On December 4th, a gunman entered Comet Ping Pong, a Washington D.C. pizza parlor, to "self-investigate" an insane online conspiracy theory claiming the establishment was part of a worldwide child sex trafficking ring somehow tied to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Where did gunman Edgar Welch get such a transparently insane idea? The newly released criminal complaint reveals that just days before entering the restaurant, Welch forwarded to a friend an Alex Jones-promoted video promoting the fraudulent conspiracy. Now Jones’ team is scrubbing that and other "pizzagate" content from his site, Facebook, and YouTube channels.
Jones and Infowars appear to be scrubbing separate commentary about pizzagate. Jones’ YouTube channel posted a November 23 video headlined “Pizzagate Is Real: Something Is Going On, But What?” The video has since “been removed by the user,” though it’s not clear when.
The video has been re-uploaded by other conspiracy theorists (some of whom speculated about why Jones deleted it). During the video, Jon Bowne states that Clinton allies are “using a code to communicate child sex trafficking as casually as ordering a pizza.” The video then states that Comet Ping Pong “may be competing for the lucrative Washington, D.C., pedophile market right out in the open.”
Jones promoted the video on his Facebook account but has since deleted the post. Infowars also deleted a November 27 article by Bowne that promoted the video.
It is likely, according to me, that Jones is attempting to scrub links to his own “pizzagate” content because he knows being the identified source of a conspiracy theory cited by a gun-toting lunatic entering a restaurant to "investigate" those wild claims makes it Extremely Really Super Damn Likely that he is about to be sued for every penny Comet's lawyers can wring from his greasy hide.
Godspeed, you lawyers. Godspeed.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—Stuart Taylor's Credibility Gap on ScAlito:
In the Bush Administration pushback on ScAlito (he has taken some major hits already), the "outside the White House" pushback is being led by Conservative shill Stuart Taylor (I use "shill" deliberately here because too many people want to treat Stuart Taylor as some nonpartisan. His dishonest work on Monicagate, when he failed to disclose his ties to Kenneth Starr tells you all you need to know about his credibility).
It is important to understand who and what Stuart Taylor is because I suspect he will be leading the Conservative charge on ScAlito in January. And what line is Taylor shilling now for the Wingnuts? That the "liberal media" is unfairly labeling ScAlito as a conservative ideologue with credibility problems.
Of course, coming from a shill like Taylor, the facts have little room in his argument.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: More crazy people walking into Trump Tower (which is full of nuts as it is), and some are walking out with cabinet jobs. No end in sight for Trump’s conflicts. New generation Russian kompromat is scary stuff. But are we reading propaganda about propaganda?
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