Remember when Hillary Clinton said “Can’t we just drone this guy?” about Julian Assange? Heck, Wikileaks tweeted it in monospace font with yellow highlight! That means it’s from some leaked document, right? Well, actually, Wikileaks put text from a right-wing website, TruePundit, in monospace font and highlighted the relevant quote. (Unsurprisingly, many who shared it attributed it to Wikileaks instead.) That citation, in turn, quoted “State Department sources”.
Now, you might argue that it seems unlikely that anonymous “State Department sources” would leak such an important story to an obscure right-wing website. And indeed Snopes did, flagging it as “unproven”. Yet thanks in large part to the Wikileaks attention and lots of social media sharing, it got enough traction to be raised by media, causing Hillary to say that she didn’t remember making such a comment, and if indeed she did, it would have been a joke. (Really, that was the only thing she could responsibly say — nobody remembers every comment they’ve ever made.) That was again picked up by Wikileaks, who characterized her as “eyes downcast, stammering”.
So now that a few weeks have passed, what has TruePundit been up to? Oh, here’s their latest story: “BREAKING BOMBSHELL: NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation, Pay to Play, Perjury” (archive.is copy). The story quotes, once again, unnamed NYPD sources, claiming that the emails found on Weiner’s laptop reveal (and I’m quoting verbatim here):
- Money laundering
- Child exploitation
- Sex crimes with minors (children)
- Perjury
- Pay to play through Clinton Foundation
- Obstruction of justice
- Other felony crimes
What a lovely laundry list straight from the conspiracy theory machine factory! The story also suggests that the NYPD source stated that if necessary, the NYPD itself would leak the information: “We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.”
Both stories don’t have a byline and are simply posted by “admin”. Of course this is pure silliness that doesn't even pass the most cursory of smell tests. (Really, your NYPD source wants to go to Wikileaks, but first they leak to the anonymous crack team at TruePundit.com?) Yet, the same website was sourced by Wikileaks and Fox News, and its content has been shared endlessly on social media.
Meanwhile, the “Christian Times Newspaper” published a very similar story which was simply labeled as “false” by Snopes given that “Christian Times Newspaper” has previously self-identified as a fake news source and has a record of such nonsense (incidentally, under the username “admin1” with the name “John Chefetz”, a name that did not exist on the Internet before March 2016 — the few hits are false positives or incorrectly dated current stories).
The recipe here is simple: pay one or two writers to anonymously set up a website, post a lot of content, and mix completely made-up stuff that’s consistent with what many people want to believe with more Breitbart-style innuendo and one-sided copy/paste reporting. Throw enough mud to hope some of it sticks, until the website in question is completely discredited. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Whatever commitment Wikileaks has to truth (they print the word on their t-shirts, for one thing), it clearly does not include critically examining content that conforms to their own point of view regarding what Hillary Clinton is capable of. Given their own nearly 4M followers on Twitter, their willingness to spread content from sources like TruePundit.com makes them useful idiots from the point of view of those seeking to spread lies and nonsense.
Our response has to be twofold:
- accelerate the cycle by quickly pointing out when new sites like this pop up, and explaining how they work;
- point out the general pattern to people who believe or share this stuff.
In that spirit, if you see people posting from “True Pundit” or similar websites, please point them to this, or a similar, piece.