We have a problem. We’ve had this problem for years but in this last election it morphed into an all out assault on our country. Fake News started spreading across social media, possibly in targeted fashion, to receive the ultimate benefit. Hillary Clinton received the lion’s share of it. But it hasn’t ended. An interesting, if not disgusting article by WIRED exposes GOP staffers using reddit to craft their latest piece of legislation to go after Clinton and Comey,
“a group of Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee presented an amendment calling for an investigation into alleged misconduct on the parts of Hillary Clinton and James Comey. It was a way to frustrate Democrats, but, more than that, it provided an opportunity to publicly discuss their very favorite thing: the many bygone misdeeds of Crooked Hillary. The amendment may sound to some readers like it's been ripped out of a conspiracy forum, because that's exactly what happened.”
On the first level we have the GOP using it’s power in Congress to target a person as means of distraction, a clear abuse of power. It’s not new but it’s still disgusting. But the next level takes it out of the park, their using a reddit thread to come up with the idea’s on what to go after them with.
“Thursday night, three Twitter users discovered that a staffer for one of the resolution’s sponsors attempted to crowdsource a number of the resolution's salient points from r/The_Donald, a subreddit notorious for playing host to unfounded conspiracy theories and anti-Islam tendencies. In other words, not a conventional source of legislative inspiration.
"If the purpose of oversight investigations is to get to the truth," one longtime legislative staffer explained, "then using baseless conspiracies as your starting point is completely counterproductive to a direct investigation."
The reason why this article is so important is that journalists are now starting to dig in real time to see where these conspiracies are coming from and expose how Republicans are coming up with their ideas/legislation. If we don’t pay attention to this and counter it with transparency then GOP will continue to use it to fuel conspiracies.
This article exposes a lot of creep factor. The staffer on Reddit also posted a Pepe gif on one of his accounts the day before inauguration. It’s really nuts to see how far down the rabbit hole they’ve gone.