This Week in Misinformation: Votes for QAnon (But Ron Loses), J6 Texts Wiped, Alex Jones Texts Spilled
4 August 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.
Election misinformation had a big week as Republican primary contests ended in unsubstantiated recriminations and a couple of wins for people deep into conspiracy theories.
What once was all about Donald Trump and the presidential race has taken hold at the local level (CNN, 42.40), and in some cases with the attempted assistance of a sheriff (Reuters, 47.93) or the increasing number of conspiracy theory-minded state and local officials.
Election truther candidates across the country, and especially those who lost their primary races, are following the Trump playbook of claiming fraud (Axios, 44.35) when there is no evidence to support it. It’s becoming ingrained into the Republican way of doing politics now, apparently.
The QAnon fairy tale has played no small role in spreading election denialism far and wide on the right, and now QAnon boosters themselves are going up for office in key states (BBC, 46.18). In Arizona, for example, self-styled “decertification” champion Mark Finchem emerged victorious to be the Republican nominee for Secretary of State (Newsweek, 38.38), meaning if he wins in November he will be running that state’s 2024 election. QAnon-famous Ron Watkins, on the other hand, finished seventh out of seven in his primary for a rural Arizona Congressional District (Daily Dot, 37.32).
There were signs of a possible January 6th coverup spanning major departments of Trump’s government.
First it was the Secret Service whose texts were reported missing (Washington Post, 40.01). Then the Homeland Security watchdog who declined to get to the bottom of the Secret Service shenanigans was accused of misleading investigators (Washington Post, 40.01). Further up the chain, more messages were missing from the devices of the Trump appointees leading DHS at the time (Washington Post, 40.01).
Separately--but at this point, you have to wonder how separately--the January 6th text messages of key Trump-appointed officials at the Defense Department also have been lost to history (CNN, 42.40) despite having been official records that must be preserved by law.
On the question of whether any of this is a crime, federal investigators might be close to the limit of what their resources will allow them to pursue (NBC News, 45.80) as part of the Justice Department’s largest ever probe. There was one particularly notable addition to the team investigating Trump, however, with a top public corruption prosecutor being brought on board to supervise (Insider, 43.21). Color me intrigued.
Alex Jones is out a few million dollars. And, amusingly in light of the above, he’s out all of his text messages from the past couple years.
As lawyers argued in the courtroom what damages he owed the families of Sandy Hook victims, the company behind Jones’s InfoWars show filed for bankruptcy (Reuters, 47.93). By his own admission, this was a gambit to try and stay on the air after being imminently forced to pay out compensatory and probably punitive damages (@RonFilipkowski via Twitter).
At the time of this writing, the jury had already assessed the former to be worth $4.1 million, while the latter was still being deliberated. But a possibly more interesting development was that due to bad lawyering, the entire contents of Jones’s phone came into possession of the plaintiffs (NBC News, 45.80). Among other implications, the January 6th Committee (Rolling Stone, 38.77) and multiple law enforcement agencies (@willsommer via Twitter) have wasted no time trying to get their hands on the digital cache, which could have evidence pertinent to their respective investigations.
Finally, it wouldn’t be an InfoWars story without conspiracy theories! Some of Jones’s fans have asserted that the trial itself is staged (@SethDaire via Twitter), but how would that even work… unless… Alex has been an actor all along? For what it’s worth, the new Alex says he believes Sandy Hook was "100% real" (Politico, 42.74), so maybe he IS a body double.
We go light on the grab bag this evening: the DoJ sues Trump adviser Peter Navarro for the contents of his encrypted email; Arizona Republicans involved in the fake electors scheme were worried at the time it might "appear treasonous" (ya think?); those “dead people” who voted in Arizona were very much alive; the team leading Truth Social for Trump winked and nodded at QAnon from the start to grow the platform’s user base; and the feds indict a Russian national for waging an influence campaign in the U.S.
That, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin