This Week in Misinformation: Maui DEW-Fires, Ivermectin-Again, Georgia Indicts Trump and Co.
17 August 2023
Keeping up on misinformation is basically the best thing you can do for your brain. So glad you’re here!
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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.
We’ve got to talk about what didn’t cause the deadly, catastrophic wildfires in Maui.
Experts are still trying to sort out how the fires got so out of control that they destroyed huge swaths of the island. But we know one thing: people who are saying the fires were intentionally started by directed energy weapons originating, Goldeneye-style, in the atmosphere (Poynter, -), are quite wrong (Poynter, -). Yes, there are pictures, and the pictures are fakes (BBC, 46.15).
The theory seems to be that rich and powerful people lit the land up and killed hundreds because they wanted to swoop in and buy it cheap (VICE, 38.97). Question marks??
Aside: I love Maui and spent part of my honeymoon in Lahaina, the town that was completely destroyed by the fire. My wife and I fell in love with a charming little antique maps store there and said we would go back in a few years to peruse its collection. May we get all those on the island the help and economic recovery they need.
U.S. Senator Ron Johnson got the COVID truthers spun up over the expert-spurned drug ivermectin.
Kind of out of nowhere, the Republican senator from the great state of Wisconsin just launched into an anti-vaccine rant that included wild (if familiar) assertions that global elites pre-planned the pandemic (The Independent, 41.74).
Supposedly this was prompted by the FDA approving ivermectin as a treatment for COVID, which would imply it was always effective and known to be effective and the only reason we couldn’t use it was the powers that be didn’t want us to be treated. You know, totally reasonable conclusions to draw from the FDA changing its position.
As you may have guessed, though, the FDA approval is not even a real thing (PolitiFact, 45.22). Despite what you may be seeing in the conservative mediasphere this week, the FDA has not “admitted” that doctors can prescribe ivermectin for COVID patients (Snopes, -).
A Georgia district attorney indicted Donald Trump and a bunch of other people for trying to overturn the 2020 election.
Like the federal indictment last week, the Georgia one (Reuters, 46.68) starts with Trump losing the election and describes how he then refused to accept that outcome and orchestrated a far-reaching criminal plot--with racketeering, solicitations to impersonate officials, computer theft, the January 6th Capitol attack, and more-- to stay in power. As Trump does, he immediately lied about prosecutor Fani Willis (CNN, 42.18), but for what it’s worth the trend seems to be that more Americans are siding with those doing the prosecuting over him (New York Times, 42.00).
A number of Trump’s co-defendants (and unindicted co-conspirators) are characters I’ve written about here and talked about in the Prism Guide to January 6th voice essay, so you may recognize: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, and 45 others involved in a scheme to have states send alternate slates of electors, then have state party officials pretend to be electors for Trump, then pressure VP Pence into going along (NPR, 43.25).
A funny thing happened on the way to the late-night indictment: the list of criminal charges against Trump appeared, briefly on the Georgia court website before the grand jury was finished voting (PBS, 46.27). Afterwards the clerk explained that she had a "mishap" mixing up the send button with the save button (WSB-TV, -), and let’s be honest who among us. Some Trump defenders, and even Trump himself, seized on the incident to falsely claim the grand jury vote was rigged.
On a humorous note, the former president pledged he would release a report to end all reports on election fraud in Georgia (New York Times) in a press conference next week before surrendering himself--but his lawyers appear to have convinced him to not do that incredibly stupid thing (PBS).
Hey. Ho. Let’s grab bag: Sound of Freedom director says Jim Caviezel’s QAnon comments “hurt my work”; the hit country song by Oliver Anthony injects still more conspiracy theory stuff into the mainstream, possibly by design; Biden makes up a few personal anecdotes in a speech; Spanish-language climate disinformation is spreading online, while scientists and climate advocates are peacing out from the misinformation hellsite formerly known as Twitter; Russia gets mad at Google for not deleting “false content” about its Ukraine war; cancer treatment misinformation is no longer be tolerated on YouTube; the new boss at Project Veritas cleans house; Mike Lindell’s latest election fraud symposium thing has conspiracy theory nonsense written all over it; and Boston University snaps up Harvard disinformation scholar Joan Donovan.
All that, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin