Conspiracy central: the activists painting Clinton as a sick, terrorist-friendly killer
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Version 0 of 1. Hillary Clinton is a psychotic murderer who suffers from syphilis and is months away from death, and her chief of staff is a secret Muslim terrorist – at least according to some parts of the internet. In recent weeks, the political conspiracy level dial has been turned up to Beyoncé-runs-the-Illuminati level crazy. Who is pushing the biggest conspiracy theories against Clinton during this campaign? Hillary’s health hoax Most of the recent flurry stems directly from InfoWars, a conspiracy-fueled political site run by shock jock Alex Jones that funds itself partly through the sale of supplies necessary for doomsday prepping such as bulk vitamins and a year’s worth of long-life food. InfoWars has been pushing the “Clinton is sick” theory hard in the last few weeks – with stories including “EXPERTS: HILLARY IS A SOCIOPATH AND COULD HAVE BRAIN DAMAGE” and “HILLARY HEALTH COVER-UP IMPLODES”. But the first recent coverage to get attention came from a little-known YouTube user, DaPhoneyRapperz, who uploaded a video supposedly showing the Democratic nominee convulsing and having seizures – mainly the same few bits of video of Clinton laughing or making faces looped to a creepy soundtrack – on 21 July and has more than 2.2m views. DaPhoneyRapperz didn’t respond to the Guardian’s attempt to contact them. The video went viral on Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, and then InfoWars writer Paul Joseph Watson published a video on 4 August claiming “The Truth About Hillary’s Bizarre Behavior”, which now has more than 3.3m views. The Daily Beast notes that one of the few named experts in the Hillary health stories is PharmaBro Martin Shkreli, infamous for hiking the price of an anti-HIV drug by 5,556%, but not actually a medical professional (Shkreli is certain Clinton suffers from Parkinson’s disease). The InfoWars articles on Clinton’s health are all written by Watson, the editor-at-large of InfoWars, who also runs the sister conservative news and aggregation site Prison Planet. Watson did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. He believes the US government was highly involved in 9/11 and wrote the book Order Out of Chaos, which was published by InfoWars. In the book’s acknowledgements, he thanks founder Jones “for awakening me to the New World Order”. InfoWars is owned by Alex Jones, a 42-year-old from Texas. The Southern Poverty Law Center called him “almost certainly the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America”. Rolling Stone called him “the most paranoid man in America”. The sick Hillary story is not new: back in May 2014, Karl Rove, former senior adviser under President George W Bush turned talking head, first began pushing this story, questioning whether the former secretary of state had received a traumatic brain injury after a fall in December 2012 – rather than a blood clot as Team Clinton says. Rove is one of the most infamous faces of the GOP so having him speculate publicly about possible brain damage left the crowd “stunned”, reported the New York Post, with Clinton’s team immediately dismissing it and a former White House communications director who worked with Rove calling his comments “off the wall”. “It’s only 2014, but the 2016 presidential race has already taken an ugly turn,” reported the Huffington Post. Weeks after Rove’s comments, a former Drudge Report editor, Joseph Curl, published a column at the Washington Times demanding Clinton’s health records be made public. Then in January of this year, rightwing site Breitbart claimed a law enforcement source said Clinton’s long bathroom break during a primary debate was because of cognitive problems from the fall. After InfoWars pushed its health video, rightwing commentator and Trump fan Sean Hannity at Fox News declared on his show later that week: “it almost seems seizure-esque to me”. During the primaries, Hannity gave Trump more than 50 hours of interview airtime on his show, dramatically more than any other candidate and more than double that on any other show. The New York Times says Hannity has become more like an adviser to Trump, offering ideas for media strategy. Media Matters estimates Hannity has given Trump more than $31m in free publicity. WikiLeaks is now on board tweeting leaked Clinton emails saying she identified with “decision fatigue” and was interested in a drug that helped exhausted people stay awake. Decision fatigue is not a medical illness, but a phenomenon in which people struggle to make decisions if their brain is tired from constant decision making – essentially a marketing psychology idea created from studying shoppers. Julian Assange from WikiLeaks is promising to leak “significant” material from Clinton’s election campaign before November (remember, Clinton was secretary of state when WikiLeaks released US embassy cables and Assange lives in Ecuador’s embassy in London to avoid possible extradition to the United States). Clinton & 'decision fatigue' https://t.co/BGMmiHjn0r 2 months later looked into wakeup pills https://t.co/ftmwzMcE9U pic.twitter.com/9Djozxnnln Then Rudy Giuliani, former NYC mayor turned Trump talking head, raised the “sick Hillary” debate during a recent Fox News appearance, including when he told viewers on Sunday to “go online and put down ‘Hillary Clinton illness’, take a look at the videos for yourself”. Clinton even appeared on Jimmy Kimmel on Monday night opening a jar of pickles to prove she was in good health, a move that popular Twitter troll Mike Cernovich (who believes that date rape “does not exist” and thinks the Orlando Pulse shooter did not act alone) saw as a win for rightwing Twitter and blogs, such as his own, pushing the sick Hillary idea – although his gloating did make it seem he didn’t necessarily believe the conspiracy: We made a candidate for POTUS open a jar of pickles on live TV. Totally embarrassing. Well done Twitter, and @PrisonPlanet! And Rove is still pushing the supposed “brain injury”, more than two years after he first proposed it, appearing on Fox’s The Kelly File with Megyn Kelly on Tuesday with three mini whiteboards showing a timeline of supposedly damning events and quotes from Clinton officials and husband Bill, much to Kelly’s amusement. Huma Abedin: secret Muslim extremist For years rightwing commentators have speculated that Clinton’s chief of staff, Huma Abedin, known as her closest adviser, is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamic organization – and it’s popped up again this week. “Why aren’t we talking about Huma and her ties to the Muslim Brotherhood? Why aren’t we talking about the fact that she was an editor for a Sharia newspaper?” asked Sean Duffy, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin and former contestant on The Real World: Boston, on CNN – who has also been pushing the “sick Hillary” theory – on Tuesday. The Muslim Brotherhood theory stems back ito 2012, when Frank Gaffney, dubbed “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, released a report from his organization Center for Security Policy claiming three of Abedin’s relatives were connected to the Muslim Brotherhood – including her father, who died in 1993. Shortly afterwards Michele Bachmann, founder of the Tea Party, called on federal agencies to examine whether Abedin fueled the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda – which resulted in Senator John McCain speaking out against Bachmann, declaring: “These attacks on Huma have no logic, no basis and no merit.” Paul Sperry, a columnist for the New York Post – a paper which has already declared it is backing Trump – wrote this week that Abedin worked at a “radical Muslim publication that opposed women’s rights”. She used to work as an associate editor at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, a scholarly journal edited by her mother and founded by her father that examines the life of Muslims living in traditionally non-Muslim areas. The Washington Post quotes various scholars denying that the publication is “radical”. On Wednesday Jones from InfoWars and Trump adviser Roger Stone – who is known for compiling aggressive dirt files full of conspiracy theories, arguing that Chelsea Clinton is not the real daughter of Bill and has had plastic surgery to more closely resemble him – discussed on radio whether Abedin suffered from genital mutilation as a child because of her family: Alex Jones & Roger Stone discussed today whether Huma Abedin has had her “genitals cut off" https://t.co/IbF9iGsgAB pic.twitter.com/RdJmAFb35S The Clinton murder conspiracy Another favorite of Clinton conspiracists is the “Clinton body count”, a claim that a number of mysterious deaths over the years are somehow tied to the Clintons. The recent death of Democratic National Convention staffer Seth Rich, who was shot while walking in his suburban Washington DC neighborhood just days before the DNC started, helped reignite the murder conspiracies story. WikiLeaks’ Assange brought up Rich – who died just before WikiLeaks released thousands of leaked DNC emails – while talking to Dutch TV about the need for whistleblower protection, saying “our sources take risks”. WikiLeaks is offering a $20,000 reward for anyone with information about his murder. The most famous Clinton body count conspiracy is about Vince Foster, Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, who killed himself in the first year of the Clinton administration. He was a close friend of the Clintons, and it’s been argued since the 1990s by conspiracy extremists – such as a series of reports by the Arkansas Project funded by late conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife – that either: 1) he was killed because he knew too much about the Clintons’ scandals; or 2) Hillary publicly humiliated him and caused him to kill himself. The Foster case reappeared this week after Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter who penned a 2009 book based on secret service agents revealing the private lives of presidents and their families, wrote in the Daily Mail that FBI files linking Clinton to Foster’s suicide are “missing”. Kessler says the documents have disappeared from the National Archive – although it’s not clear the documents ever existed. InfoWars collects a list of the Clinton body count, with dozens of names – from lawyers to criminals – of people who have died and are in some way connected to the Clintons. This week Paul Joseph Watson, of sick Hillary fame, claimed that Google is not autofilling in its search “Clinton body count”, although other search engines do. A writer at Media Post noted this could simply be due to Google algorithms, known to be different from other search engines, and not necessarily censorship – since the story comes up if you type out the whole words. That falls into a wider theory that Google is suppressing negative stories about the Clintons – another favorite complaint of Assange’s. Fox News mentioned Google’s lack of autofill on Wednesday , citing InfoWars as its source. Fox News anchor pushes Clinton murder conspiracy, explicitly citing InfoWars pic.twitter.com/wEgboKUxVt |