“Mike ‘reinstatement’ Lindell says he’ll be one of the opening acts at Trump’s January 15 rally in Arizona, expects ‘60,000 people’ to show up...” We are 5 months past Trump's last reinstatement date of August 2021, and Roger Stone’s pet rocks remain on sale.
After months of failing to disprove the reality of Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss, some of the Internet’s most popular right-wing provocateurs are grappling with the pressures of restless audiences, saturated markets, ongoing investigations and millions of dollars in legal bills.
The result is a chaotic melodrama, playing out via secretly recorded phone calls, personal attacks in podcasts, and a seemingly endless stream of posts on Twitter, Gab and Telegram calling their rivals Satanists, communists, pedophiles or “pay-triots” — money-grubbing grifters exploiting the cause.
The infighting reflects the diminishing financial rewards for the merchants of right-wing disinformation, whose battles center not on policy or doctrine but on the treasures of online fame: viewer donations and subscriptions; paid appearances at rallies and conferences; and crowds of followers to buy their books and merchandise.
But it also reflects a broader confusion in the year since QAnon’s faceless nonsense-peddler, Q, went mysteriously silent.
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Although Trump is only indirectly connected to some of the increasingly personal battles, many of them show clear signs of his playbook: winning attention and overwhelming the enemy through constant, uninhibited attacks. And the animosity has begun filtering down to mid-level influencers with smaller followings, who have become divided on the basis of their loyalty to the warring camps. Some have begun marking their allegiances on Telegram with special emoji in their usernames: Three stars, for instance, means you’re on team Flynn. (His opponents haven’t agreed on a symbol yet, though some have used the three stars as a punchline.)
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But many of the fights still show the tried-and-true signatures of modern-media storytelling: the bitter rivalries and gossip that online audiences often can’t help watching.
“It’s become almost like reality TV, and what makes great reality TV is conflict,” Aniano said. “Conflict creates great content. And these people are content creators, if nothing else.”
www.washingtonpost.com/...
The November 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county was administered properly and not marred by fraud, the Republican-led local government concluded in a lengthy report released Wednesday. The 93-page document debunks, one by one, vague allegations of potential problems previously identified by the GOP-led state Senate and championed by former president Donald Trump and his allies.
County officials said the blunt rebuttal, released on the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, was intended to highlight the ongoing dangers of unfounded claims of mass election fraud.
“We have seen how people react when they think that an election has been stolen. They storm the U.S. Capitol. They threaten to kill and hang and shoot election workers. And they called other Americans traitors,” Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates (R) said Wednesday. “The American family cannot stand for that. I will not stand for that.”
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The new report, produced by the Maricopa County Elections Department, concluded that the work of the private contractors hired by the GOP-led state Senate amounted to “faulty analysis, inaccurate claims, misleading conclusions” and was based on “a lack of understanding of federal and state election laws.”
It found that of the claims made by the Senate and its contractors, 22 were “misleading,” 41 were “inaccurate” and 13 were “demonstrably false.”
The report found that even the contractors’ hand recount, which involved weeks of work by dozens of workers in colorful shirts toiling on the floor of a former NBA basketball arena, was marred by problems.
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The result of the flawed process by election novices, the county found, was to falsely malign county employees, call into question the validity of legitimate votes and damage the confidence of the electorate.
The county released the report ahead of a rally planned by Trump in Arizona on Jan. 15. On Tuesday, Trump abruptly canceled plans for a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate on the Jan. 6 anniversary, writing in a statement that he would instead speak about the election, the congressional committee investigating the attack, the news media and other topics at his Arizona event.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
"We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore," he said.