https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/online-amplifiers-anti-lgbtq-extremism

Published: 01.24.2023
From: Center on Extremism
In recent months, a handful of high-follower social media accounts have driven the rapid spread of dangerous and false narratives designed to marginalize and demonize the LGBTQ+ community. Online amplifiers of anti-LGBTQ+ hate and extremism use their influence to push baseless tropes and conspiracy theories to their millions of followers. These claims are frequently picked up by major far right media personalities, expanding their reach. Online amplifiers are key players in an ecosystem of anti-LGBTQ+ hate that drives online harassment campaigns against LGBTQ+ individuals and groups, and spreads narratives which inspire real-world extremist activities, threats and even violence.

The Center on Extremism is tracking several of the biggest online amplifiers of anti-LGBTQ+ extremism:

Libs of TikTok

Libs of TikTok (LoTT) is an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist social media account run by Chaya Raichik. Using false allegations of “grooming,” “child abuse” and “indoctrination,” LoTT frequently targets educators, healthcare professionals and drag performers who either identify as LGBTQ+ or work on LGBTQ+-related issues. Notable narratives promoted by LoTT include an “investigation” into Boston Children’s Hospital and a mega thread vilifying drag shows during Pride Month. Those targeted often report experiencing threats, harassment and real-world violence in the wake of the LoTT campaign against them. LoTT, with a large following of 1.7m on Twitter and significant presence on other major social media platforms, is frequently cited and further amplified by right-wing media figures and politicians, including Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Tweet on Dec. 27th showing LoTT’s promotion of hateful and baseless conspiracy theories regarding the LGBTQ+ community following Raichik’s interview on Tucker Carlson. This post reached an estimated 1.2M viewers, up from LoTT’s average of 984K views per Tweet.

Following LoTT’s inflammatory “investigation” into the gender-affirming care services offered by Boston Children’s Hospital in August 2022, three bomb threats were directed against the facility with two perpetrators directly stating they were targeting services for LGBTQ+ minors.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/opinion/early-abortion.html

No paywall
https://archive.is/Qqava

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Primary care clinicians like us who provide early abortions in their practices have long known that the pregnancy tissue we remove does not look like what most people expect. After Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and early pregnancy termination was banned across more than a dozen states, we felt it was important to make this information public and show the images we have seen more widely.

It’s important to us to counter medical misinformation related to early pregnancy because about 80 percent of abortions in the United States occur at nine weeks or earlier. So much of the imagery that people see about abortion comes from abortion opponents who have spent decades spreading misleading fetal imagery to further their cause.

Last fall, as members of the MYA (My Abortion) Network, a clinician-led organization dedicated to educating people about abortion and expanding early abortion services into primary care settings, we launched a multimedia project to provide accurate information regarding early pregnancy tissue after abortion.

The Guardian published our first photos on Oct. 19; they went viral, appearing in media outlets and getting shared widely on social media.

Many people, even those who support abortion rights, did not believe the photos were accurate. Some insisted we had deliberately removed the embryos before taking the photos. The images weren’t consistent with those often seen in embryological textbooks, magnified on ultrasounds or used in anti-abortion propaganda; these enlarged images are not what you see with the naked eye after an abortion. A Stanford gynecologic pathologist has validated our photos, but many people could not believe the pictures were presented unaltered.

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Forced birthers still won't accept this

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031329

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INTRODUCTION

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, social media were rife with conspiracy theories about the origins, spread, and treatment of the virus. One conspiracy theory alleged that the virus was deliberately manufactured in a Chinese laboratory to wage war on the West. Another put forward the notion that it was all a hoax. In early 2022, a conspiracy theory alleged that there were US chemical weapons laboratories in Ukraine, and another conspiracy theory advanced the argument that the war in Ukraine was started deliberately by billionaires while they prepared a new virus to let loose on the world. Conspiracy theories like these—allegations that two or more actors have coordinated in secret to achieve an outcome, and that their actions are of public interest but not widely known by the public—abound in social and political discourse. However, even though they are more visible due to advances in communication technology, they are not a new phenomenon. For instance, in earlier decades conspiracy theories have alleged that Diana, Princess of Wales, was assassinated by the British secret service; that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job; and that the Apollo moon landings were a hoax. Conspiracy theories have therefore always been with us. When we hear news about important social and political events and circumstances, we also hear conspiracy theories about them.

Despite the prominence of conspiracy theories, psychological scientists have only begun to study them in earnest in the past 20 years. The development of this research agenda is important for many reasons. To give just one example, belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories has been linked with reluctance to take the behavioral precautions and vaccines required to protect public health. Throughout their history, conspiracy theories have been associated with violence, war, terrorism, prejudice, poor health choices, and denial of climate change. In many important ways, therefore, conspiracy theories matter.

Progress in the study of this important topic has been spectacular. We have prepared this article to review this progress, highlighting what we know, and what we are yet to learn, about the psychology of conspiracy theories. Moving beyond the boundaries of a descriptive review, we argue that significantly more progress will be achieved if we pay more careful attention to determining exactly what we are studying. We argue therefore for analyzing the essential features of conspiracy theories and their implications for the causes, consequences, and transmission of conspiracy beliefs.

We begin by reviewing the empirical literature on conspiracy theories, highlighting both the abundance and the disorganization of empirical discoveries in this literature. We then take a step back to propose a reasoned definition of conspiracy theories. From this, we derive an inventory of some of their most important inherent characteristics. We then articulate a metatheoretical framework in which hypotheses about the acceptance, sharing, and impacts of conspiracy theories can be inferred from these defining characteristics. We argue that this framework synthesizes hitherto disconnected insights into the antecedents, transmission, and consequences of conspiracy belief, and it promises to promote and direct innovation in further research.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump


One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.

The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.

The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.

Economists agree that we needed massive deficit spending during the COVID-19 crisis to ward off an economic cataclysm, but federal finances under Trump had become dire even before the pandemic. That happened even though the economy was booming and unemployment was at historically low levels. By the Trump administration’s own description, the pre-pandemic national debt level was already a “crisis” and a “grave threat.”

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https://religiondispatches.org/celebrating-religious-freedom-day-by-taking-back-the-revolutionary-meaning-of-religious-freedom/

Religious freedom has been at the center of American history since the founding. (And by the founding, I mean of the United States of America, not including the roughly century-and-a-half of colonial era.) There’s a story of religious freedom in the U.S. that isn’t widely or well understood—and is fiercely contested by the Christian Right.

Religious freedom was and is a revolutionary and liberatory concept that can disrupt entangled religious and political establishments and corrupt alliances of convenience. On Religious Freedom Day (January 16th) some will praise faith, and maybe the Founding Fathers, and some will call for interfaith understanding. Nothing wrong with all that. But if they fail to discuss the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which the day is intended to commemorate, they will have muffed the meaning and power of the moment.

There are many roots of religious freedom, but the story of religious freedom as a constitutional right in the US begins with the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was originally drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and shepherded through the Virginia legislature by James Madison in 1786. The following year, Madison served as the lead author of the Constitution, and in 1789, as the lead author of the First Amendment. Thus, the Virginia Statute is rightly understood to be the clearest statement of the intentions of the Framers in matters of the right relationship between the individual, religion, and government.

Historian John Ragosta’s thumbnail history of the bill at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello recognizes this. He quotes Madison saying that the Virginia Statute “is a true standard of Religious liberty: its principle the great barrier agst. usurpations on the rights of conscience. As long as it is respected… these will be safe.”

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https://trumpresearchbook.com/

Welcome to American Bridge 21st Century's Donald Trump opposition research hub. Originally launched before the 2020 election, this website exists to help allies find the research needed to defeat Donald Trump. It's organized into multiple reports designed to help you tell the full story about Trump's failed presidency and make the case against his 2024 campaign.

https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/the-great-right-wing-con-job

Let us say you are thinking about the motive forces of hatred—what drives it and who is drawn to it and why.

Somewhere along the meandering path towards understanding you encounter a Trump-themed Red Bull rip-off called Winning Energy, whose shabby aura, a quintessence of the MAGA aesthetic, offers its own set of answers.

It’s a homepage you can almost smell. The vibe is a Klan meeting with a cash bar, seedy lounge-singer covers of Wagner, gilt that comes off on your fingers, a $999 deal on a late-night infomercial with the volume cranked all the way up. The can says its ingredients are liberal tears, but the label adds glucuronalactone and pantothenic acid. Very thin women in bikinis hold up the beverage in promo photos; it’s endorsed by an evangelical rapper and a graying male YouTuber whose videos include “Basic Bitches 101.” Winning Energy will help you kick “Sleepy Joe” syndrome, and it comes in sugar-free.

Or it did once, anyway. Timothy Shea, the founder of the company, was convicted in late 2022 of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, and now the email list offers an error message when you try to sign up.

Of prominent hate figures—like UK professional racist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon a.k.a. Tommy Robinson, or snake-oil tycoon Alex Jones—the question is often asked: do they sincerely believe all this shit, or are they just trying to make a buck?

The answer is yes.

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/a-plot-to-overturn-an-american-election

The messages you are about to read are the definitive, real-time record of a plot to overturn an American election.

TPM has obtained the 2,319 text messages that Mark Meadows, who was President Trump’s last White House chief of staff, turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Today, we are publishing The Meadows Texts, a series based on an in-depth analysis of these extraordinary — and disturbing — communications.

The vast majority of Meadows’ texts described in this series are being made public for the very first time. They show the senior-most official in the Trump White House communicating with members of Congress, state-level politicians, and far-right activists as they work feverishly to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. The Meadows texts illustrate in moment-to-moment detail an authoritarian effort to undermine the will of the people and upend the American democratic system as we know it.

The text messages, obtained from multiple sources, offer new insights into how the assault on the election was rooted in deranged internet paranoia and undemocratic ideology. They show Meadows and other high-level Trump allies reveling in wild conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric, and crackpot legal strategies for refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory. They expose the previously unknown roles of some members of Congress, local politicians, activists and others in the plot to overturn the election. Now, for the first time, many of those figures will be named and their roles will be described — in their own words.

Meadows turned over the text messages during a brief period of cooperation with the committee before he filed a December 2021 lawsuit arguing that its subpoenas seeking testimony and his phone records were “overly broad” and violations of executive privilege. Since then, Meadows has faced losses in his efforts to challenge the subpoena in court. However, that legal battle is ongoing and is unlikely to conclude before next month, when the incoming Republican House majority is widely expected to shutter the committee’s investigation. Earlier this year, Meadows reportedly turned over the same material he gave the select committee to the Justice Department in response to another subpoena. These messages are key evidence in the two major investigations into the Jan. 6 attack. With this series, the American people will be able to evaluate the most important texts for themselves.

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https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-twitter-and-hunter-bidens-laptop/

Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Twitter and how it handled something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. If you’re new here, you may not know that I’ve written a similar post for people who are wrong about Section 230. If you’re being wrong about Twitter and the Hunter Biden laptop. there’s a decent chance that you’re also wrong about Section 230, so you might want to read that too! Also, these posts are using a format blatantly swiped from lawyer Ken “Popehat” White, who wrote one about the 1st Amendment. Honestly, you should probably read that one too, because there’s some overlap.

Now, to be clear, I’ve explained many times before, in other posts, why people who freaked out about how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story are getting confused, but it’s usually been a bit buried. I had already started a version of this post last week, since people keep bringing up Twitter and the laptop, but then on Friday, Elon (sorta) helped me out by giving a bunch of documents to reporter Matt Taibbi.

So, let’s review some basics before we respond to the various wrong statements people have been making. Since 2016, there have been concerns raised about how foreign nation states might seek to interfere with elections, often via the release of hacked or faked materials. It’s no secret that websites have been warned to be on the lookout for such content in the leadup to the election — not with demands to suppress it, but just to consider how to handle it.

Partly in response to that, social media companies put in place various policies on how they were going to handle such material. Facebook set up a policy to limit certain content from trending in its algorithm until it had been reviewed by fact-checkers. Twitter put in place a “hacked materials” policy, which forbade the sharing of leaked or hacked materials. There were — clearly! — some potential issues with that policy. In fact, in September of 2020 (a month before the NY Post story) we highlighted the problems of this very policy, including somewhat presciently noting the fear that it would be used to block the sharing of content in the public interest and could be used against journalistic organizations (indeed, that case study highlights how the policy was enforced to ban DDOSecrets for leaking police chat logs).

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https://insurrectionexposed.org/

Attempts by former President Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election—culminating in the violent assault on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021—were a dramatic prelude to escalating efforts to undermine public confidence in voting in the U.S., eroding the foundation of democracy.

The 147 members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election results and the extremists who stormed the Capitol are only part of the story. Across the country, a web of right-wing dark money groups, politicians, billionaire donors, media influencers, prominent activists, and lawyers worked behind the scenes to overturn the election.

Since then, they have continued to promote Trump’s Big Lie of a stolen election, spread disinformation about voter fraud, politicize control over the administration and certification of elections, and fuel political extremism and violence.

Insurrection Exposed provides a central resource for information about the key players behind these threats to the very survival of American democracy. While the people who attacked the bedrock of American democracy on Jan. 6 were largely pawns in a much larger game, the subjects of Insurrection Exposed are the chessmasters sitting at the table.

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