09-27-2017, 11:21 PM
Three children playing doctor in the laundry room generate demands for anti-shari legislation in Idaho, threats of violence to city officials.
One especially interesting aspect of this case was how the Russian intervention amplified it, working through the existing system of right wing anti-Mulsim/anti-globalist websites. Some excerpts below from NYT reporter Caitlin Dickerson.
How Fake News Turned a Small Town Upside Down
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/magazine/how-fake-news-turned-a-small-town-upside-down.html
According to a local reporter named Brown: three children had been discovered partly clothed inside a shared laundry room at the apartment complex where they lived. There were two boys, a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old, and a 5-year-old girl. The 7-year-old boy was accused of attempting some kind of sex act with the 5-year-old, and the 10-year-old had used a cellphone borrowed from his older brother to record it. The girl was American and, like most people in Twin Falls, white. The boys were refugees; ...
...a friend texted [Brown], telling him to check the Drudge Report. At the top, a headline screamed: “REPORT: Syrian ‘Refugees’ Rape Little Girl at Knifepoint in Idaho.” . . . On the Monday when Twin Falls was the top story on Drudge, the City Council held another weekly meeting.... A woman named Vicky Davis, her hair in a satiny white bob, stood up and proclaimed that Islam had declared jihad on America.
“They are not compatible with our culture,” she said. “They hate us. They don’t want to be Americans. They don’t want to assimilate. What do you need to see? What more proof do you need?”. . .
A commenter on another website called The Muslim Issue posted the phone numbers and email addresses for the town’s government officials, the head of the refugee-resettlement center and some administrators at the college, which runs the refugee resettlement program. From there, the information spread to more blogs and to the comments sections of far-right news outlets with massive audiences.
Many of the people who wrote to the mayor had a much simpler goal: to unleash their hatred of Islam. One message, with the subject line “Muslims,” said that refugees were committing rapes and hit-and-runs and urinating on women and that the mayor was guilty of treason. “It’s out of the bag, [expletive],” it read. “We will and are holding you responsible for any and all crimes committed by these quote refugees. No courts. No police. Just us. You will answer to us in the darkness of night.”
The Twins Falls story aligned perfectly with the ideology that Stephen Bannon, then the head of Breitbart News, had been developing for years, about the havoc brought on by unchecked immigration and Islamism, all of it backed by big-business interests and establishment politicians. Bannon latched onto the Fawnbrook case and used his influence to expand its reach.... He sent his lead investigative reporter, Lee Stranahan, to the town to investigate the case, boasting to his audience that Stranahan was a “pit bull” of a reporter. “We’re going to let him off the chain,” he said.
Stranahan says his Breitbart editors sent him to Twin Falls to report on the “Muslim takeover” of the town. (Breitbart denies this and says it’s “absurd.”) But he soon became enamored of a grander theory about what was happening in southern Idaho: globalism. He wrote that local businesses received government kickbacks for employing foreigners instead of Americans.
Later, it turned out that fake Facebook accounts linked to the Russian government helped to spread stories about Twin Falls and even organized one of the rallies there. The event was also poorly attended but is the first known Russian attempt to spark a demonstration on American soil.
Stranahan and I spoke a handful of times over the course of the last year....Talking with him feels like being inside one of his conspiracy theories. When you ask him a question, he begins to answer and then immediately swerves in a different direction, bouncing like a pinball between topics that barely connect to one another — from the Fawnbrook case to clitorectomies and stoning, then Syrian refugees, then a prominent Wahhabi cleric — and seems to increase in velocity as he ricochets off them ....
Stranahan struck me as passionate about his stories; not about their veracity but about the freedom he and the critics of refugee resettlement should have to speculate as they wanted without being belittled by the fact-mongering mainstream. . . . He told me that he believed that he had uncovered another dimension of his globalist theory related to Chobani’s participation in the federal school-lunch program. He felt compelled to follow up on the earlier coverage, because he was frustrated that Alex Jones and others were forced to retract their stories and apologize under pressure. “I don’t like people getting shut up like that,” he said. “Even if their stories have problems, I don’t like journalists getting shut down.”
One especially interesting aspect of this case was how the Russian intervention amplified it, working through the existing system of right wing anti-Mulsim/anti-globalist websites. Some excerpts below from NYT reporter Caitlin Dickerson.
How Fake News Turned a Small Town Upside Down
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/magazine/how-fake-news-turned-a-small-town-upside-down.html
According to a local reporter named Brown: three children had been discovered partly clothed inside a shared laundry room at the apartment complex where they lived. There were two boys, a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old, and a 5-year-old girl. The 7-year-old boy was accused of attempting some kind of sex act with the 5-year-old, and the 10-year-old had used a cellphone borrowed from his older brother to record it. The girl was American and, like most people in Twin Falls, white. The boys were refugees; ...
...a friend texted [Brown], telling him to check the Drudge Report. At the top, a headline screamed: “REPORT: Syrian ‘Refugees’ Rape Little Girl at Knifepoint in Idaho.” . . . On the Monday when Twin Falls was the top story on Drudge, the City Council held another weekly meeting.... A woman named Vicky Davis, her hair in a satiny white bob, stood up and proclaimed that Islam had declared jihad on America.
“They are not compatible with our culture,” she said. “They hate us. They don’t want to be Americans. They don’t want to assimilate. What do you need to see? What more proof do you need?”. . .
A commenter on another website called The Muslim Issue posted the phone numbers and email addresses for the town’s government officials, the head of the refugee-resettlement center and some administrators at the college, which runs the refugee resettlement program. From there, the information spread to more blogs and to the comments sections of far-right news outlets with massive audiences.
Many of the people who wrote to the mayor had a much simpler goal: to unleash their hatred of Islam. One message, with the subject line “Muslims,” said that refugees were committing rapes and hit-and-runs and urinating on women and that the mayor was guilty of treason. “It’s out of the bag, [expletive],” it read. “We will and are holding you responsible for any and all crimes committed by these quote refugees. No courts. No police. Just us. You will answer to us in the darkness of night.”
The Twins Falls story aligned perfectly with the ideology that Stephen Bannon, then the head of Breitbart News, had been developing for years, about the havoc brought on by unchecked immigration and Islamism, all of it backed by big-business interests and establishment politicians. Bannon latched onto the Fawnbrook case and used his influence to expand its reach.... He sent his lead investigative reporter, Lee Stranahan, to the town to investigate the case, boasting to his audience that Stranahan was a “pit bull” of a reporter. “We’re going to let him off the chain,” he said.
Stranahan says his Breitbart editors sent him to Twin Falls to report on the “Muslim takeover” of the town. (Breitbart denies this and says it’s “absurd.”) But he soon became enamored of a grander theory about what was happening in southern Idaho: globalism. He wrote that local businesses received government kickbacks for employing foreigners instead of Americans.
Later, it turned out that fake Facebook accounts linked to the Russian government helped to spread stories about Twin Falls and even organized one of the rallies there. The event was also poorly attended but is the first known Russian attempt to spark a demonstration on American soil.
Stranahan and I spoke a handful of times over the course of the last year....Talking with him feels like being inside one of his conspiracy theories. When you ask him a question, he begins to answer and then immediately swerves in a different direction, bouncing like a pinball between topics that barely connect to one another — from the Fawnbrook case to clitorectomies and stoning, then Syrian refugees, then a prominent Wahhabi cleric — and seems to increase in velocity as he ricochets off them ....
Stranahan struck me as passionate about his stories; not about their veracity but about the freedom he and the critics of refugee resettlement should have to speculate as they wanted without being belittled by the fact-mongering mainstream. . . . He told me that he believed that he had uncovered another dimension of his globalist theory related to Chobani’s participation in the federal school-lunch program. He felt compelled to follow up on the earlier coverage, because he was frustrated that Alex Jones and others were forced to retract their stories and apologize under pressure. “I don’t like people getting shut up like that,” he said. “Even if their stories have problems, I don’t like journalists getting shut down.”
![[Image: 4CV0TeR.png]](https://i.imgur.com/4CV0TeR.png)
