Moral Panic In Twin Falls Idaho
Moral Panic In Twin Falls Idaho
Russian propaganda fanned by American idiots infects the Heartland, again. Let’s name it and shame it
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“One suggestion included trying to ‘make a fake on an American soldier that raped a German woman. That would be great!’”—Doppelganger affidavit, Russian strategy notes to take down America
Watching the deadcatting continue into the weekend is pitiful.
Titushky brown shirts marching through the streets, trailed by cameras addicted to spectacle.
Russian propagandists promising baby eating next, because pet slaying won’t hold the attention span in the much coveted 18 to 49 demo beyond Monday.
Forgive my ennui with these plotlines, but I’ve been reporting on Russian fuckery as fanned by American idiots/traitors for nearly a decade, and I’ve been reporting on Nazis far longer.
We’ve see this rerun, over and over again. I turn to you, dear reader, to help others understand the plays, to get out ahead of the hysteria, to sharpen your prebuttals so we can refocus on all the joy and good, again.
I open this report with a pull-quote from the 277-page doppleganger/cybersquatting affidavit about a fake rape scenario to refresh your memory that in order to disrupt our sanity, the Russians plant false stories. They don’t even expect you to believe them, but the chaos and confusion and outrage that follows is the point. The cruelty is the point. The narrative clusterfuck is the point. Conspiracy is the point.
As you know, I thought it was dumb to give Trump a stage in primetime.
In Kabuki Demon Masks, I wrote:
While the media is back to horse-race coverage, I believe giving a public enemy a debate stage shows the US still doesn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
These are not two equals on that stage. Treating this as normal will not defeat a dictator.
While praising dictators and wearing the mask of an evil clown, Trump continues to be a grave threat.
We have actual big, breaking news — tsunamis crashing on the shores of platforms owned by oligarchs and VP candidates that facilitate and boost Russia’s covert influence activities, which as our State Department explained, are not journalism.
And yet, the focus is on the Moral Panic Fakery.
So let’s rewind to Twin Falls, Idaho, where a story that was “100 percent false” caused moral panic.
As Jason Stanley wrote in How Fascism Works:
In the United States at the moment of this writing, we also see a loss of “logical faculties” in the face of a barrage of propaganda connecting immigrant groups to rape. Trump famously began his campaign by denouncing Mexican immigrants to the United States as rapists. In an article for The New York Times on September 26, 2017, Caitlin Dickerson wrote about what happened in the small town of Twin Falls, Idaho, where three refugee boys, aged seven, ten, and fourteen, were accused of some kind of sexual activity with a five-year-old American girl. Immediately after the incident, Facebook groups formed about it, with links to articles on the Internet claiming “that the little girl had been gang raped at knifepoint, that the perpetrators were Syrian refugees and that their fathers had celebrated with them afterward by giving them high fives.” Soon thereafter, the headline article on the Drudge Report, one of the most visited sites on the Internet, screamed “REPORT: Syrian ‘Refugees’ Rape Little Girl at Knifepoint in Idaho.” The articles were all false—for one thing, as Dickerson reports, no Syrian refugees were resettled in Twin Falls. It’s not clear that there was any attack at all (a police officer, based on the cellphone video of the incident, called the Internet descriptions of it “100 percent false, like not even close to being accurate”). Nevertheless, the fake news stories created a wave of intimidating harassment against public officials in Twin Falls, and a storm of outrage against refugees in the community. In short, they created moral panic about the sexual danger refugees posed for American white girls, a panic that has yet to subside.
The rhetoric on immigration that surrounded the Trump campaign (and continues to surround his administration) parallels the tactics of Russian propaganda outlets, which have spread fake news stories (as well as grossly exaggerating facts) about Middle Eastern immigrants raping white women in Europe. To take just one example, discussed in a September 2017 New York Times article by Jim Rutenberg, Russian propaganda outlets tried to create a fake scandal about a supposed rape of a thirteen-year-old girl in Berlin by a Middle Eastern immigrant in 2016. Multiple media outlets produced stories about the supposed rape, stoking outrage among the German Russian community, ultimately to the point where seven hundred people gathered to protest an event that never occurred. Russian media coverage and Russian fake news stories inflamed outrage. The fact that all of this eerily mirrors the spread of the German propaganda campaign in the 1920s of “the Black Horror on the the Rhine” should dissuade us from adopting the view, currently in vogue, that this sort of “fake news” is a consequence of the modern revolution in social media.”
A footnote to the above is the mention of the Drudge Report, which linked to Russian propaganda sites in its reporting 400 times between 2012 and 2017. 2017 was the year when it was exposed. This week, the State Department confirmed that Russian state media is tied to Russian military intelligence, so the Drudge Report was pointing Americans to covert influence activities — not journalism.
As my podcast partner Jim Stewartson wrote today:
Weird. If it wasn’t so BlueAnon, I would say it’s almost like the entire “right wing” is just a giant Russian psyop to terrorize and brainwash Americans into hating each other instead of fixing anything, because it benefits oligarchs & foreign enemy nation-states.—Jim Stewartson on X/Twitter
The question I posed to our federal agencies, taking action at long last to begin dismantling Russian influence operations, is when do they handcuff the billionaires, who push this poison on us?
Critically important, the US State Department TKO’d the free speech argument the billionaires hide behind.
Peter Thiel and JD Vance are still hosting RT. I asked my other podcast partner High Fidelity to send a screenshot from a typical example of an RT post hosted on Rumble, funded by Thiel and Vance. He sent me an example of one RT livestream that had been viewed 23 million times.
Is that enough? 23 million minds ingesting covert influence directed by Russian military intelligence? Or do we take action when it’s 50 million views or a hundred million views? If this were Agent Orange, being carpet bombed on citizens, would we just standby and say, ‘Whatever, it’s the internet.’
A VP candidate spreading and platforming Russian propaganda is a national emergency. The world’s richest man spreading and boosting Russian propaganda on a platform he owns is an international emergency.
I have joined in the campaign to release the list of 2,800 journalists, influencers, academics, businessman, bloggers, politicians, veterans, and comedians that the Russian directors of the doppelganger operation were monitoring on social media. Twenty-one percent of them were US-based.
Not everything can be as tidy as the examples I used in my report on How Is Being a Paid Propagandist Not a Crime? A German, pro-Putin author fails to disclose he took 600,000 Euros from a Putin bag man. A US retired general fails to disclose he received $530,000 from an Erdogan cutout until after he posts a hit piece on an Erdogan nemesis in The Hill. Kim Kardashian boosts magic internet money, failing to report the quarter million she received to promote.
Late-night gumshoeing for more examples, I found a reporter who worked for both OAN and Sputnik, simultaneously. Now this might shock you, but among the made-up stories the reporter wrote was one about Hillary Clinton paying antifa. Here is an excerpt from a 2019 Daily Beast report:
Kristian Brunovich Rouz, originally from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, has been living in San Diego, where OAN is based, since August 2017, reporting on U.S. politics for the 24-hour news channel. For all of that time, he’s been simultaneously writing for Sputnik, a Kremlin-owned news wire that played a role in Russia’s 2016 election-interference operation, according to an assessment by the U.S. intelligence community.
Rouz’s on-air reports for OAN include a wholly fabricated 2017 segment claiming Hillary Clinton is secretly bankrolling antifa through her political action committee. Clinton, Rouz claimed falsely, gave antifa protesters $800,000 that “went toward things like bricks, hammers, bats, and chains.”
Other smears target billionaire financier George Soros, a longtime Kremlin bête noire. In one segment, Rouz amplified a thoroughly debunked claim that Soros collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, when the Jewish philanthropist was 14 years old. Another Rouz story accused Soros of secretly funding migrant caravans.
And as the latest moral panic concoction begins its inevitable descent below the fold, the migrant caravans will return, as soon as the sun will rise. Putin’s US proxies will screw up their faces in outrage as they create ‘othering’ fear so vital to the DNA of fascist movements.
And somewhere on Twitter, a QAnon superspreader is promising more carnage, because it’s important to escalate once you have everyone’s attention:
If you’re disgusted seeing videos of Satanists eating and sucking the blood out of live cats, brace yourselves.
They’re also doing this to children including babies and toddlers.
The cats is soft disclosure for the darker and more difficult truths that many of us have been screaming about for years.—Liz Crokin on X/Twitter, 882K views
Usually, I am better than this, but some days, I just can’t help it. What can I say? The sea was angry that day, my friend.
I gave Liz a quote tweet, where I reported:
The dingo ate your baby.🤡 🇷🇺👍🏽
I am not always mature, but I know when someone’s trying to create moral panic.
The sooner we name it and shame it, the sooner we get back to the joy of saving democracy.
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It was the intent and design of the methodology of the madness of the “advertising” as the affidavit discusses. This is the rope designed to hang oneself in the Depersonalization Derealization spectrum.
https://substack.com/@lanitajones/note/c-69078090?r=ttmjq&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action