Morning Briefing: GOP State Legislative Candidates Promote Conspiracy Theories
Republican state legislative candidates in California, Washington, and Maine, have promoted fringe conspiracy theories, including false claims about the government controlling the weather.
Morning Briefing: Republican state legislative candidates in California, Washington, and Maine, have promoted conspiracy theories including false claims about the government controlling the weather, and GOP candidate for district judge in Minnesota has promoted the “Pizzagate child sex trafficking hoax.”
Denise Aguilar, Republican candidate for the California State Assembly, was revealed in a now deleted video to have “boasted of taking part in the Jan. 6, 2021,” and “spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
Carrie Kennedy, GOP candidate for the Washington State House, reportedly reposted a social media post that promotes the “conspiracy theory that the US Government caused the recent East Coast hurricanes as part of an attempt to depopulate the country,” and Kennedy previously “posted similar conspiracies before.”
Wendy MacDowell, Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives, has reportedly made the false claim that the “government is creating hurricanes to seize land and punish voters in conservative states,” and MacDowell “refused to provide information backing up her claims and threatened to sue a reporter for requesting an interview.”
Nathan Hansen, GOP candidate for district judge in Minnesota, has reportedly “promoted numerous fringe conspiracy theories, including the Pizzagate child sex trafficking hoax,” and Hansen apparently “deleted roughly 100,000 of his Twitter posts prior to announcing his candidacy.”
The Chicago Inspector General is reportedly requesting that “state regulators to ban a number of Chicago police officers from serving in law enforcement,” and the request comes in to response that “more than a dozen CPD officers have been tagged as members of radical, sometimes violent groups, even as they deny it and remain on the job.”
The America First Policy Institute disclosed that the organization’s computer systems were “breached, marking the second known instance that people supporting the former president have been the target of a cyberattack,” however, the organization “would not say what materials were compromised.”
Must Reads
Seamus Hughes writes that “as it stands now, the approach to handling minors drawn to extremism has been scattershot, to say the least. In some cases, like the one in Philadelphia, federal law enforcement will work the investigation but ultimately kick it to a state-level prosecutor. The end result is the same, a minor in prison, albeit without the lengthy federal sentence but still with a rap sheet. In other cases, they’ll alert the child’s parents to their concerns about the teen’s descent into the extremist rabbit hole and hope the family steps in to stem the radicalization. But parents are ill equipped to both know and counter the intricacies of specific extremist ideologies, be they incels or the Islamic State. As has been demonstrated by some school shooting tragedies, simply alerting a parent is sometimes not enough. There won’t be simple solutions to address this problem, but policymakers and senior officials can make it easier for agents in the field to understand and identify what additional options are available. [Lawfare]
Mike Wendling writes that threats to election workers have “become increasingly common throughout the country in recent years, experts say. As a result, officials are preparing for another high-stakes election on 5 November by bolstering security to keep workers safe at polling places. They are also working to protect against possible intimidation of voters or tampering with the voting process. Threats against election workers have increased since the 2020 presidential election which Donald Trump and his allies falsely claimed to have won. Conspiracy theories about the voting process led to threats against election workers, and culminated in the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol. Now, suspicion about elections has become so pervasive that it has moved well beyond urban areas with large vote-counting operations and crept into places like Jackson County. Wisconsin is a battleground state which President Joe Biden won by fewer than 21,000 votes four years ago. Election workers are on the frontlines.” [BBC News]
David Pegg, Tom Burgis, Hannah Devlin and Jason Wilson write that “An international network of ‘race science’ activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire US tech entrepreneur. Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organisation, formed two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine and research papers to seed ‘dangerous ideology’ about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups. The anti-racism campaign Hope Not Hate began investigating after encountering the group’s English organiser, a former religious studies teacher, at a far-right conference. Undercover footage was shared with the Guardian, which conducted further research alongside Hope Not Hate and reporting partners in Germany. HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal.” [The Guardian]
What to expect from Radical Reports: Morning Briefing provides a daily round-up of reporting on the Radical Right; Extremist Links offers a weekly round-up of extremists activities including the white supremacist and militia movements; Narratives of the Right delivers weekly analysis of the current narratives in far right online spaces and promoted by right-wing media; and Research Desk provides monthly highlights research and analysis from academia on the Radical Right.