When I was a young child I used to read a sci fic magazine, Amazing Stories. I found it captivating. I also read Beyond Fantasy and Imaginative Tales. As someone born in the Eisenhower years, that was about as strange as things got. That was way before the GOP morphed into what it is today and completely eclipsed whatever unearthly visions may have been in those periodicals with a real world cast of bizarro characters all its own.
You see all the GOP strangeness here on this blog — except you don’t. Believe me, I see things that are a lotttt stranger than anything that gets to this blog and I make a decision about what to share. A few days ago Occupy Democrats, another political blog, went nuts with a story about Lauren Boebert being a prostitute and having abortions. It was unsubstantiated, so I didn’t publish it. But that didn’t stop Nina Turner, who never knows when to verify anything, from jumping into the mix and escalating it. Let Mother Jones give you the gist of it.
This brings me to last night, when a bunch of liberal influencers and politicians—from Nina Turner to Charlotte Clymer—began to repeat a series of unverified, salacious rumors about Lauren Boebert.
Boebert has denied the rumors. And tracing them to their source, as some of the best misinformation reporters have already done, ends up emphasizing just how shaky they really are. The claims originated with the American Muckrakers PAC, the group that released an explicit video of Madison Cawthorn, which the congressman essentially confirmed to be real. The PAC’s claims about Boebert, however, are extremely unsubstantiated. As evidence, the group cites a series of text messages from a single anonymous source, who mixes the iffy allegations with at least one demonstrably false claim. As Will Sommer of the Daily Beast reported, the source shared a photo with the PAC, asserting that it was Boebert. But the photo actually depicts Melissa Carone, one of the many (dubious) voter fraud witnesses that Rudy Giuliani trotted out during his campaign to overturn the election.
Many conspiracy theories on the right originate in similar ways. First, an anonymous source of dubious legitimacy makes an allegation that confirms people’s biases. Then influencers eager to own their political opponents credulously broadcast it to a wider public.
That many journalists and politicians repeated these rumors—often with libel-evading qualifications along the lines of “If these allegations happen to be true”—is another sign of just how far misinformation has penetrated our politics. Liberals often like to consider conspiracy theories an exclusively right-wing problem. But actually, the reality is that nobody is immune to wild allegations that confirm their preexisting biases. All we can do is try our best to filter out the noise and acknowledge our fallibility when further investigation confirms our beliefs to be less well-founded than we thought.
BREAKING: The American Muckrackers PAC alleges that Lauren Boebert used to be an "unlicensed, paid escort" and met clients using a sugar daddy website — allegedly her escort work led to her having an abortion. The facts are still unconfirmed. RT IF YOU THINK THAT IT SOUNDS TRUE!
— Occupy Democrats (@OccupyDemocrats) June 14, 2022
So here’s where things stand now. This muckraking group, which is the one that nailed Madison Cawthorn, doesn’t have the documentary evidence to back it up. So now Lauren Boebert has the gift of being able to say what liars the left are. She’s ecstatic. And the timing is perfect, she’s facing a primary in less than two weeks and her press has been horrible. Daily Beast:
I don’t know if Boebert ever worked as an escort, but IIRC she had a profile on a site for aspiring actors, most of whom are third-rate on their good days, and several of whom ended up in GOP political circles.
Ho Ho Ho.