This Week in Misinformation: Indictment Tales, Kennedy and Musk, UFOs and the Unabomber
15 June 2023
We’re back! This week is a double to make up for skipping (too much happening that Thursday night to report it out well). Thanks for your patience.
Reliability scores for media outlets cited in the summary are in parentheses for each, courtesy of the terrific folks at Ad Fontes Media.
Now, on to our top stories.
You may have heard that a federal indictment came for Donald Trump, and that he was subsequently arraigned in Miami.
The crux of the accusations is that the former President wilfully refused to return documents that he knew he possessed and was not allowed to keep. So right off the bat, you’ve got a sizable gap between anything that Biden, Pence, or either of the Clintons ever did (Associated Press, 48.40).
Predictably, all kinds of fake stuff related to the crimes Trump is alleged to have committed has cropped up in the hours and days since he was alleged to have committed them. Sure, there’s the quaint ones: Trump didn’t keep any nuclear documents (he did), Special Counsel Jack Smith tampered with evidence (prove it!), etc. But the most popular seemed to be a legally backwards reading of the Presidential Records Act (CBS News, 41.16) and that a person cannot be charged under the Espionage Act if there is no literal espionage (CNN, 42.16).
Trump and others tried to cast criticisms of these bogus claims, for example by his one-time Attorney General Bill Barr, as “misinformation,” but overall the consensus of legal experts is that this indictment poses a real threat. Informed analysis seems to hold little sway in Trumpworld, though, beginning with Trump’s rejection of it in this matter and instead following quack advice from Tom Fitton (Washington Post, 38.13).
The Trump fans over in QAnon, meanwhile, have merrily convinced one another that getting himself arrested is all part of the plan, and that he is leaving all kinds of bread crumbs for them to mash together into a deeply meaningful, prescient loaf. Another brilliant chess move that will expedite the downfall.
One billionaire reinstates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr; another courts his favor.
The Democratic Party scion, who recently got his Instagram back after being suspended, was invited by Elon Musk himself to do a live chat on Twitter to advertise his presidential run (Fox News, 24.83). Kennedy and Musk wasted no time in letting the thing devolve into a hot mess of misinformation, mostly of the kind you see on the right wing of American politics (New York Times, 41.99).
Kennedy does election trutherism--for example he has publicly argued the 2004 election was stolen from John Kerry--and even dabbles in conspiracy theories about mass shootings (Forbes, 40.91). What he’s known best for, though, is being outspoken and wrong about vaccines, especially since COVID shots entered the picture.
Kennedy is great for Very Online and reality-departed people (Time, 41.12), but it looks like he might not be palatable for Democrats in 2024 (The Hill, 42.77). Will he try to leverage his popularity with tech bros (Politico, ) to run third party instead (VICE, 38.97)? Musk, for one, came out as against literal fact-checking this week; which when you think about it is just the kind of ultra high net worth backing that Kennedy could really use.
There was some stuff about new UFO information, but it turns out the information isn’t panning (saucering?) out.
Less reputable news outlets ran headlong with the story of a military whistleblower who claimed to have evidence of a secret government UFO retrieval program (Fox News), including that the remains of many a wrecked alien craft had been collected over the years. A lot of people forgot to think critically about this one, and ballyhoo ensued.
The whistleblower went on, however, to claim a bunch of things even wilder than that aliens could traverse the galaxy but somehow kept crashing in the atmosphere of little old Earth (New York Magazine, 40.19), and this caused most people to hit pause. For example, he said the UFOs recovered could distort space and time (Daily Mail, 34.52), and the Vatican helped the US retrieve an extraterrestrial spacecraft from Benito Mussolini (New York Post, 33.38).
While we’re on the topic of dangerously deluded individuals that other dangerously deluded people are kind of defending this week: Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski has died (New York Times). The sympathy for him is apparently entering in because he was a subject of the MK ULTRA experiments of the last century--and maybe because he embodied the anti-law enforcement views that many these days are working themselves into.
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen grab ba-ag: the families left behind from mass shootings suffer again at the hands of conspiracy theorists; the online far right thinks The Wall Street Journal () story about Instagram pedophile networks…proves Pizzagate was true; former NYC police chief Bernie Kerik had a multimillion-dollar plan to pressure state legislators just before January 6th; Russia is caught by France for doing active measures to undermine democracy; it also appears to have been Russia behind the viral Pentagon explosion hoax from a couple weeks back and the proliferation of videos of destroyed Ukraine tanks; the unignorable wildfire smoke prompted all kinds of conspiracy theories among people who mostly wanted to deny it was related to climate change; the USAF guy who said an AI drone killed its human operator in a simulation is walking back that horrific anecdote; Tucker’s view count is… somewhat inflated; and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley wrongly attributes teen girl depression and suicides to the existence of trans people.
All that, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin