Believing J6 Myths

Tom Jackman, Scott Clement, Emily Guskin and Spencer S. Hsu at WP:

Twenty-five percent of Americans say it is “probably” or “definitely” true that the FBI instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, a false concept promoted by right-wing media and repeatedly denied by federal law enforcement, according to a new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

The Post-UMD poll finds a smaller 11 percent of the public overall thinks there is “solid evidence” that FBI operatives organized and encouraged the attack, while 13 percent say this is their “suspicion only.”

Among Republicans, 34 percent say the FBI organized and encouraged the insurrection, compared with 30 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats.

The results confirm that misinformation about Jan. 6 is widespread as the United States heads into a presidential election year, during a campaign in which the former president and leading 2024 Republican candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed support for those who participated in the insurrection. Despite a detailed congressional investigation and more than 725 completed federal prosecutions of Jan. 6 participants that did not yield evidence of FBI involvement, a substantial minority of Americans still embrace conspiracy theories not unlike the ones that drove many rioters to storm the Capitol three years ago.


“The people that went there to express their views, to support Trump, were peaceful,” said Richard Baum, 61, an independent voter from Odessa, Tex. “The government implants were the violent ones: the FBI, the police people that were put in there, the antifa and BLM hired by George Soros; everybody knows that.”

The Post-UMD poll finds 39 percent of Americans who say Fox News is their primary news source believe the FBI organized and encouraged the Jan. 6 attack, compared with 16 percent of CNN or MSNBC viewers and 13 percent who get most of their news from ABC, CBS or NBC. The poll finds 44 percent of those who voted for Trump say the FBI instigated the attack.

Holocaust Denial

 Nick Robertson at The Hill

A fifth of Americans ages 18-29 believe the Holocaust was a myth, according to a new poll from The Economist/YouGov. While the question only surveyed a small sample of about 200 people, it lends credence to concerns about rising antisemitism, especially among young people in the U.S. Another 30 percent of young people said they didn’t agree or disagree with the statement, while the remaining 47 percent disagreed. Only 7 percent of Americans overall believe the Holocaust is a myth, according to the poll.

 Congress and the White House have placed special attention on fighting antisemitism in recent weeks as the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza continues to divide public opinion. Leaders of top universities were grilled by a House committee this week on the topic, drawing criticism for vague answers on what comments constituted antisemitic harassment. About a third of Americans described antisemitism as a “very serious problem” in the poll, with just more than a quarter of young people saying the same. 

On Friday, a bipartisan group of senators, led by Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), introduced a bill to reauthorize the Never Again Education Act, providing federal funding for Holocaust education. “Failing to educate students about the gravity and scope of the Holocaust is a disservice to the memory of its victims and to our duty to prevent such atrocities in the future,” Rosen said in a statement. “At a time of rising antisemitism, reauthorizing the bipartisan Never Again Education Act will help ensure that educators have the resources needed to teach students about the Holocaust and help counter antisemitic bigotry and hate.”

From a 2018 survey by the Claims Conference

• Nearly one-third of all Americans (31 percent) and more than 4-in-10 Millennials (41 percent) believe that substantially less than 6 million Jews were killed (two million or fewer) during the Holocaust
• While there were over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, almost half of Americans (45 percent) cannot name a single one – and this percentage is even higher amongst Millennials

 The survey asked an open-ended question: "From what you know or have heard, what was Auschwitz? 

......................................................All adults ..................Under 35

Concentration camp ........................40% ............................22% 

Death/extermination camp ..............23% ............................11% 

Forced labor camp ............................1% ...............................2% 

Other ................................................21% ............................31% 

Not sure ...........................................20% .............................35%

Meta Influence at KSG

Many posts have discussed the political uses of philanthropy. 

 Joseph Menn at WP:

A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.

Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.

... 

As the main attraction at a Zoom meeting for top Kennedy School donors on Oct. 29 that year, Donovan said the papers showed that Meta knew the harms it was causing. Former top Facebook communications executive Elliot Schrage asked repeated questions during the meeting and said she badly misunderstood the papers, Donovan wrote in a sworn declaration included in the filing.

Ten days after the donors meeting, Kennedy School dean Doug Elmendorf, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, emailed Donovan with pointed questions about her research goals and methods, launching an increase in oversight that restricted her activities and led to her dismissal before the end of her contract, according to the declaration. Donovan wrote that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s $500 million gift for a new artificial intelligence institute at the university, announced Dec. 7 that year, had been in the works before the donor meeting.

...

The Donovan case comes at a time when researchers who focus on social media platforms find themselves under increasing attack. Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s legal foundation has sued academic and independent researchers, claiming that they conspired with government agencies to suppress speech, and Republican-led congressional committees have subpoenaed their records, adding to the pressure.

In addition, Big Tech companies themselves have sponsored research, made grants to some colleges and universities, and doled out data to professors who agree to specific avenues of inquiry.

Oswald Acted Alone

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

Oswald acted alone.  The more education you have, the more likely you are to know that. Gallup:

The latest poll, conducted Oct. 2-23, finds majorities of most key demographic groups believing that more than one person was involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Americans with postgraduate education are the exception, with more who say a lone gunman (50%) rather than multiple people (44%) killed the president. This was not the case when this question was last asked in 2013.

The views of college graduates (those without any postgraduate education) are closer to those of Americans with at least some postgraduate education compared with those without a college degree. Still, 57% of college graduates think there was a conspiracy among multiple parties, while 41% say Oswald acted alone.

Although majorities of all party groups believe Kennedy’s assassination involved a conspiracy, that view is less prevalent among Democrats (55%) than Republicans (71%) and independents (68%). Conversely, Democrats (39%) are more likely than Republicans (25%) and independents (25%) to support the idea of a lone gunman.

Paul Roderick Gregory at WSJ last year:

Less than a year after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Warren Commission released its findings to the public: JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted alone. The new tranche of files the National Archives released last week contains nothing that calls that conclusion into question. But many Americans do anyway.

When the Warren report came out in September 1964, some 80% agreed with its finding that Oswald acted alone. Today more than 60% don’t believe Oswald acted alone. The persistent belief in a conspiracy has been fueled by the 400 books published on the Kennedys, most on the multitude of conspiracy theories revolving around Cuba, the Soviet Union, the Mafia, Texas oil interests, Lyndon B. Johnson and so on. One of the most amusing, in an effort to shift the blame from the leftist Oswald, lists my father and me as part of a White Russian conspiracy.


We did have a connection with Oswald. My father, a native Russian speaker, taught the language at a public library in Fort Worth, Texas. Oswald wanted a certificate of fluency in Russian and invited my father and me to his brother’s house. There we met Lee’s wife, Marina, for whom my father translated after the assassination. Moscow and some American leftists accused him of mistranslating her to shift the blame to Lee. Lee’s brother identified me as Lee and Marina’s only friend during their stay in Forth Worth.

I never doubted that Lee did it, or that he did it alone, when I saw his image on the TV screen as he was brought into Dallas police headquarters. As I told the Secret Service the next day, the Lee Harvey Oswald I knew would be the last person I would recruit for a conspiracy. He was genetically incapable of being either a leader or a follower.

The Warren report itself is a masterpiece in careful investigation. Its agents interviewed almost everyone who crossed paths with the Oswalds, down to fellow passengers on Lee’s bus to Mexico City and a landlord who once knocked on their door. The explanation of the sustained rejection of its findings rests with incredulity that history-changing events can happen by chance, especially through the actions of a nobody like Lee Harvey Oswald—a paranoid, delusional high-school dropout who expected his Historic Diary to make him an intellectual figure of the left.

I have a quite different picture as I remember waving goodbye to Lee and Marina as they boarded the night bus from Fort Worth to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1962, exactly one year before the assassination. Lee had all the attributes for a “low-tech” assassination: motive, resources, persistence, street smarts and the soul of a killer. He also needed a string of the coincidences that formed the brew for the conspiracy theories that seem to have won the day.

The loss of national innocence begun with JFK’s assassination has only gotten worse—the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks, Russiagate, evidence of a partisan bureaucracy, and questioning of formerly revered institutions such as the Supreme Court and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Can public trust be regained after such damage?

Speaker Johnson and Christian Nationalism

Mike Johnson (R-LA) has become speaker of the House. His inaugural speech mentioned religion and the Declaration.

 Kastelyn Fossett at Politico interviews Kristin Kobes Du Mez:

DU MEZ: As he understands it, this country was founded as a Christian nation. And he stands in a long tradition of conservative white evangelicals, particularly inside the Southern Baptist Convention, who have a distinct understanding of what that means. And this is where evangelical author and activist David Barton comes in.

Johnson has said that Barton’s ideas and teachings have been extremely influential on him, and that is essentially rooting him in this longer tradition of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism essentially posits the idea that America is founded on God’s laws, and that the Constitution is a reflection of God’s laws. Therefore, any interpretation of the Constitution must align with Christian nationalists’ understanding of God’s laws. Freedom for them means freedom to obey God’s law, not freedom to do what you want. So really, Christian supremacy and a particular type of conservative Christianity is at the heart of Johnson’s understanding of the Constitution and an understanding of our government. 

....

Fossett: Tell me more about David Barton.

Du Mez: Barton is a very popular author in conservative evangelical spaces, and he is the founder of an organization called Wallbuilders. It is an organization that for decades has been promoting the idea that the separation of church and state is a myth. He is a self-trained historian. Some would call him a pseudo-historian. He’s not a historian — I can say that, as a historian. He’s an apologist. He uses historical evidence, cherry-picked and sometimes entirely fabricated, to make a case that the separation of church and state is a myth, and it was only meant to protect the church from the intrusion of the state but that the church is supposed to influence the government. He’s the author of a number of very popular books.

Back in the early 1990s, Jerry Falwell, Sr., started promoting his teachings. I noticed that Johnson said he was — I think about 25 years ago —introduced to David Barton’s work, and it has really influenced the way he understands America. And that would be around that same time.

It’s really hard to overstate the influence that Barton has had in conservative evangelical spaces. For them, he has really defined America as a Christian nation. What that means is that he kind of takes conservative, white evangelical ideals from our current moment, and says that those were all baked into the Constitution, and that God has elected America to be a special nation, and that the nation will be blessed if we respond in obedience and maintain that, and not if we go astray. It really fuels evangelical politics and the idea that evangelicalism has a special role to play to get the country back on track.riday. Sign up for the newsletter.

I should also add that Barton’s Christian publisher back in 2012 actually pulled one of his books on Thomas Jefferson, because it was just riddled with misinformation. But that did not really affect his popularity. And again, these are not historical facts that we’re dealing with. It really is propaganda, but it’s incredibly effective propaganda. If you listen to Christian radio, you will hear them echoed. It’s just this pervasive understanding of our nation’s history that is based on fabrication.

Violent Crime Is Down. Americans Think It's Up

An October 2022 Morning Consult poll found that 74% thought violent crime was increasing nationally. 

It wasn't.

From the FBI:

The FBI’s crime statistics estimates for 2022 show that national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates:

• Murder and non-negligent manslaughter recorded a 2022 estimated nationwide decrease of 6.1% compared to the previous year.
• In 2022, the estimated number of offenses in the revised rape category saw an estimated 5.4% decrease.
• Aggravated assault in 2022 decreased an estimated 1.1% in 2022.
• Robbery showed an estimated increase of 1.3% nationally.

Fake Washington, Fake Jefferson, Fake Henry

Many posts have discussed fake quotations from Lincoln, Jefferson, Tocqueville, and others.

John Fea at Current:

 Here is Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch:

MAGA pastor and self-proclaimed “prophet” Hank Kunneman held a special patriotic church service prior to Independence Day earlier this month, during which he read made-up a quote supposedly from Thomas Jefferson in an attempt to argue that America was founded as and must remain a Christian nation.

During the service, Kunneman flagrantly misrepresented the famous 1802 “separation of church and state” letter that Jefferson sent to the Danbury Baptists after being elected president.

After mistakenly claiming that this quote came from “an address” that Jefferson delivered to the Danbury Baptists, Kunneman then read a laughably false quote supposedly delivered by Jefferson.

“He said, ‘The First Amendment has created a wall of separation between church and state,’” Kunneman declared, while an image of false quote was projected on screen. “‘But that wall is one directional. It keeps the government from running the church, and it makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government.’”

“Take that and choke,” Kunneman smugly proclaimed.

Read the rest here.

Watch the entire sermon here.

Some of you might notice that Kunneman also throws up on the screen a quote that he claims comes from George Washington’s Farewell Address: “Do not let anyone claim tribute of American patriotism, if they even attempt to remove religion from politics.” Read the farewell address here. Kunneman only got this quote half right. (The words after the comma are not Washington’s). Apparently Kunneman got this quote off the internet. He didn’t even bother to read the original document.

And that’s not all. Kunneman follows this up with the fake Patrick Henry quote that got Missouri senator Josh Hawley into trouble earlier this month.

Misinformation and the 303 Creative Case

Last week, SCOTUS ruled 6-3 in favor of a web designer, finding that a Colorado law that includes protections for sexual orientation, would unconstitutionally compel her to create speech that violates her religious convictions. Caroline Downey continues at NRO:

The New Republic reported this week that two men named in a court filing by Smith’s counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom had no idea they were mentioned in the filing and had never asked Smith to create a website for them.

But according to the filing, someone who identified themselves as “Stewart” contacted Smith on September 21, 2016 asking for her help with his wedding to “Mike” “early next year.” The inquiry said the couple would be interested in “some design work done for our invites,” place names, and potentially a website. Stewart included his contact information on the request.

Smith received Stewart’s inquiry in September 2016, one day after filing a preemptive lawsuit challenging the accommodation clause of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. ADF attorney Jonathan Scruggs corroborated the timeline to National Review.

...

Smith and ADF were prevented from running a background check on Stewart to verify the authenticity of his request because it could have put them in conflict with the existing law, he added.

...

No request was necessary to establish a credible threat to Smith, however. Colorado had been particularly “aggressive” with its enforcement of the public accommodations law in the past, Waggoner said and Gorsuch agreed. The state’s record of anti-free speech intimidation prompted Smith to fire the first shot...“That’s why the Supreme Court never mentioned or relied on the request, neither did the Tenth Circuit, neither have numerous courts all across the country that have heard similar challenges without requests,” Scruggs said. “It’s kind of a nothing burger and smacks of desperation.

Attention and Credulity

 Natalie Jackson at National Journal:

At best, only one third of Americans pay close attention to politics. In a recent Marquette Law School poll, just 36 percent of respondents said they follow politics most of the time. Using different wording, a Grinnell College-Selzer poll from March found that 28 percent of Americans say they pay a lot of attention to political news.

...

When it comes to paying attention to presidential campaigns, there is even more reason to think we dramatically overestimate how invested people are. Pew Research has asked respondents how much thought they have given to the candidates running for president in the lead-up to the last several presidential elections. In the summer of 2019, barely a quarter had given the candidates much thought. The figures were similar in mid-2015. (Pew has not yet asked the question for the 2024 cycle.)

The poll also found that older people are more likely to say that they follow politics "most of the time" 

• 18-29  36%
• 30-44  43%
• 45-59  63%
• 60+    74%

And so they tend to have more contextual knowledge, which helps them sort fake headlines from true ones.

 Sawdah Bhaimiya at Business Insider:

Boomers have always taken the flack for falling for fake news stories, but a survey has found it's younger generations that are more susceptible to online misinformation.

The survey of 1,516 US adults, published Thursday, was conducted by polling organization YouGov in April 2023. It examined how likely people were to be fooled by fake headlines. The survey is based on a framework called The Misinformation Susceptibility Test, developed by University of Cambridge psychologists.

The 2-minute test, now available to the public, required participants to look at 20 headlines and determine which were fake and real. It found that, on average, 65% of those surveyed were able to correctly classify them.

Surprisingly, the survey found that younger respondents were not as adept at spotting the difference between real and fake headlines as their older counterparts who have often been memed for their online naivete.

Electing Idiots

Liz Cheney:

"What we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots...

I look at it through the lens of how do we elect serious people? And I think electing serious people can’t be partisan...And part of the problem is we have this closed partisan… pic.twitter.com/FJhv7eYeIq

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) June 27, 2023

From the Hugh Hewitt interview with Francis Suarez: https://t.co/OzgJloODWJ pic.twitter.com/b9LCcwCM4e

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) June 27, 2023

“I'll look at — what’d you call it, a ‘Weeble?’”

— 2024 GOP presidential candidate Francis Suarez on Uyghurs pic.twitter.com/wAW8lGg0IK

— The Recount (@therecount) June 27, 2023

Coup Misinformation

Matt Binder at Mashable:

The potential coup attempt in Russia by a paramilitary organization may already be over(opens in a new tab), but the misinformation sure did flow during the breaking global event.

... 

Since Elon Musk acquired the platform, Twitter has gone through changes that don't exactly bode well for it as an invaluable breaking news resource like it once was.

For example, prior to Musk, the blue checkmark meant that a user was verified by Twitter as the journalist or expert that the individual claimed they were. Remember, the purpose of the checkmark was to make sure these users couldn't be impersonated. Now, however, anyone who pays $8 per month for Twitter's premium subscription service, Twitter Blue, gets a blue checkmark.

Furthermore, those paid blue checkmark users now get priority placement in Twitter's For You feed algorithm, and in the replies to other users' tweets. And, echoing the issue on Telegram, many Twitter Blue subscribers are not far, ideologically speaking, from the Putin regime.

 

From WNYC "On the Media":

Myths, Misinformation, and RFK Jr.

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Julia Shapero at The Hill:

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested Wednesday that Russia has been “acting in good faith” in various efforts to end the war in Ukraine and placed blame on the U.S. for the 16-monthlong conflict.

Kennedy said in an interview on SiriusXM’s “The Briefing with Steve Scully” that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “repeatedly said yes” to negotiations.

Joan Walsh at The Nation:

I’ve been doing my best to ignore the farcical presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His noxious views on vaccines, the origin of AIDS, the alleged dangers of wi-fi and other forms of junk science deserve no wide hearing. Polls showing he’s favored by 20 percent of likely Democratic voters over President Biden are almost as laughable as Kennedy’s views. It’s early; he’s got iconic American name recognition; and there’s almost always an appetite, among Democrats anyway, for anybody but the incumbent. His lies have been thoroughly debunked by Judd Legum at Popular Info, Michael Scherer in The Washington Post, Naomi Klein in The Guardian, and Brandy Zadrozny on NBC News.

But I’ve come to believe I have a responsibility to write about Kennedy because of my own shameful role in sending his toxic vaccine views into public discourse: I was the Salon editor, in partnership with Rolling Stone, who 18 years ago published his mendacious, error-ridden piece on how thimerosal in childhood vaccines supposedly led to a rise in autism, and how public health officials covered it up. From the day “Deadly Immunity” went up on Salon.com, we were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data. Some of his sources turned out to be known crackpots.

///
But as subsequent articles and books continued to debunk Kennedy’s conspiracy theory, it felt irresponsible to leave it up. Six years later, in 2011, my successor as editor in chief, Kerry Lauerman, in consultation with me and others, decided we should take it down. Rolling Stone later did the same. (In the interests of transparency, we preserved the corrections page.)

Jake Tapper at CNN:

Go back to 2005. I was a reporter with ABC News and Salon.com reached out to see if we were interested in doing a TV spot tied to the publication of the Kennedy Jr. piece. I interviewed him via phone, with a TV crew in his office, and prepared a spot for “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.”

In Kennedy’s bizarre retelling a few days ago (the relevant part starts at 27:55 into the interview), I worked with him “for three weeks doing this incredible documentary” (no and no) about his Rolling Stone story – please note he makes zero mention of the article having since been retracted and disappeared – and then “the night before the piece was supposed to run, he called me up and said, ‘The piece just got killed by corporate.’” (I didn’t say that in any way and the piece wasn’t killed.) “All my career, I have never had a piece killed by corporate and I’m so mad,” he said I said. (I hadn’t. I had been at ABC News for two years. I had had plenty of pieces killed. Not once did “corporate” play a role in killing any of them.)

 

 

Committee Goes After Disinformation Scholars

  Naomi Nix and Joseph Menn at WP:

Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and his allies in Congress are demanding documents from and meetings with leading academics who study disinformation, increasing pressure on a group they accuse of colluding with government officials to suppress conservative speech.

Jordan’s colleagues and staffers met Tuesday on Capitol Hill with a frequent target of right-wing activists, University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, two weeks after they interviewed Clemson University professors who also track online propaganda, according to people familiar with the events.

Last week, Jordan (Ohio) threatened legal action against Stanford University, home to the Stanford Internet Observatory, for not complying fully with his records requests. The university turned over its scholars’ communications with government officials and big social media platforms but is holding back records of some disinformation complaints. Stanford told The Washington Post that it omitted internal records, some filed by students. The university is negotiating for limited interviews.

AI and Politics

Emily A. Vogels at Pew:

About six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) are familiar with ChatGPT, though relatively few have tried it themselves, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March. Among those who have tried ChatGPT, a majority report it has been at least somewhat useful.

ChatGPT is an open-access online chatbot that allows users to ask questions and request content. The versatility and human-like quality of its responses have captured the attention of the media, the tech industry and some members of the public. ChatGPT surpassed 100 million monthly users within two months of its public launch in late November 2022, setting a world record as the fastest-growing web application. Due to these factors, the Center chose to ask Americans about ChatGPT specifically rather than chatbots or large language models (LLMs) more broadly.

Jim Saksa at Roll Call:

AI is already being used in politics. After President Joe Biden announced his reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee released an AI-generated video that envisioned a dystopian future wrought by his four more years in office. In the Chicago mayoral primary earlier this year, a Twitter account posing as a local news outlet posted a deepfake video impersonating candidate Paul Vallas on the eve of the election. And campaigns have used machine-learning models to guide their ad buys on social media platforms like Facebook for years now.

Right now, though, it’s the potential to use large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to update voter files, perform data analysis and program automated functions that excite political operatives the most. While well-funded Senate or gubernatorial races can afford to hire data scientists to crunch numbers, smaller campaigns rarely have that luxury, said Colin Strother, a Democratic political consultant based in Texas. AI will change that.

“I’m excited about some of the brute work that would be really great to do, but — unless you’re on a big-time campaign, with a ton of money and a ton of staff — you can’t afford to do,” Strother said.

 

One More Time: Puerto Rico is Part of the United States

Many Americans don't know that Puerto Ricans are their fellow Americans.

Maria Santa at CNN:

Hertz has apologized to a Puerto Rican customer after one of its employees refused to rent him a car he had paid for in advance because he did not show her his passport.

Humberto Marchand said that he traveled to New Orleans last Wednesday and presented his Puerto Rican driver’s license at the Hertz counter at the Louie Armstrong International Airport. The employee asked for his passport even though, like all Puerto Ricans, Marchand is a US citizen and does not need to have a passport to rent a car within the United States.

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States, and anyone born on the island is by law a US citizen.

Marchand said the employee, who has not been publicly identified, treated him like a foreigner and told him that he could not rent a vehicle without presenting a passport.

“I was surprised and definitely frustrated because it was very late at night, so I decided to make a formal complaint” said Marchand in an interview with CNN.

In a statement to CNN, Hertz (HTZ) said that the company accepts Puerto Rican driver’s licenses from customers renting in the United States without requiring a valid passport.

“We sincerely regret that our policy was not followed and have apologized to Mr. Marchand and refunded his rental,” a company spokesperson said. “We are reinforcing our policies with employees to ensure that they are understood and followed consistently across our locations.”

A video recorded by Marchand and posted on his Twitter account shows the employee asking him to leave while he repeatedly reminds her that his Puerto Rican driver’s license is just as valid as those issued in Louisiana or any other US state. The employee then threatened to call the police, to which Marchand responded, “yes, please call the police.”

“I told her that she was making a mistake based on ignorance and I recorded to make my point clear that I had been denied as a US citizen because my license is from Puerto Rico. It’s a real ID license which by law should be a uniform form of ID within the United Sates,” said Marchand. “She sustained her position and decided to call the police”

Marchand says a Kenner Police Department officer responded to the scene and also asked him to leave. As he walked away, he said he heard the police officer threaten to call the border patrol.

Fake Story about Vets and Migrants

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Aidan McLaughlin at Mediaite:

The New York Post dropped a bombshell report last week: amid a nationwide influx of migrants, nearly two-dozen homeless veterans were kicked out of hotels where they were being temporarily housed in order to make room for migrants in upstate New York.

The story, which was based on a claim by a veterans advocate, got the front page treatment: “VETS KICKED OUT FOR MIGRANTS,” bellowed the Post last Saturday. “Outrage as upstate hotels tell 20 homeless veterans to leave.”

It was a juicy story that could have been cooked up in Roger Ailes’s rage-fear lab: Red-blooded American veterans put out on the street to make way for foreign invaders!

The story rocketed around the right-wing ecosystem. New York Post columnist Miranda Devine said President Joe Biden “should burn in hell for this.” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called it “shameful.” Donald Trump Jr. declared, “Fuck Democrats.” Nikki Haley said the tale was “Liberal insanity at work.”

Naturally, Fox News covered the story enthusiastically, treating it as gospel on nearly every program. On Outnumbered, one of Fox’s most popular daytime programs, hosts pinned blame for the very local story on Biden.

It proves he “doesn’t mean it” when he says “God bless the troops” at the end of his speeches, one host said. “Why is Joe Biden doing this?” another asked. “Because it is intentional… he is a globalist. He’s more concerned about the needs of the U.N., about the World Economic Forum than he is about his own American citizens.”

Then, the story fell apart.

First, the hotels that veterans were supposedly booted from told Mid-Hudson News they had no idea what the advocate, YIT Foundation Executive Director Sharon Finch, was talking about. Then, a local Republican New York lawmaker dug into her claims and concluded that she lied.

Small local publications are in trouble, but they provide vital information. 

 

Pro-Russian Twitter Accounts

Many posts have discussed how Russia has interfered in American politics.

David Klepper at AP:

Soon after a train derailed and spilled toxic chemicals in Ohio last month, anonymous pro-Russian accounts started spreading misleading claims and anti-American propaganda about it on Twitter, using Elon Musk’s new verification system to expand their reach while creating the illusion of credibility.

The accounts, which parroted Kremlin talking points on myriad topics, claimed without evidence that authorities in Ohio were lying about the true impact of the chemical spill. The accounts spread fearmongering posts that preyed on legitimate concerns about pollution and health effects and compared the response to the derailment with America’s support for Ukraine following its invasion by Russia.

...

Another pro-Russian account recently tried to pick an online argument with Ukraine’s defense department, posting photos of documents that it claimed came from the Wagner Group, a private military company owned by a Yevgeny Prigozhin, a key Putin ally. Prigozhin operates troll farms that have targeted U.S. social media users in the past. Last fall he boasted of his efforts to meddle with American democracy.

A separate Twitter account claiming to represent Wagner actively uses the site to recruit fighters.

“ Gentlemen, we have interfered, are interfering and will interfere,” Prigozhin said last fall on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections in the U.S. “Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do,” Prigozhin said at the time.

A Reagan Myth

Dan McLaughlin at NRO:

On the 112th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, we commemorate his many monumental accomplishments as the greatest president of the past century. But it is also a good occasion for correcting the record regarding the persistent, never-ending efforts to obscure those accomplishments with misleading smears. One attack on Reagan that has grown in the telling over the years is the claim that he invented a wartime story about having been present at the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The problem: The actual evidence of Reagan saying this is vague, thirdhand, and contradicted on the record by people who were there. It is also inconsistent with Reagan’s own public accounts of how he first came to see the reality of the Holocaust on film.

What Reagan actually said: Remarks at the First Annual Commemoration of the Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust April 30, 1981

I'm horrified today when I know and hear that there are actually people now trying to say that the Holocaust was invented, that it never happened, that there weren't 6 million people whose lives were taken cruelly and needlessly in that event, that all of this is propaganda. Well, the old cliche that a picture's worth a thousand words -- in World War II, not only do we have the survivors today to tell us at first hand, but in World War II, I was in the military and assigned to a post where every week, we obtained from every branch of the service all over the world the combat film that was taken by every branch. And we edited this into a secret report for the general staff. We, of course, had access to and saw that secret report.

And I remember April '45. I remember seeing the first film that came in when the war was still on, but our troops had come upon the first camps and had entered those camps. And you saw, unretouched -- no way that it could have ever been rehearsed -- what they saw, the horror they saw. I felt the pride when, in one of those camps, there was a nearby town, and the people were ordered to come and look at what had been going on, and to see them. And the reaction of horror on their faces was the greatest proof that they had not been conscious of what was happening so near to them.

And that film still, I know, must exist in the military, and there it is, living motion pictures, for anyone to see, and I won't go into the horrible scenes that we saw. But it remains with me as confirmation of our right to rekindle these memories, because we need always to guard against that kind of tyranny and inhumanity. Our spirit is strengthened by remembering, and our hope is in our strength.

The Myth of Ellis Island Name Changes

Caitlin Hollander:

[We] are told by our grandparents “oh, the name was changed at Ellis Island”. And at first glance, it seems to be true- from mobsters (Meyer Lansky was born Meier Suchowlanski) to actors (Jack Benny was Benjamin Kubelsky), everyone seems to have come to America with a different name. This story is an accepted part of the early 20th century immigrant experience- that immigration officials changed the names of immigrants due to racism, misunderstandings, an attempt to “Americanize”, or simply because they did not care.

But none of it is true- simply put, it is one of the greatest urban legends ingrained in the modern American psyche. The commonly given reasons behind these supposed name changes do not hold up to the historical facts of immigration through Ellis Island.

The names recorded at Ellis Island were taken directly from the passenger manifests, which were made up at the port of departure. In addition, Ellis Island employed a number of interpreters who spoke the immigrants’ native languages. In 1911, Commissioner William Williams wrote to Washington, providing both the number of interpreters for each language and asking for funding to hire more.
...
But a more practical barrier existed to a permanent name change being made at Ellis Island in the early 20th century, and one that we do not think of in the age of digitization. Once you left Ellis Island, there was nothing indicated what name you had entered under, at least nothing that would matter in your day to day life. Depending on the era in which they had come to America, the immigrant might never see what name they had entered under. Alien Registration Forms were only created in 1940. Even when applying for citizenship, you provided first, the name you went by and second, the name under which you entered the US (as seen in the petition for naturalization above). The assumption was that the former was now your legal name. After 1906, when nationwide standardization of the process was instituted, you had to simply provide affidavits from witnesses that had known you in the US for 5 years- later on, proofs of arrival were included in petitions for naturalization, but this part of the process was only slowly adapted. And no ID existed at the time for a job, school, or housing to require. 

Not the Day After D-Day

this is a dark horse contender for the worst tweet of all time lmao pic.twitter.com/BCjzX68KA5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 7, 2022

Happy Not the Day After D-Day to all who celebrate

— George Conway🌻 (@gtconway3d) December 8, 2022