This Week in Misinformation: Q Murders in Michigan, FBI-Lindell Meetup at Hardee's, Trump on the Golf Course
15 September 2022
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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.
A man who had fallen for conspiracy theories killed his wife and severely injured his daughter in Michigan.
Igor Lanis, resident of Walled Lake, used a handgun to shoot his wife and a shotgun to shoot his daughter and police arrived on the scene, who returned fire and killed him (Detroit News, 46.81).
Lanis’s other daughter told the Detroit News that she had seen her father succumb to mental illness after “reading all those weird things on the internet,” specifically "crazy ideas" like QAnon and conspiracy theories about Trump and vaccines. In her words, “[n]obody could talk him out of” these beliefs.
In what I see as a testament to the ability of Q adherents to spin difficult realities into palatable narratives for one another, one influencer in their community made the grisly affair into--what else?--a false flag that was staged to make QAnon look bad (@rothschildmd via Twitter).
The federal investigations into election machine tampering and fake electors ramped up.
As part of the probe into Tina Peters of Colorado (CBS News, 46.07), the county clerk indicted for helping unauthorized individuals gain access to a Dominion system after the election, pillow magnate Mike Lindell had his phone taken by the FBI this week (NBC News, 45.66). If they have a warrant they can do that, even if you’re in line for Hardee’s drive-thru.
And would you look at that, the search of Lindell’s phone has also led to new details about the January 6th investigation (CNN, 42.40). No wonder Lindell is hiring Alan Dershowitz to help him sue the U.S. Government (@Out5p0ken via Twitter), because who knows where things could go from here!
Lindell being targeted is just the highest-decibeled of the recent indicators of these Department of Justice inquiries. The FBI also seized the phone of election denier and Lindell associate Douglas Frank (Washington Post, 40.07), investigators issued at least at least 40 new subpoenas (New York Times, 42.92), and the DoJ secured the cooperation of former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (CNN, 42.40).
Trump himself was the subject of unfounded controversy, giving him and his allies a bit of ammunition to push back when they get in trouble for lying.
It started when the former president was seen landing at an airport near Washington, DC unexpectedly. On the left, rumors flew based on this sighting alone that he had been forced to come to be indicted and arraigned by the feds, or that he had been summoned to testify before a grand jury, or maybe he had a health incident and was coming to be checked out at Walter Reed? Was he wearing golf shoes because he came in a hurry from somewhere (Daily Beast, 35.76)? Was that a government jet he flew on? No, no, no, and no. The plane was one of his.
The next place he popped up was on a golf course, in fact (Newsweek, 38.40), but again theories ran amok: was that election denier Gregg Phillips and propagandist Sean Hannity with him? House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy? Was this some kind of consultation with yet another set of lawyers? Why weren’t they golfing out there, was this a mob-style meeting held purposely far from prying law enforcement microphones? Well, no to all of that as well; it was about the course itself, which he owns, and what needed to be fixed so it could host a big Saudi-sponsored golf event (Insider, 43.02). The guys with Trump were mostly types who manage the property.
You can guess that none of the rampant speculation, and the walking out onto what were very thin reeds, was helpful, and in fact quite the opposite. Trump aide Boris Epshteyn, for example, wasted no time pointing this out (Politico, 42.69), bolstering the narrative that it’s the other side, not theirs, that is removed from reality. What he said on Bannon’s show: “The mainstream media loves to degrade MAGA and talk about conspiracy theory this or that, or how MAGA is a bunch of kooks. The next thing you know they get one inkling and they’re writing about what kind of jacket the president is wearing or what shoes he has on. They have tin foil hats from here to Timbuktu.”
It’s going to take more discipline to get on the high ground of this issue, people. If we can’t, there will be no stopping Trump’s gaslighting--for example on the trouble he’s in with the FBI, over which he made veiled threats of “big problems” for the country if he is indicted for illegally keeping government records at his home (Politico, 42.69).
And with that, we’ll dive into our scrumptious grab bag: QAnon isn’t quite sure what to say about the massive Ukrainian counteroffensive routing Russian invaders; NewsGuard found that TikTok search results are riddled with misinformation; the screen shot of Trump claiming to have been knighted by the Queen is fake; the “investigate Mueller” probe led by John Durham is winding down with not much to show for it; Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg write in The Atlantic (39.10) about how memes led to the January 6th insurrection; expect to see more public hearings from the January 6th Committee starting September 28th; more than half of Republican Senate nominees have rejected, cast doubt upon, or tried to overturn the 2020 election results; and supporters of the former president are flooding election offices with so many 2020 requests that it is distracting from their ability to administer the 2022 vote.
All this, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin