Last night, Fox News’ Sean Hannity announced he was going to stop talking about the bullshit Seth Rich murder conspiracy “for now.” Embraced by right-wing idiots looking to deflect away from all the news about Russia and a few sad and pathetic leftists who’ve come to believe the DNC is the focal point of all evil in the universe, the Rich story has, like Pizzagate before it, been a premiere example of how fake the fake news can get, as well as how things like this spread and are believed by those who want to believe it. And it didn’t hurt that it was pushed along by a joke of a news operation, which is better known nowadays for sexual harassment than its adherence to values and integrity.
For those unfamiliar, prestigious conservative assholes like Hannity, some Republican lawmakers, consummate villain Newt Gingrich, and so-called progressives that rail against Democrats (like Caitlin Johnstone), have been pushing a conspiracy theory which alleges DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of WikiLeaks’ release of DNC emails, without a single shred of evidence. This is important, since according to this theory, if Rich was the source of the emails, then in their narrow little minds it disproves the notion the DNC was hacked by Russian interests or any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Add on to this the fact Rich was murdered in the early morning hours of July 10, 2016, in what local police have described as a likely botched robbery. However for Hannity, Gingrich, and other assorted right and left-wing kooks, innuendo and fantasy have concocted a version of events in which the DNC had Rich murdered to stop his righteous attempt to expose DNC corruption and Empress Hillary Clinton’s reign of terror.
Needless to say, there is nothing factual to support this. No legitimate news organization or branch of law enforcement has found anything which lends any credence to any of it. In fact, the family of Seth Rich has disputed these assertions and asked for the respect of their loved one.
But for the fools who like fake news and are happy InfoWars is getting press passes at the White House, the lack of evidence is only further proof of the government’s and the mainstream media’s evil plot to do evil. Instead, their “concerns” are based on ambiguous tweets from hackers and every bad thing they believe about the DNC and Democrats in general, with the supreme purveyor of current fake-ness, Fox News, giving these idiots a lifeline with a story that was published last week, claiming evidence supporting some aspects of the conspiracy theories.
A private investigator named Rod Wheeler, who had been paid by a conservative donor to investigate the murder, at first asserted and then retracted his claim that Rich’s laptop was in FBI custody and contained evidence of a WikiLeaks connection. Neither allegation was true, according to Rich’s family, and none of it has confirmed on any level by an official in any capacity to know.
Yesterday, Fox News retracted the story, but that hasn’t stopped many of the blowhards from blowing. And today, another facet of the story blew up in the face of the conspiracy theorists.
Even as the Fox News report was discredited far and wide last week, many of the conspiracists pinned their hopes on the tweets of hacker Kim Dotcom, who has been putting out spurious claims to having known Rich since back in 2014, as a then-nameless source going by the alias “Panda.”
Today, that avenue of the conspiracy theory seemed to collapse.
From David Weigel at The Washington Post:
When Seth Rich’s Gmail account received an alert this week from Mega.com, attempting to start a new account on a website created by the New Zealand-based Internet businessman and convicted hacker Kim Dotcom, his family knew that something was off.
Over seven frenzied days, Dotcom had become a leading purveyor of the theory that Rich, a staffer at the Democratic National Committee who was shot dead near his home in Northeast Washington last summer, had supplied DNC documents to WikiLeaks and was killed as a result. Multiple security analysts and an FBI investigation have tied the release to hackers with ties to Russia. D.C. police have said repeatedly that they think Rich was slain in a random robbery attempt.
According to experts and Rich’s family, the emailed invitation from welcome@mega.nz appeared to be an attempt to gain access to Rich’s email. Joel Rich, who maintains his late son’s Gmail account, did not click the link. Meanwhile, Dotcom was promising on Twitter to prove that the younger Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks — and Fox News host Sean Hannity was telling his 2.37 million Twitter followers to be ready for a revelation.
Hannity had invited Dotcom to appear on his show for what he said on Twitter would be a “#GameChanger” interview. The implication: that Dotcom would finally offer evidence of his claim that Rich had sent internal DNC documents to WikiLeaks before his death.
All that began to unravel Tuesday afternoon, when Fox News retracted a story that had claimed the same Rich-WikiLeaks connection, telling readers that the article was “not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.” Fox News did not respond to a request for comment, but Dotcom wrote on his website that he would not speak further about his allegations.
Of course, for the true believers, it doesn’t matter. Irrational beliefs are inherently irrational and by definition can’t be dissuaded with logic. So people can waste their breath trying to reason with a bunch of people that believe in fantasies, or ridicule them for behaving stupidly.
Let’s go for the latter tonight, as well as asking the question: where do media hoaxes come from? Does it come from ideological want, a belief in an enlightened superiority in being contrarian, or is it largely a function of ego for the Hannitys of this world and their ilk?
Someone I hold very dear likes to get drunk with me. And when she gets drunk, sometimes we have a good time, and sometimes she can get going and tell me I’m too mainstream by participating in politics and trying to change things through government. That it’s the system that’s corrupt, and I’m just being a stooge by believing “what they want you to believe.” Inherent in her criticism is the idea that it’s somehow more enlightened to be a cynic about everything, without evidence cynicism is even warranted. Therefore, the lack of evidence for nutty beliefs is no impediment, since the facts themselves become suspect because they come from people with ties to the CIA, Illuminati, or whatever other bogeyman someone has in the back of their mind.
But with Trump supporters and everyone else sympathetic to believing the worst about Democrats, there is an “us vs. them” dynamic. If someone says something they like, they believe it because someone who shares their ideology said it and thus they want to believe it because it reinforces their own opinions. And it takes on a similar nature to sports. Fans will scream bloody murder about a player on the opposition, how he’s no good and a horrible human being. But if he starts playing for their team and plays decently, they’ll forget about all that and make excuses. It’s one thing to do that for some asshole playing for the Cowboys or Steelers because he’s having a Pro Bowl season, but it’s another thing when it’s the asshole cutting health benefits and thinks the problem with the budget of the United States government is that too many people get Medicaid.
It’s tribal. It can be described as cult-ish. And there is almost a childishness to it, as well (i.e., it’s right because mommy said so, and mommy is always right). Which leads to the larger question of whether someone like Sean Hannity actually believes his own bullshit. Is he so much of a sycophant that if tomorrow Trump came out and said: “up is down and right is left,” would Sean puppet it like everything else, because if a Republican/conservative says it that means it’s true? Or is Hannity just in this for the money and notoriety, and knows he has an audience of gullible dipshits who will believe anything as long as that anything sticks it to liberals?
From Paul Bond at The Hollywood Reporter:
Sean Hannity has lost two advertisers — Cars.com and Peloton — presumably over his coverage of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was murdered a year ago.
Cars.com did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday, though it issued a statement to BuzzFeed saying that after "watching closely" it has decided it will no longer advertise on Hannity, the conservative host's show on the Fox News Channel.
Peloton, a purveyor of exercise bikes, tweeted its decision directly to Hannity, Fox News and others: "We directed our media agency to stop advertising on Sean Hannity's show. This will take a few days to take effect."
The two advertisers made their decision one day after Media Matters for America published an article calling Hannity "a bigot, a sexist, and a conspiracy theorist." The article didn't explicitly call for a boycott, though it listed more 100 companies that advertise on Hannity.