Remember when “Document the atrocities” was Internet snark for tweeting about Sunday talking heads shows? Ah, but we were so much older then.
Ukrainians and international human rights officials today are documenting literal atrocities committed by Russian troops against civilians. Desiccated corpses lie in the streets where they fell weeks ago, shot at random according to reports, or taken out behind buildings and summarily executed as Nazis. Or suspected Nazis. Or Nazi sympathizers. Or Nazi adjacent or Nazi whatever. Stories from survivors are remarkably similar.
Vladimir Putin’s indoctrination has been most effective. Cultural memory of World War II runs thick in Russia. Programming Russian citizens and soldiers to believe in (and act on) a lie about imaginary Nazis is easier when a handful exist among a far-right militia group in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Easier still when the government led by a former KGB agent controls all major media.
Here on this side of the Atlantic, Republicans are mounting their own propaganda campaign. The American right’s “Nazis” are pedophiles.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes took on this growing propaganda effort Tuesday night. Republicans are smearing political opponents as “pro-pedophile.”
New dog whistles in this campaign such as “Save the Children” and “grooming” suggest to QAnon supporters (one-quarter of the GOP base, Hayes claims) that supporters of LGBTQ rights are actually a Nazis pedophiles. It is, like Putin’s effort that has resulted in mass murder, a cynical ploy for attacking anyone in the way of their retaining power. And as the Ukraine atrocities demonstrate, such lies are irresponsible and dangerous.
The Pizzagate conspiracy that circulated on the fringe right in 2016 alleged “that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign chair, John Podesta, ran a child sex ring at the basement of a pizzeria in DC, Comet Ping Pong (which doesn’t even have a basement),” Vox reported:
From there, people began speculating without any evidence that the restaurant was part of a broader child trafficking ring run by the Democratic Party — a popular but entirely false conspiracy theory on the fringes of conservative media. The conspiracy theories jumped over to Reddit, where the popular Trump subreddit r/The_Donald championed it; Twitter, where pro-Trump tweeters (including the son of Trump’s pick for national security adviser) have continued to promote it; and Facebook, where fake news outlets have written and shared articles about it.
And Alex Jones, the head of the fake news InfoWars who once argued that President Barack Obama and Clinton are literally demons, also boosted the conspiracy theory, saying on his show (in a video that was published in early November but later taken down) that “Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children.” That video earned more than 420,000 videos before it was removed.
Eventually, 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch from North Carolina arrived at Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle “and fired at least one shot in the restaurant while investigating the conspiracy theory.” No one was hurt. That time.
Donald Trump’s Big Lie, however, resulted in thousands of MAGA supporters and militia members mounting an insurrection against the government on Jan. 6, 2021, resulting in several deaths and hundreds of injuries.
This is not a game. Such lies are not politics-as-usual. Nor are they innocent. Ask Ukraine. Ask Rwanda. People spreading them know exactly what they are doing.
That irony is lost on the GOP is no defense. That their supporters are lining up to consume the lies is neither.
Republicans do not yet have a Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines to spread their lies and incite their supporters to murder as effectively as Putin has. But they do have Fox News and other right-wing news sites. They have public forums. Their statements draw eyes and clicks. It is only a matter of time, if their smears continue and spread, before more armed Edgar Maddison Welchs decide to save the children and start executing the cabal of elite, Satan-worshiping, cannibal pedophiles their leaders have told them runs the world.
Stop it. Just stop it, Republicans.
But I’m not holding my breath.
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