The call (to the Proud Boys) is coming from inside the (White) House!
When the first QAnon posts jumped in to leverage the ugly Pizzagate conspiracy theory with a whole new level of destructive, divisive hate, the person behind those first cryptic notes was something of a mystery. But when it comes to the Big Lie—the claim that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election—the source of the disinformation, distortions, and big juicy whoppers isn’t difficult to pin down. It was Trump. And Trump’s lawyers. And Trump’s extended team.
As The Guardian makes clear, a study of social media has determined that it took just a handful of “super spreader” accounts to infect the entire Republican Party with a disease that led directly to the Jan. 6 insurgency. The accounts that did the most damage were not no-name accounts manned by people surfacing from the dark side of conspiracy land. In fact, of the top 21 accounts most responsible for spreading false information on Twitter, 15 were verified accounts. If that little blue checkmark was supposed to connote some kind of reliability, or to suggest that Twitter will in some sense hold the person behind the account to a higher standard … it clearly failed.
But it may not have been just social media that was acting as a gateway between the people spreading the Big Lie and those bashing down the doors of the Capitol. As The New York Times reports, the FBI has identified at least one direct connection between the Proud Boys and the Trump White House.
According to The Times, the FBI has learned that one member of the white supremacist group Proud Boys was in direct communication with someone in the White House in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 insurgency. That includes using “metadata”—so often a topic of concern to Sen. Josh Hawley—to directly connect a call made by a Proud Boy member with someone in the White House. Exactly who that might be, the FBI hasn’t yet made clear.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/3/6/2019710/-The-call-to-the-Proud-Boys-is-coming-from-inside-the-White-House?detail=emaildkre
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