Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Facts and reality are not idiotic. Progressives are just demented and delusional.

The misinformation that drove South Dakotans to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6

In conversations with Forum News Service, three South Dakotans who attended former President Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C., reveal the roots of a conspiratorial mindset propped up by extreme cable news to "trusted sources on the internet."

Written By: Christopher Vondracek | Feb 5th 2021 - 6pm.

A pizza pub roadhouse, formerly run by one of the South Dakota residents who traveled to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, sits along the side of a highway in the Black Hills advertising its affection for former President Trump with a large sign. The word "fired" has now been tagged on the bottom of the sign in small, green letters.

PIERRE S.D. — On Thursday, Jan. 7 — one night after a violent mob breached the U.S. Capitol for the first time in two centuries — South Dakota's lone congressman, Dusty Johnson, sought to reason with voters in an evening tele-townhall.

Johnson, a moderate Republican, noted a Maricopa County judge in Arizona found no fraud in the 2020 election. The congressman said there was a hand recount of all the ballots in Georgia.

Call after call, voters continued to repeat election falsehoods endorsed by former President Donald Trump and echoed by a battery of far-right media platforms, from One American News Network (OANN) to The Epoch Times to YouTube pages populated with a feast of Rudy Giuliani videos.

Finally, one caller, "Doug from Rapid City," pleaded with the congressman.

"I don't really have a good source I can go to," said the South Dakotan, not speaking with frustration, but with anxiety in his voice, as though he were reaching out to a good friend for help. "I have to search through everything to try and find truth, and it's difficult."

If the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol, which was fanned by the former president and others propping up false claims of election fraud, presented a coalescing moment between reality and fiction for the country, a chance to step back from toxic sources of misinformation, it has been a missed opportunity among Trump's most loyal supporters.

In the month since the siege, Forum News Service has communicated with three women — and spoken by phone with two — who reside in western South Dakota who found their way to D.C. last month the day a horde briefly forestalled Congress' certification of Joe Biden's presidential victory in the Electoral College.

Although they say they didn't follow the crowds into the Capitol, they believe the false claim that the insurrection was perpetrated by undercover left-wing activists posing in MAGA gear.

"Conservatives, we don't do those things," said Chris Livingston, a pizza maker from rural Lead, S.D., in the Black Hills. Livingston traveled to D.C. for the "Stop the Steal" rally "to show our loyalty" to the president, she said. "We're not destructive. We don't destroy things. We're not the people in these cities burning down and tearing apart businesses."

Instead, Livingston, a registered Independent, said she holds with the 46% of Republicans, according to Pew Research Center, who say Trump is blameless for the violence, instead pointing a finger, without proof, at Antifa or the Black Lives Matter movement.

Asked where she gets her news, Livingston said, "trusted folks on the internet."

Conspiracy theories abound

For the people who spoke with FNS for this story, all roads lead to the same conspiracy stories.

Deanna Becket, a Rapid City woman who was in Washington on Jan. 6 with her husband, said that Giuliani and Sidney Powell — Trump's disavowed election attorney who has promoted the baseless fraud allegations — had yet to give the "evidence" in court.

Brooke Formanek, a Philip, S.D., woman declined to be interviewed about her participation in the "Stop the Steal" rally on Jan. 6 but, in an email to FNS wrote, "One cannot trust the media anymore." She did tell her story in her local newspaper, the Pioneer Review.

Becket and Formanek certainly are not alone in this conviction.

A former Trump aide who lives in South Dakota and worked on the president's 2016 campaign in Iowa hung up the phone after being pressed on his boosting election falsehoods on social media. Another GOP county director in the state's western half refused to speak with FNS, saying he had some "real questions" about what took place on Jan. 6 and that he did "not trust (Senate Minority Leader Mitch) McConnell," who also points to Trump as the insurrection's instigator.

South Dakota's senators, John Thune and Mike Rounds, both have cast blame at Trump's feet for stirring people up over false election claims.

"I do believe that he has misled the American people since the election," Rounds told FNS in an interview in January.

But the words of the faraway congressional delegation might not be resonating at home.

A few days after the attack on the Capitol, Custer County Chronicle editor Charley Najacht in Custer, S.D., penned an op-ed alleging, without any evidence, that "four white shuttle busses reportedly carrying Antifa members" arrived on the Hill "(j)ust prior" to the insurrection.

Reached by phone, Najacht defended his column, which got his page briefly booted off of Facebook.

"Yeah, that's been proven," he said, of the conspiracy that the insurrection was perpetrated by liberal or anarchic activists.

Federal authorities so far have pressed charges against 181 persons involved in the siege, according to George Washington University's Program on Extremism, including members of Oath Keepers, a far-right militia, and the Proud Boys, as well as a gun-rights activist who put his boots on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's desk.

Pressed further for proof, Najacht demurred. "It's pretty hard to describe truthful news today and fake news."

The long-time newspaper editor said his news diet is "various sources," but mostly Newsmax, OANN, and The Epoch Times.

Cocooned in misinformation

The Black Hills have long offered shelter to a conservative politics that looks askance at government, and it's what Livingston felt when she moved from Rochester, Minn., and — in her words — "crossed the border" over a decade ago.

For years, Livingston ran a pizza parlor and pub off a spur through the heart of the Hills. She lives on a spread near an old mining village that she shares with over a dozen family members, seven dogs, and enough food to last a year. She loves her country and her neighbors, even those who "are a little more liberal."

And at 68, she talks with the gravelly voice of a caring mom who'd stick an extra chocolate pudding in your brown lunch sack or fight like hell if someone bullied her kid.

But aside from "maybe Tucker (Carlson) on Fox," Livingston doesn't watch CNN or read The New York Times.

"I don't look there ever," said Livingston.

She also doesn't buy the conspiracy theory that March 4 — the nation's original inaugural date — will bring a reckoning to usher Trump back into office.

"I'm not so sure that March 4 isn't more of a Q-thing," said Livingston. She said she has "guarded" herself from conspiracies associated with the online QAnon community. But she noted, almost whimsically, that "a majority of the things Q said were going to happen happened."

She didn't elaborate, save to say she knew "military sources." Pushed further she simply clarified, she knew "people who know people that are in special ops."

'I have other sources'

In July 2020, amid the nationwide race riots sparked by the death of George Floyd and in growing skepticism of the coronavirus health precautions, Adam Enders, an assistant professor at the University of Louisville, told news site Politico that America during the pandemic is "ripe ground" for conspiracy theories.

The question remains, can that soil be cleansed?

Talk of the election and the siege has somewhat faded as the congressional delegation has pivoted attention to President Biden's actual actions, including his rescission of the Keystone XL pipeline permit, a move cheered by environmentalists and South Dakota's tribal leaders, but blasted by Republicans for upending pipeline workers' jobs and local economies.

But the echoes of Jan. 6 are close. On Thursday, Feb. 4, Dusty Johnson did not join 11 Republican colleagues in voting to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from two committees, with Democrats citing a litany of internet-based conspiracy myths uttered by the freshman congresswoman from Georgia.

And next week, a trial to convict Trump for inciting the riot reaches the U.S. Senate. It's not certain how South Dakota's two senators will vote, but The Washington Post has reported 12 Republicans are "open to conviction" based on public statements.

Back in South Dakota, many of Trump's loyal supporters aren't budging. Not just from their conviction that Trump is being framed, but even from the original lie, that the election that sent him packing to Florida was stolen.

Asked about the multitude of courts, federal and state, that tossed out Trump attorneys' lawsuits, or the election officials who called the presidential election "the most secure in American history," Livingston was only momentarily deterred, like someone who backs up after catching a spark off a light fixture.

"Yeah, I don't buy that," she said, after a pause. Then she regained her confidence.

"Because I have other sources that definitely conflict with that."

George Boardman: The lies conservatives tell themselves
Columns COLUMNS | February 1, 2021

George Boardman | Columnist

Some of Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters are feeling a sense of betrayal after the transfer of power went smoothly and Joe Biden is now president of the United States.

The Proud Boys, who were once told by the president to “Stand back and stand by,” are now calling him “weak” for letting Biden take the reins of power. “Trump will go down as a total failure,” a Proud Boy member wrote on one forum.

Fervent adherents of QAnon are disillusioned because an Inauguration Day coup to keep Trump in office failed to happen, though some held out hope until the very end. Even as Biden prepared to take the oath of office, one supporter tweeted, “I don’t think this is supposed to happen,” and wondered, “How long does it take the fed to run up the stairs and arrest him?”

Members of both groups, along with outfits like the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, felt a sense of betrayal after finding themselves in jail or on the run after answering what they believed was their leader’s call to action and stormed the Capitol. The lawyers for some of them wanted Trump to issue pardons before he left office.

But you would be wrong to think this kind of clueless behavior is limited to the fanatical fringe of the conservative movement. Recent polls reveal that just 24% of Republicans say they trust the outcome of the presidential election, and 61% think Trump should not have conceded the election to Biden. Another poll showed 87% of Republicans still back Trump, even after the Capitol riots.

Much of this magical thinking can be traced to Trump and his enablers, who exploited his followers’ misguided sense of patriotism to feed them a steady stream of lies about a corrupt election they could overturn. Those fantasies were reinforced by conservative media that are more interested in advancing an agenda than giving consumers anything resembling the truth.

Fortunately, there are limits to our First Amendment free speech rights, and some of these outlets are now learning the legal and financial consequences of straying too far from the facts. Leading the parade is the usual suspect, Fox News, and its comrade in arms, Fox Business.

Lou Dobbs of Fox Business, who can easily match his counterparts at Fox News when it comes to shilling for the former president, was forced on air to debunk his own lies about Smartmatic voting machines when the company threatened to sue him and Fox. Smartmatic’s equipment was used by some states in the November elections.

Then on Nov. 24, Fox News announced the settlement of a suit brought by Joel and Mary Rich that included a retraction and apology from Fox along with a reported seven figure financial settlement.

The case involved the death of the Richs’ son, Seth, who worked for the Democratic National Committee when he was murdered in Washington, D.C., in July of 2016. Police believe he was the victim of an armed robbery, but no perpetrator has been arrested and the reason for his death remains unclear.

That created the opening conservative propagandists were looking for, and they started making claims that Seth Rich was killed because he — not Russian operatives — leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks. That led to a series of broadcasts on Fox News involving Newt Gingrich and others that tried to validate the claims.

Prime time Fox talking head Sean Hannity called the story an “explosive” development “that might expose the single biggest fraud, lies, perpetrated on the American people by the media and the Democrats in our history.”

The Rich family suit against Fox dragged on until the judge in the case scheduled Hannity and several Fox News executives for depositions, which would have required them to tell the truth under penalty of perjury. That’s when Fox’s attorneys began settlement talks with the Rich family.

Fox News issued an apology, but specified the settlement could not be announced until after the November elections. Fox apparently thought the announcement would hurt its credibility before election day, assuming it has any.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The Richs’ other son, Aaron, was accused of complicity in theft of the emails and his brother’s murder when he tried to defend Seth against the smears circulating in conservative media.

That prompted Aaron to sue frequent Fox News commentator Ed Butkowski and pro-Trump blogger and self-proclaimed investigator Matt Couch for defamation. He also sued The Washington Times for making similar claims in an op-ed piece; the paper retracted the article and apologized.

Butkowski and Couch retracted all of their claims last month. “I never had physical proof to back up such statements or suggestions, which I now acknowledge I should not have made,” Butkowski said. Couch, who has almost 500,000 Twitter followers and who has been retweeted several times by Trump, said Butkowski was the source of his reports.

Fox News has lost conservative viewers to Newsmax and One America News Network mainly because they have refused to concede that Trump lost the election and launched repeated attacks on the integrity of the election. Many of those attacks have involved Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, which supplied voting equipment to 28 states.

But the companies weren’t willing to remain silent while their reputations were trashed. In addition to the Dobbs recantation, both companies sued Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for libel and demanded retractions from Newsmax and OANN.

Newsmax host John Tabacco appeared on-air in December to recant the network’s claims, stating the two companies did not have a business relationship and did not use or reprogram software that manipulated votes in the general election. He also stated that Dominion has no connection to the Pelosi, Feinstein or Clinton families, or to George Soros.

OANN, which was suspended by YouTube for repeatedly posting misinformation about COVID-19, has developed a reputation for airing baseless conspiracy theories and spreading false information. That hasn’t stopped Trump from referring to OANN as “Great News, not Fake News.”

NewsGuard, a network of journalists that evaluates news sites for reliability, urges readers and advertisers to “proceed with caution” when it comes to OANN, claiming the network “severely violates basic standards of credibility and transparency” and “regularly includes false or distorted information.”

If you detect a pattern in this, so does Mathew Sheffield, founder of NewsBusters, the pre-eminent conservative website devoted to exposing liberal media bias. While Sheffield finds plenty of liberal media bias, he has developed a more nuanced view of conservative media.

“Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’ It doesn’t even have to be a fact. I eventually realized that most people who run right-dominated media outlets see it as their DUTY to be unfair and to favor Republicans because doing so would somehow counteract perceived liberal bias,” he wrote. “The tens of millions of people who vote Republican are not deplorable. They are misled.”

If conservatives believe what these television networks tell them, they’ll believe anything Trump tells them.

https://www.theunion.com/opinion/columns/george-boardman-the-lies-conservatives-tell-themselves/

Kind of like delusional progressives telling themselves that coal-fueled electric cars are a step away from fossil fuels?

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that comment makes absolutely no sense.

Sure it does. Neptune is delusional to think that burning coal is a step away from using fossil fuels.

Slightly off topic: why are most of the responses here getting heavily downvoted? And why is only one particular user's responses getting upvoted?

It just looks like the one upvoted user is apparently responsible for everyone else's downvoted responses, regardless if they're relevant to the thread or not.

For example: I posted an article here about rising COVID cases and briefly talked about my and my family's ordeal with the virus and it got heavily downvoted.
https://able2know.org/topic/555216-7#post-7103261

Yeah, someone is running a bot farm. Seems like a lot of work but what else are you going to do in your parents' basement?

No. It's not really off-topic at all. I've reported the phenomenon several times to no avail.

Because a progressive poster used to abuse the vote system by mass-downvoting conservatives, and eventually one or more conservatives were driven to figure out the exploit so they could retaliate.

That progressive is no longer posting actively (although I do occasionally briefly see one of their sock puppets). I have no idea if they were suspended, and if so whether it was for their voting abuse.

If I had to guess, I would guess that they were suspended, but probably for some other reason. Who knows though.

But anyway currently there are only conservative posters who know what the exploit is.



Because I'm the only conservative currently posting in the thread.



You aren't fit to draw your own conclusions. You should let other people do your thinking for you.



I upvote progressives who are downvoted if they are polite and civil to me.

You don't qualify for this service. I did upvote MJ and Revelette however.

thank you. I know I deserved it.

The simplest solution would be to do away with the feature altogether, an idea that gets raised quite often. I don't know how difficult that would be but it would probably be easier than screening for multiple accounts, anonymising VPNs, and proxy servers. For now, if you see a response which has been voted below the viewing threshold you can always give it an upvote and possibly return it to visibility.

An alternative is to simply accept that some narrow-minded individual is threatened by exposure to other people's opinions on an open forum for sharing viewpoints and ideas, and is afraid to openly challenge these people and their opinions in an actual discussion.

Or maybe turn off voting until an account has made a certain number of posts. That would make sock puppets harder.

. . . or show username of the person marking the post.

I like that idea!

Do away with it altogether. I never pay any attention to it.

The suggestion to do away with it has been made dozens of times.

I guess we are stuck with it...but I agree: Don't pay it any attention.

The problem is, people who are voted down to -5 are effectively censored.

That's not so much of a problem when it's progressives who are voted down to -5 because progressives are such horrible people.

But in the past conservatives have been voted down to -5 and that was a real problem.

If it wasn't for the censorship I would never have minded being downvoted.

Without the censorship if some progressive got so upset over my posting of truth and justice that he voted me down to -1000 I would have taken it as a badge of honor.

But being censored by this abuse of the TOS was pretty annoying.

I just saw a paladin wielding a CthunAxe and a rogue with a Thunderfury.

What kind of guild lets either of these go to anyone other than a warrior?