “X” to endorse a centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about Jewish rabbis drinking the blood of Christians.
Owens was referring to the so-called “blood libel,” a centuries old false allegation that Jews murder Christians, especially Christian children, to use their blood for ritual purposes, such as an ingredient in the baking of Passover matzah.” The Anti-Defamation League reported that scholars have documented about 100 blood libels that took place from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and that “many of them resulted in massacres of Jews.”
Owens also has blamed rising levels of anti-Semitism on “political Jews” and suggested that there was a “small ring of specific people” in Hollywood and potentially Washington, D.C. who are “using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism.”
Celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach responded on “X” and accused Owens of being an “arch antisemite” who “is inciting her Jew-hating followers to threaten to murder Jews and especially [sic] me.”
Boteach’s criticisms of Owens has generated threats to his life and venomous responses from anti-Semites, like “I will catch you jew boi. Ima knock you the fuck out. Ima watch you cry like a bitch,” read the message. Or someone with the handle @christ_gnosis, posted, “Are you drunk on Christian blood again?”
The Daily Wire has engaged in climate change denial and COVID-19 disinformation. Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing said the company “would not fire Candace (Owens)” because she “is paid to give her opinion.”
“Unless those opinions run afoul of the law or she violates the terms of her contract in some way, her job is secure and she is welcome at Daily Wire,” said Boreing.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., is infamous for her fear mongering and distortions, which could go unchallenged depending on the court ruling.
Most recently, Greene repeated the disputed claim of anti- abortion activists who said that in March 2022, they were given 115 aborted fetuses off a medical waste truck and saved five of them for evidence.
“Five of these babies were second and third-trimester premature infants who appeared to have been born alive and then murdered,” said Greene who announced that she will be holding a House hearing on “Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting.”
The claims concerned abortion opponent Lauren Handy who was found to possess five aborted fetuses in her apartment. A day earlier, she was charged with blockading a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic two years prior. Handy and fellow activist Terrisa Bukovinac claimed the five were among 115 fetuses given to them by the driver of a medical waste truck. They claimed they buried 110 of them with a priest present at an undisclosed location but kept the remaining five to prove that illegal procedures were used to abort them.
Police determined the abortions were legally conducted and the waste truck company denied Handy’s account.
Another continuing line of trump lies involves migrants who the ex-president has called poison and rapists, said that they are invading the country, that they are responsible for the fentanyl crisis and trump’s most recent claim that migrants are coming from countries where they don’t have a language.
The latest baseless, absurdity being pushed by right wingers claims that Haitians involved in current political unrest are cannibals.
Gangs have seized control of areas in the capital, Port-a — Prince, and have forced the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry. The bloodshed has forced many refugees to try to flee the chaos.
Far-right commentators have repeated unverified rumors that the gangs practice cannibalism and coming to the U.S. NBC reported that the allegations of cannibalism were false and appeared to stem from the gangs’ efforts at intimidating rivals with propaganda about their cruelty and bloodlust. But that did not stem the rumors.
One source of the rumors has been Malaysian right-wing commentator and social media influencer Ian Miles Cheong, who tweeted, “There are cannibal gangs in Haiti who abduct and eat people. We are not supposed to talk about that because of cultural relativism.” Cheong said gang members are trying to enter the U.S.
Podcaster and Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh repeated Cheong’s fantastic claims and said that “according to reports circulating all over social media, the violent gangs terrorizing Haiti have even resorted to cannibalism.” Elon Musk , who consistently complains about the southern border and has falsely said that non-citizens swing elections for Democrats , shared Walsh’s video on Monday, commenting, “Cannibal gangs.”
Musk shared what he claimed was video evidence of cannibalism in Haiti posted by a different X user. The graphic, unverified footage violated X’s guidelines and was removed by the company.
One video purported to show two corpses being roasted in Haiti. The video was seen nearly half a million times on an X account before it was debunked as Halloween decorations at a Chinese theme park in 2018.
White supremacist Nick Fuentes, who dined last year at trump’s Mar-a-Lago palace, added his own version of reality on his podcast, blaring, “Cannibal Savages PLOT IMMINENT Florida Invasion.”
Trump’s allies in Congress have been working hard to discredit the Biden administration with claims that the administration is leading a conspiracy to silence conservative opinions. The Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, led by unbending trump supporter, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, claimed that it had found that the government’s primary agency for overseeing cybersecurity, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), was “an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (that) has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries.”
Trump’s anger at CISA peaked in 2020, when the agency created a website, titled “Rumor Control,” to rebut disinformation associated with the 2020 presidential election. On Nov. 12, 2020, CISA issued a press release that said, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
On the same day, CISA Director Chris Krebs said he expected to be fired and a week later, trump dismissed him via tweet for his comments regarding the security of the election.
The trump administration’s ire at CISA was increased when CISA and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center joined with several organizations and the Election Integrity Partnership, a collaboration of researchers, on 2020 election misinformation claims. The working relationship between the federal agencies and the Election Integrity Partnership began while trump was still in office.
In a recent interim report, the Jordan subcommittee said that CISA, formed in 2016, has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.”
“In 2022 and 2023, in response to growing public and private criticism of CISA’s unconstitutional behavior, CISA attempted to camouflage its activities, duplicitously claiming it serves a purely ‘informational’ role,” the report said.
A relatively unknown former trump State Department official, Michael Benz, has been a key voice in leading Republican criticism of the Biden administration and alleged social media censorship. Benz’s work has been cited in congressional hearings and promoted by Musk.
Before working for the State Department, Benz ran an alt-right social network site called “Frame Game.” The site interacted with white nationalists and posted videos espousing racist conspiracy theories, according to recordings, livestreams and blog posts.
In interviews with white nationalists, Frame Game blamed Jews for “controlling the media” and for the decline of the white race.
“If you were to remove the Jewish influence on the West,” said one Frame Game video, “white people would not face the threat of white genocide that they currently do.”
Frame Game was promoted by alt-right leaders including Richard Spencer, who led the violent white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottsville, Va., in 2017, in which a counter-protester was killed. Trump later refused to criticize the white nationalists and instead, said there were “very fine people on both sides”, implying a moral equivalence between the white supremacist protesters and the counter-protesters.
FrameGame also hosted podcasts of white supremacists including Patrick Casey of the group then known as Identity Evropa, which helped plan the Charlottesville rally.
Frame Game stopped posting in 2018.
Benz was hired in 2018 as an assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, writing speeches for then-Secretary Ben Carson. He left in 2020 and went to the Department of State, where he was appointed deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information technology for less than a year.
In April 2022, Benz created the “Foundation for Freedom Online,” a group that claims to offer “nonpartisan insights and assistance to all peoples taking a stand for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the free exchange of ideas online.”
In August 2022, the Foundation for Freedom Online posted a report on its website, titled “Department of Homeland Censorship: How D.H.S. Seized Power Over Online Speech.” The report focused on the Election Integrity Partnership, and its relationship with CISA.
Benz has 99,000 followers on X and has been featured in interviews with such right wing voices as Fox News, OANN, Real America’s Voice and The Epoch Times.
A Jan. 12, 2024, story in Foundation for Freedom online, claimed that “American taxpayers are paying for the same industry that works to monitor, suppress, and silence them online through a Department of Justice funding program that purports to target domestic extremism, but in fact catches ordinary conservatives and religious groups in its net.”
The story was referring to a federal agency called the “Research on Domestic Radicalization and Violent Extremism” portfolio, which is managed by the National Institutes for Justice. The article said the program began in 2012, initially to research foreign terrorists groups in the U.S. but that it was redirected by the Biden administration to focus on “the radicalization of Americans to white nationalist extremism.”
The article said terms like “radicalization” and “white nationalist extremism” have been used in recent years by the government and the media “to target trump, his supporters, and those with populist political viewpoints.”
The Election Integrity Partnership was a lightning rod for Republican criticism after it published “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election.” One of the more interesting topics concerned top spreaders of misinformation and cited Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, a relatively obscure scientist who claims to have invented email.
Ayyadurai’s platform exploded in popularity in 2020, after he posted a video claiming Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading COVID-19 epidemiologist, was part of a “Deep State” conspiracy to spread coronavirus garnered. The video had more than six million views in a week. After the 2020 election, Ayyadurai produced lengthy videos on YouTube, hyping multiple false narratives alongside “dubious statistical evidence.”
After a failed primary campaign for the U.S. Senate in September 2020, Ayyadurai began promoting a conspiracy theory that computer tabulation systems systematically switched votes in favor of his opponent. After November 3, he extended the claim based on error-filled statistical analysis, to claim fraud in the presidential election.
When his arguments were debunked by statisticians, Ayyadurai altered or changed expectations or presented a new and equally fraught statistical argument. His most popular video has gained more than1million views since he livestreamed it on Nov. 10, 2020.
“His popularity can, in part, be attributed to sharing of his content by other misinformation superspreaders, including QAnon-affiliated lawyer Sidney Powell” the report noted.
The report said that Powell tweeted Ayyadurai’s video to her one million-plus followers and also used Ayyadurai’s arguments as evidence in her so-called “Kraken” lawsuit attempting to overturn the election results in Georgia, a key swing state.