Putin's invasion of Ukraine exposes the Fox News-QAnon feedback loop

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Amanda Marcotte
@AmandaMarcotte
The latest Fox News conspiracy theory on Ukraine comes straight from QAnon. To make it worse, Russia has started to use it to justify Putin’s invasion.

salon.com
Putin's invasion of Ukraine exposes the Fox News-QAnon feedback loop
Conspiracy theories burble up from the right-wing swamp, Fox News launders them and the fringe gets emboldened
11:48 AM · Mar 17, 2022

https://www.salon.com/2022/03/17/putins-invasion-of-ukraine-exposes-the-fox-news-qanon-feedback-loop/


One of the currently preferred rationalizations pro-Russia propagandists are using to justify the invasion of Ukraine appears to have emerged from an American social media network known for hosting QAnon, neo-Nazis and other assorted deplorables. As Justin Ling at Foreign Policy explained it earlier this month, the new theory is that "Moscow is launching airstrikes on Ukraine to destroy bioweapon-manufacturing labs in order to prevent the American infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci from creating a sequel to the COVID-19 virus."

The notion that Ukraine has "bioweapons" and that Russia is invading to stop some dastardly Ukrainian plot didn't even emerge until after the invasion had begun. Prior to that, the laughably thin rationale was based on Vladimir Putin's asinine claims that Ukraine, whose president is of Jewish ancestry, is being run by Nazis. When that didn't really fly, a new justification emerged, from what look to be American sources.

As Ben Collins and Kevin Collier of NBC News have traced — and as the Fauci-centric nature of the theory would indicate — this nonsense seems to have started in right-wing circles and only spread after the Russian invasion started. Memes illustrating the conspiracy theory originated on Gab, a Trump-worshipping social media network rife with neo-Nazis and QAnon fans. Soon they were copied to Twitter and spread by QAnon accounts, many which were eventually deleted for spreading disinformation. But by then, of course it was too late: The conspiracy theory had reached Fox News.

On March 9, Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity offered cleaned-up versions of the conspiracy theory. Instead of explicitly justifying the invasion of Ukraine, they presented the bioweapons claim as a "theory," simply being offered as a counterbalance to the supposed pro-Ukraine bias of the mainstream media. The next day, another Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, hauled the Fauci part of the conspiracy theory out of the weeds, first burbling on about "biolabs" and then adding, "Isn't it interesting that we haven't heard or seen Fauci in weeks?"

*snip*