The usual stable of lunatics are getting some assistance this time around from the aggressively anti-Clinton Julian Assange, who's already made it clear he'll be releasing Russian-hacked DNC emails in a slow trickle from now to the election in an effort to keep the story alive. He's doing his best to suggest the now-dead staffer was a "source" of information, despite all available evidence suggesting not-that.
"Whistleblowers often take very significant efforts to bring us material and often at very significant risks," Assange said in the interview, before bringing up, unpromoted, that Rich was killed "for unknown reasons." [...]
Asked what he was suggesting, Assange replied, "I'm suggesting that our sources take risks ... We are concerned about it."
Riiiiight.
On the other hand, there's a few odd details here. First, as the anti-conspiracy site Snopes notes, the rumors of the staffer's murder comes from a conspiracy site that, via RationalWiki:
usually includes a sensational headline barely related to reality and quotes authoritative high-level Russian sources (such as the Russian Federal Security Service) to support its most outrageous claims.
A Russian-connected conspiracy site is pushing the notion that Russian hackers weren't behind the leaks, it was just Some Guy? Well that's a heck of a coincidence. In response to even more elaborate conspiracy claims, Snopes also notes that Rich was not nearly as involved in DNC operations as the version conspiracy theorists have invented:
[T]he 27-year-old staffer worked in voter expansion, helping people "find their polling places"; Rich's age and the relatively minor scope of his duties made him an unlikely linchpin in a conspiracy involving election fraud or any purported testimony against Hillary Clinton.
None of that is likely to make much difference to a pro-Trump crowd obsessed with more separate conspiracy theories than can at this point even be counted. Because, we repeat again, the sort of conservatism that gave rise to Donald Trump, the one that cheers his "birther" claims and the supposition of Mexican rapists, secret threats from American Muslims, and so on, and so on, is patched together with nothing but conspiracy theories. There's no core ideology there, just a Jade Helm-of-the-week, an unending stream of "the United Nations is coming for our golf courses" or "Central American children fleeing violence are being sent by ISIS."
I think this will probably be the last time we talk about this, because the conservative operation of smearing dead people and their families with claims of foul deeds is nauseating and gross. It was during the 1990's, and when the same crowd supposed the Khan's fallen U.S. Army son was probably secretly in league with al Qaeda, and it is now. They are grotesque people who revel in saying grotesque things, so long as those things prop up their increasingly tenuous faux-reality, and they deserve only our mockery and scorn.
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