After Nancy Guthrie’s Feb.1 abduction from her Tucson, Arizona, home, her daughter “Today” host Savannah Guthrie put out a call on social media for tips on her mother’s whereabouts, pleading for her safe return.
So far, social media users have been less than helpful. With the Justice Department’s Jan. 30 release of more than 3 million pages of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, X users proposed bogus links between the abduction and the file release.
MultipleXposts include a photo of Savannah Guthrie’s family and an accusation about her husband, Michael Feldman.
“Her husband’s company is listed as a co conspirator in the Epstein files… FGS Global,” reads a Feb. 12 X post with over 1 million views. “In case you’re wondering why now of all times for Savannah Guthrie’s mother to be ‘kidnapped.’”
The co-anchor’s husband isn’t named in the Epstein files, and neither is his current company.
Searching the digital Epstein files, we found one 2013 email to Epstein from a person named Michael Feldman, but it seems to be someone else, introducing himself as a “theoretical physicist.”
Guthrie’s husband is a communications consultant who previously worked in the Clinton administration as chief liaison to Congress and senior adviser for former Vice President Al Gore. Feldman currently works as North American co-chairman of FGS Global, an international public relations firm.
We did not find FGS Global listed in Justice Department files, but another public affairs company that was merged to found FGS Global was listed. As a community note on one of the X posts said, Feldman helped found Glover Park Group in 2001, and its name appears twice in the Epstein files. The firm merged with other companies to form FGS Global in 2021.
PolitiFact reached out to FGS Global, but didn’t receive an immediate response.
The second was in a 2015 email forwarded by Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury secretary and former Harvard University president. Summers suggested that Epstein contact Joe Lockhart, who worked at the Glover Park Group and served as press secretary during the Clinton administration, as well as other Democratic politicians. The initial email says Lockhart “helped Clinton and Genera= (sic) Petraeus.” (Former CIA director and retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus had an extramarital affair uncovered in 2012.)
(Screenshot of a Jan. 8, 2015, email exchange in the Epstein files)
These mentions are not evidence that Feldman, FGS Global or Glover Park Group were “co-conspirators” with Epstein.
Being mentioned in the files does not mean criminal wrongdoing. We reported in 2025 that figures such as President Donald Trump and Clinton appear in the files, but that doesn’t mean they are guilty or charged with crimes. As of February 2026, Epstein and his coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell are the only people who have beenconvicted in the scheme to sexually exploit and abuse multiple minor girls.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said Feb. 16 on X that the Guthrie family, including “all siblings and spouses,” had been cleared as possible suspects in the Nancy Guthrie case.
We rate the X posts’ claims about Guthrie’s husband’s company False.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama said he did not see evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” after sending social media abuzz by saying aliens were real on a podcast over the weekend.
During a lightning round of questions with podcast host Brian Tylor Cohen, Obama was asked, “Are aliens real?”
“They’re real,” he answered, continuing: “But I haven’t seen them. And, they’re not being kept in Area 51.”
On Sunday night, the former president released a statement on Instagram, appearing to clarify what he meant by his comments that have since gone viral.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
Secrecy around Area 51, a top-secret Cold War test site in the Nevada desert, has long fueled conspiracy theories among UFO enthusiasts.
In 2013, the CIA acknowledged the existence of the site, but not UFO crashes, black-eyed extraterrestrials or staged moon landings.
Declassified documents referred to the 8,000-square-mile (20,700-square-kilometer) installation by name after decades of U.S. government officials refusing to acknowledge it.
The base has been a testing ground for a host of top-secret aircraft, including the U-2 in the 1950s and later the B-2 stealth bomber.
On Wednesday, Variety published the headline: “J.K. Rowling Denies Inviting Jeffrey Epstein to ‘Harry Potter & The Cursed Child’ Broadway Opening, DOJ Docs Show He Was Turned Away at Door.” One wonders why the editors decided they needed the first part of that, which is accusatory in tone—even though the second part acquits her!
Luckily for Rowling, the new information, made available as part of the federal government’s mandatory Epstein files disclosure—3 million more pages became available last Friday—knocks down this particular smear campaign. But here’s my question: What if Epstein, a schemer and a charlatan whose entire shtick was worming his way into the company of rich and famous people for the purposes of manipulating and/or blackmailing them, had somehow snuck into the show?
If the response to this latest batch of Epstein files is any indication, Rowling would have been referred to as one of those notable names brought down by the Epstein files—guilty, by insinuation, of complicity in the most infamous sexual predator’s appalling crimes. Rowling, of course, is already persona non grata among progressives, owing to her views on transgender issues, which are perfectly mainstream but toxically unpopular amongst the left. But that’s the problem: The Epstein files have become an exercise in ax-grinding among partisan actors and knee-jerk critics of people who found themselves in Epstein’s orbit—wealthy entrepreneurs, academics, the chattering class, etc.
You are reading Free Media from Robby Soave and Reason. Get more of Robby’s on-the-media, disinformation, and free speech coverage.
This is not to excuse the appalling judgment of those who consciously and deliberately continued to court Epstein’s favor even after the full extent of his depravity was well-known. Such figures include Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky, Steve Bannon, and Stacey Plaskett. Bannon and Plaskett, in particular, sought Epstein’s political counsel right up until the end of his life. Chomsky gave Epstein advice on beating the charges against him. Gates is accused of despicable behavior, which he denies.
The best thing that can be said about the release of the Epstein files is that it sheds light on the incredibly poor discernment of several individuals who are influential in public policy. This is useful information that the public has a right to know.
But the release of the Epstein files has also meant that millions of documents containing thinly-sourced accusations, misleading information, and outright falsehoods are now flooding social media, giving a veneer of confirmation to rumors, gossip, and lies. This is very much by design, since Congress—by a vote of 427–1 in the House—opted to disclose everything, including transcripts of investigations, and reports that were never deemed truthful.
For example, the latest batch of docs prompted Keith Edwards, a Democratic strategist, to post on X the claim that Epstein is the one who introduced President Donald Trump to Melania is now “confirmed.”
The claim is not confirmed. Just because someone said this, and an investigator made note of it, does not mean it’s true. On the contrary, Donald and Melania have both denied that it’s true, and The Daily Beast was previously forced to retract the claim because the official timeline of events contradicts it.
So here we have a clear case of bad-faith political actors weaponizing the Epstein files to tarnish their political enemies, even though the new documents don’t prove anything about Trump. Indeed, for partisan figures who have been obsessed with the notion that the Epstein files would demonstrate Trump’s complicity in Epstein’s sex crimes, the most stunning revelation should be that there’s no evidence of this whatsoever. There’s also no evidence that the Clintons were involved in an international cabal of pedophiles.
No one’s priors are being reconsidered, however. On the contrary, those who were interested in the Epstein files mostly because they wanted evidence that their political enemies were child rapists are now mostly claiming that such proof is still being withheld. Much like people who believe the moon-landing was fake and the CIA killed John F. Kennedy, no amount of evidence to the contrary will dissuade them.
Initially, this category included many of the MAGA faithful, who earnestly believed they were about to unmask a global pedophile ring involving the Clintons. More recently, the Epstein files disclosure became a Democratic crusade, as it dawned on liberals that Trump had been friends with Epstein, too, and perhaps complicit in his crimes. Again, there’s nothing to incriminate Trump, and there’s nothing to incriminate the Clintons. Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.) won’t take no for an answer, of course. He has successfully pressured the Clintons to testify before Congress about Epstein.
It’s worth repeating that the real villain of the Epstein files is Epstein himself, a vicious sexual predator who abused underage girls. He is likely not the only one, and there are other individuals in Epstein’s orbit who reached settlements with accusers.
But the Epstein files do not contain a great deal of new evidence of sex crimes among Epstein’s friends, associates, and acquaintances. Yet everyone whose name appears in the Epstein files is now being treated like an exposed sex criminal. This includes hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, who appears in a photo alongside three young people, possibly on Epstein’s island. On X, high-follower accounts cited the photo as evidence that Dubin had sexually assaulted those children, who were probably procured for him by Epstein.
Except that’s not the case at all. Those are Dubin’s own kids!
That’s Glenn Dubin. Those are his own kids. This whole thing is becoming an insane moral panic along the lines of the Satanic child abuse panic, recovered memory, campus rape hysteria, and all of that.
Epstein was a predator, and people who kept in contact with him showed… https://t.co/1mFpPA8UXL
This is a witch hunt mentality; in fact, it’s reminiscent of the public panic over sexual misconduct on college campuses throughout the 2010s, in which junk statistics and one-sided journalism helped advance an utterly false notion that elite universities were a “hunting ground” for young women. The idea that scores of rapists hunted college women, lured them into attics, and attacked them during depraved rituals was the thrust of the infamous Rolling Stone hoax story, which was subsequently debunked.
Moreover, the release of the files may be setting a dangerous precedent. It is incredibly unusual for the federal government to unseal investigative records, which contain reports that lack corroboration. This is an unusual case, and there’s certainly an argument to be made that public confidence in the justice system requires disclosure here. But I can’t help but consider the statement by Rep. Clay Higgins (R–La.), the lone no vote on Epstein disclosure.
“If enacted in its current form, this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt,” he wrote.
(We haven’t taped either yet. Stay tuned later this week!)
Freed Up, in case you are wondering, is my brand new show with Christian Britschgi, Reason‘s resident salmon-wrangler and housing reporter. Unlike Reason‘s other video products, we are not actively trying to make you any smarter or better informed about the news—though we expect, as a side effect of watching, you may accrue information about Star Wars, Chinese history, Pokemon, working out, and/or the Catholic Church.
Considers this our desperate attempt to capitalize on the success of all those two dudes hanging out podcasts. And we are inviting you to join us!
Two casting controversies took social media by storm this week, and they are both movies I’d like to see. First, conservatives were mad about Lupita Nyong’o, a black woman, portraying Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. (Elon Musk quipped that Nolan had lost his integrity.) It should be noted that this casting rumor isn’t even confirmed; all we know for sure is that Nyong’o will appear in the movie. Second, some liberals were irate that Jacob Elordi is portraying Heathcliff in the new Wuthering Heights movie. In the source material, author Emily Brontë describes Heathcliff as “dark-skinned,” whereas Elordi is fair-skinned. This is rather silly, though. For Bronte, a woman of Victorian England, “dark-skinned” could have meant anything from African or Indian to Spanish or Italian. (Elordi is of Spanish descent, for the record.) Moreover, though Heathcliff is definitely lowborn and an outcast owing to his origins—and that affects his temperament and the manner in which he is treated by the other characters—his specific racial identity is not particularly important to the story.
This is insane. Heathcliff is not a “person of color” in the modern sense. He is described as a “dark skinned gipsy,” and what that means is ambiguous. For Emily Bronte, Spanish people would have been dark-skinned. (The collective white identity did not exist until recently.)… https://t.co/DNSC71MuYA
As for Helen of Troy, in Greek mythology, she emerged from an egg after her father, Zeus, mated with a swan. It’s essential to depict her as very beautiful, but she does not need to be a fair-skinned white woman like Diane Kruger, who played her in the 2004 Troy movie. (That movie was pretty great, in my opinion, and I definitely liked Kruger as Helen!) Kruger isn’t Greek; neither is Matt Damon, who’s portraying Odysseus this time around—but no one is mad about that. It’s just Nyong’o generating the anger.
Posts claim a Minneapolis daycare admitted fraud by posting a Craigslist ad seeking to hire “child actors” for $1,500 per day so the facility could appear compliant during a state inspection. The claim is based on screenshots of a Craigslist listing titled “Daycare hiring child actors for 3-day contract (Ventura Village).”
Explanation:
The claim is misleading and unsupported by evidence.
The Craigslist post did briefly exist and was later removed, with an archived copy preserved here. However, the existence of the post does not establish authenticity or truthfulness of its content.
The text of the ad contains multiple internal contradictions and legal impossibilities. It claims the daycare was forced to close, yet needed children present “while the state is on site.” Minnesota child care inspections do not operate this way. State regulators do not require facilities to repopulate children to restore funding temporarily, and doing so would itself violate child care and safeguarding rules. If they were forced to close, why would children be there?
Minnesota inspections are either scheduled annual inspections or unannounced investigations, and inspectors have authority to access facilities, records, staff, and children already present. There is no lawful scenario in which hiring temporary children would resolve compliance issues under (Minn. Stat. 245H.)
The ad’s proposal to hire “child actors” is also legally implausible. Employing minors requires labor permits, guardian consent, strict hour limits, and regulatory oversight. No legitimate daycare operator would solicit minors publicly on Craigslist for such purposes.
The compensation claim of $1,500 per day, no experience required, is far outside market norms and further undermines credibility.
The language of the post includes political grievance claims and accusations that routinely trigger Craigslist moderation. This strongly suggests the post was either: • a troll or provocation, • materially edited before screenshots, • or deliberately fabricated using a Craigslist template.
Crucially, there is no corroboration from Minnesota DHS, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, or local Minneapolis media. When similar allegations surfaced via viral videos, state officials stated inspections found no evidence of fraud at licensed centers.
Despite widespread online sharing, the story originated and was primarily amplified by a questionable right-wing source, not by established or verified reporting.
Conclusion:
Fact or Fiction? Fiction (Unsubstantiated / Hoax-like). While a Craigslist post briefly appeared online, its content is internally inconsistent, legally implausible, and unsupported by state regulators or credible reporting. The ad does not demonstrate real daycare fraud and is best described as a hoax, provocation, or manipulated post designed to inflame outrage rather than document wrongdoing.
Read More
Do you appreciate our work? Please consider one of the following ways to sustain us.
PARIS — A Paris court is to rule on Monday in a case involving 10 people accused of cyberbullying French first lady Brigitte Macron by spreading false online claims about her gender and sexuality, allegations her daughter said damaged her health and family life.
The defendants, eight men and two women aged 41 to 65, are accused of posting “numerous malicious comments” falsely claiming that President Emmanuel Macron ’s wife was born a man and linking the 24-year age gap with her husband to pedophilia. Some of the posts were viewed tens of thousands of times.
Brigitte Macron did not attend the two-day trial in October.
Her daughter, Tiphaine Auzière, testified about what she described as the “deterioration” of her mother’s life since the online harassment intensified. “She cannot ignore the horrible things said about her,” Auzière told the court. She said the impact has extended to the entire family, including Macron’s grandchildren.
Defendant Delphine Jegousse, 51, who is known as Amandine Roy and describes herself as a medium and an author, is considered as having played a major role in spreading the rumor after she released a four-hour video on her YouTube channel in 2021.
The X account of Aurélien Poirson-Atlan, 41, known as Zoé Sagan on social media, was suspended in 2024 after his name was cited in several judicial investigations.
Other defendants include an elected official, a teacher and a computer scientist. Several told the court their comments were intended as humor or satire and said they did not understand why they were being prosecuted. They face up to two years in prison if convicted.
The case follows years of conspiracy theories falsely alleging that Brigitte Macron was born under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux, which is actually the name of her brother. The Macrons have also filed a defamation suit in the United States against conservative influencer Candace Owens.
The Macrons, who have been married since 2007, first met at the high school where he was a student and she was a teacher. Brigitte Macron, 24 years her husband’s senior, was then called Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three.
Emmanuel Macron, 48, has been France’s president since 2017.
Is Candace Owens, the right-wing commentator who has more than five million subscribers on YouTube, more powerful than cable news?
I began thinking about this question last year, after it became clear that virally popular podcasters—Owens, Joe Rogan, Theo Von—had influenced the outcome of the Presidential election. At an unsatisfying and admittedly pedantic level, the answer depends, of course, on how you define power. Is it a matter of audience size? The amount of revenue generated? The hearts and minds won to a particular view? But the question led me to another that is also worth asking: whether the establishment media and the algorithm upstarts are actually in competition with one another. Sure, they’re both trying to get your attention, but are they describing and commenting on the same world?
In the past three months, I have been spending an unfortunate amount of time on TikTok and YouTube, and the algorithms have decided to split my attention between golf-swing tips and the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. I am there for the former, but the latter has become so ubiquitous on these platforms that avoiding content about him there would be like travelling to Greenland to get away from ice and snow. Readers of this column know that I believe these video platforms now have far more influence on how Americans receive their news than those of us in the traditional news media would like to admit. The mainstream press still lays down most of the foundation of information on which every creator, pundit, and A.I. bot builds their takes, but scoops, context, and new information go viral only when they are processed through these acts of interpretation on social media. Consider Owens. She often cites reports in the Wall Street Journal or the Times, but she uses them to uphold a single narrative about how the world works, which, at this point, largely revolves around Epstein. Owens has repeatedly suggested that Epstein, on behalf of Israel, enlisted powerful people as clients for sexual services so that those people could be controlled through blackmail.
Owens stands out among purveyors of that story, but she is hardly alone. Across the breadth of political media, broadly defined, there is an emerging schism that doesn’t follow traditional party lines: there is Planet Normie, home to the traditional press, and there is Planet Epstein, home to thousands of individual content creators.
When the inhabitants of Planet Normie sit down to read or watch a news story, they bring with them some fundamental assumptions about journalism of the sort that is purveyed by CNN or the Times or by this magazine: that reporters strive to bring the truth to the public so that the public can then make informed decisions as citizens of a democracy. These assumptions are rejected on Planet Epstein. There, such beliefs simply prove that everyone on Planet Normie is complicit in a coverup of what’s really going on. And Owens, perhaps as much as any other media figure, has built a community for those who assume that the mainstream press is involved in this vast conspiracy, which, for her and her followers, has come to center on whatever Epstein was doing on that island. Through her video podcast and the thousands of clips that populate every major short-form-video platform, Owens is asking viewers an existential question: Do you believe in the world as presented by the mainstream media or do you believe in her?
Issue polling is always suspect, at best, but surveys do suggest that a growing number of Americans have started to live on Planet Epstein—or at least might be drifting in its direction. In July, a Quinnipiac poll found that sixty-three per cent of voters disapproved of how the Trump Administration was handling the Epstein files, a collection of documents related to his case that Trump once promised to release and has since dismissed the importance of. A Yahoo/YouGov poll conducted around the same time showed that seventy per cent of Americans think that the government is hiding information about an alleged list of Epstein’s clients. And another poll, from October, found that seventy-seven per cent of Americans want the government to release every bit of information it has on Epstein. These numbers do not tell us what, exactly, the American public believes about the Epstein story, but they do indicate that the sort of suspicions that can push people to do their own research are not relegated to some small, conspiracy-minded corner of the internet.
This column is a product of Planet Normie. But even after four years of punditry at The New Yorker and the Times, I can’t confidently articulate the mainstream media’s interpretation of the world—nor am I certain what principles I am effectively defending by hanging up a shingle here on the establishment side of things. Neither the high-minded claims about the press’s function in a democracy nor the conspiracy-minded critiques about our supposed role in a conspiracy sound entirely correct to me. I know many individual journalists who seek out and bravely defend the truth. But I also know that the public’s recent downturn in trust in the establishment media didn’t happen simply because Trump said the words “fake news.” We got a lot wrong, especially during the pandemic. And while I think we also got a lot right, it’s not hard to understand why so many people look around and see little that is fun or compelling about Planet Normie.
Owens and her fellow-inhabitants on Planet Epstein don’t have this waffling problem, at least not anymore. Before Epstein, many of them fashioned their narratives in direct opposition to the mainstream media—the so-called expert class and the liberal technocrats who were ascendant during the Obama Administration. But there was a limit to that type of grievance-mongering. You can build a following by yelling about the Times, and the “woke thought police” that overran the faculty at Oberlin, and the racial politics of Disney movies. But, ultimately, how many people really care about what happens at Oberlin? How many fear a revolution led by Disney princesses of color?
DENVER — DENVER (AP) — Voting equipment company Dominion Voting Systems, a target of false conspiracy theories from President Donald Trump and his supporters since the 2020 election, has been bought by a firm run by a former Republican elections official, the new company announced Thursday.
KNOWiNK, a St. Louis-based provider of electronic poll books that allow election officials to confirm voter information, announced the deal and the name change. In a possible nod to a groundless conspiracy theory that linked Dominion to the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, the release highlighted that the company would become “100% American-owned.”
The announcement also quotes KNOWiNK’s owner, former St. Louis elections director Scott Leiendecker, as vowing to provide “election technology that prioritizes paper-based transparency,” one of the longtime demands of election conspiracy theorists. Almost all U.S. voting equipment already leaves a paper trail.
Dominion’s former CEO confirmed the sale in a single-sentence statement on Thursday: “Liberty Vote has acquired Dominion Voting Systems,” John Poulos said.
The release from the new company vows to reintroduce “hand-marked paper ballots” and adjust company policies to follow Trump’s executive order on voting procedures, which is not in effect because judges have ruled that Trump doesn’t have the power to mandate them. Part of the president’s order sought to prohibit voting equipment that produces a paper record with “a barcode or quick-response code” — equipment that is currently in use in hundreds of counties across 19 states.
Denver-based Dominion was at the heart of some of the most fevered conspiracy theories about Trump’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election., Those false allegations sparked a number of defamation lawsuits against conservative-leaning media and the president’s allies, including a settlement in 2023 in which Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787 million and one this year that Newsmax settled for $67 million.
The announcement from the new company does not disclose the cost of the transaction, but a spokesman said all the money was put up by Leiendecker. Both companies involved are privately held.
The false allegations against Dominion made its brand toxic in many Republican-leaning states and counties. But voting machine companies are usually careful about making overt political statements, given that the market for their equipment is split between places under Republican and Democratic control.
The statements by Liberty Vote saying it will align with Trump’s executive order, which has been challenged by Democratic state attorneys general, the Democratic National Committee and an array of voting and civil rights groups, could lead to concerns in blue states that currently use Dominion equipment.
But some election officials said Thursday that KNOWiNK had seemed to steer clear of 2020 conspiracy theories and acted like a typical, nonpartisan firm.
“They have a good reputation in the field,” Stephen Richer, a Republican who was targeted by Trump and his allies when he served as the top elections official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.
Despite years of detailed debunking of the Dominion conspiracy theories, Trump has continued to repeat them even as recently as a few weeks ago, when he vowed to get rid of voting machines. The president doesn’t have the power to do that because the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set election and voting rules.
At this point, the event was briefly disrupted by a small protest outside by two local activists who highlighted the fact that Attwood had been advocating a toxic bleach solution to his followers. Power and fellow far-right activist Philip Dwyer confronted the two protesters and questioned if they were trying to get Attwood killed, just like Kirk. Dwyer declined to answer WIRED’s questions about his comments but called this reporter a “communist left-wing radical.”
Back inside, Attwood laughed off the protesters, with one later speaker calling them “clones.”
Finally, after mystic Honey C Golden had informed everyone that “The Matrix was a reality show” and that she doesn’t “really believe in time,” it was time for Lewis Herms, a fringe candidate for California governor, to take the stage.
Herms, who became popular through his Screw Big Gov platform online, is running as an independent conservative and is one of almost 70 people who have filed statements of interest in being governor of California. Calling himself an “anti-politician,” Herms slammed the GOP for not talking about “child trafficking,” “election fraud,” or the influence of “Big Pharma.”
While Herms has decided not to employ a campaign manager—because it would not be authentic—he did claim that he is working with some other people.
“I’m very proud to say a lot of RFK Jr.’s team is already working with us,” Herms said. “And they already label our team Super MAHA because we’re looking for different modalities that we can bring back to California and bring to a whole other level than he’s even doing it right now.”
Herms and Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment.
Herms received a standing ovation at the end of his nearly 45-minute speech despite the fact that most people were, at this point, very cold. But even though it was now dark outside, there was still time for one more speaker—Janine Morigeau, a Canadian tarot card reader.
Just as the day had begun with the name of Kirk being invoked, so it ended. “Is Charlie Kirk really dead?” an audience member asked, with the rest of the crowd reacting excitedly. Morigeau proceeded to pull half a dozen different cards and very quickly concluded that the person seen on camera being shot was not actually Kirk at all.
“Whatever they were doing there was likely a white hat op, because it’s to the benefit of humanity,” Morigeau said before adding mysteriously: “I don’t know if even the real Charlie Kirk was who we thought he was.”
Election denial has lately come to be viewed as a feature of the political right, reflected by the lawsuits, conspiratorial documentaries, and “Stop the Steal” protests that followed Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. But in the months since 2024, a similar—albeit much quieter—form of election denial has emerged in parts of the progressive left.
These theories range from claims that Elon Musk used Starlink satellites to hack the election to a the quasi-mystical TikTok subculture known as the “4 A.M. Club,” whose members believe the timeline glitched and Kamala Harris won in a parallel reality. But the most prominent claims have been rooted in data-heavy spreadsheets and statistical jargon.
One of the most popular of these theories suggests that a 2024 National Security Agency audit confirmed that Kamala Harris won the election, a claim which gained notoriety after it appeared in This Will Hold, an anonymously published Substack. The post alleges that one of the audit’s supposed participants, an ex-CIA officer named Adam Zarnowski, possessed insider information about a global cabal of corrupt actors, international criminals, foreign operatives, billionaires, and political insiders who conspired together to manipulate the election’s outcome.
As The Atlanticrecently reported, there is no independent verification of Zarnowski’s background beyond his own claims. A LinkedIn profile describes him as a “former CIA paramilitary operations officer” but provides no evidence that he is an expert in election security or statistics. Snopeshas been unable to “independently verify Zarnowski’s employment with the CIA or his alleged involvement in [the] NSA audit.”
The Election Truth Alliance (ETA), a self-described nonpartisan watchdog group, has used statistical models to push claims that Harris won the election. In Rockland County, New York, for example, Harris received fewer votes for president than incumbent Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) did for Senate. The ETA suggests that possible election tampering can be inferred from this discrepancy.
But Charles Stewart, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that this apparent discrepancy isn’t unusual and can easily be explained. Stewart attributes Harris’ weaker performance to her unpopularity among the county’s Orthodox Jewish voters relative to Gillibrand, as well as the broader trend of voters skipping races or voting split-ticket.
The organization’s claims go further. In a recent interview with the progressive commentator David Pakman, the ETA’s Nathan Taylor claimed that vote patterns in Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania illustrate a series of unusual relationships between candidate support and voter turnout. Using color-coded heat maps, Taylor asserts that his group has discovered statistical distortions similar to those seen in countries with a reputation for fraudulent election practices, such as Russia and Uganda. Using these maps, Taylor alleges that up to 190,000 votes cast in Pennsylvania may have been algorithmically shifted, which would be more than enough to flip the state.
To lend credibility to these claims, the ETA circulated a working paper by the University of Michigan political scientist Walter Mebane that used statistical techniques to examine Pennsylvania’s 2024 election results. Mebane told The Atlantic that while he was aware the group had used his public methodology and data models, he had not reviewed their findings and did not endorse their conclusions.
To this day, no court case or credible audit has validated any of these claims. Independent experts have repeatedly affirmed that the 2024 election, like the 2020 election before it, was secure and legitimate. Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told reporters in November 2024 that her office detected no threat that could “materially impact” the outcome, assuring everyone that “our election infrastructure has never been more secure” and that election officials were better prepared than ever to deliver a “safe, secure, free, and fair” process.
Although this is hardly the first time that members of the left have questioned an election’s outcome, political scientist Justin Grimmer toldThe Atlantic that this behavior is also “strikingly similar” to that of those on the right who rejected the 2020 election results. “The most remarkable thing,” he added, “is the similarity in the analysis that we’re seeing from the bad claims made after 2020 and these similarly bad, really poorly set up claims from 2024.”
David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research put it more bluntly, telling the magazine that these claims “ring as hollow and grifting as nearly identical claims made by those who profited off the Big Lie that Trump didn’t lose the 2020 election.”
A senior U.S. Justice Department official sent a letter to a lawyer for relatives of victims killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, asking pointed questions about a retired FBI agent’s involvement in a defamation lawsuit that led to a $1.4 billion judgment against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.Ed Martin Jr., who leads the Justice Department’s “weaponization working group,” asked in the letter whether retired agent William Aldenberg received any financial benefits from helping to organize the lawsuit, in which he was a plaintiff along with victims’ family members.Aldenberg, like the parents and other relatives of the 20 children and six educators killed in the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, has been the subject of false conspiracy theories spread by Jones on his “Infowars” broadcasts.Aldenberg was among the law enforcement officers who responded to the school and found the dead children. That then led to years of abuse from people who believed the shooting was a hoax, he has said. His share of the judgment totaled around $120 million.Martin sends lawyer letter asking about retired agentIn a Sept. 15 letter to Christopher Mattei, a lawyer who represents Sandy Hook families, Martin suggested he was scrutinizing Aldenberg’s role in the lawsuit.“As you may know, there are criminal laws protecting the citizens from actions by government employees who may be acting for personal benefit,” Martin wrote.Mattei responded to the letter in a text message to The Associated Press.“Thanks to the courage of the Sandy Hook families, Infowars will soon be finished,” he said, referring to the families’ efforts in court to liquidate Jones’ assets to help pay the judgment. “In his last gasps, Jones is once again harassing them, only now with the corrupt complicity of at least one DOJ official. It’s as disgusting as it is pathetic, and we will not stand for it.”The Justice Department said it had no immediate comment Tuesday.Martin, who has been examining President Donald Trump’s claims of anti-conservative bias inside the Justice Department, has sent letters to a host of targets in other, unrelated matters, seeking information or making appeals, but it’s unclear whether such requests have amounted to anything.Jones posted a copy of the letter on his X account Tuesday, saying “Breaking! The DOJ’s Task Force On Government Weaponization Against The American People Has Launched An Investigation Into The Democrat Party / FBI Directing Illegal Law-fare Against Alex Jones And Infowars.”Retired agent testified at the trialAldenberg joined the relatives of eight Sandy Hook victims in suing Jones, alleging defamation and infliction of emotional distress.Aldenberg was one of the first witnesses to testify at the trial in 2022. He broke down on the witness stand as he described entering the two classrooms where children and educators were shot.He also testified about how he and others in the community and law enforcement were targeted with threats and conspiracy theories, including one that claimed he was an actor who also pretended to be the father of a victim.Messages were left at a phone listing and email addresses listed for Aldenberg in public records.Relatives of the shooting victims testified that they were subjected to violent threats, in-person harassment and abusive comments on social media because of Jones.Martin has been serving as head of the Justice Department’s “weaponization working group” since his nomination for top federal prosecutor in Washington was pulled amid bipartisan concerns about his modest legal experience and his advocacy for Jan. 6 rioters.Attorney General Pam Bondi created the group to scrutinize matters in which conservatives have claimed they were unfairly targeted or treated.Martin was also recently named a special prosecutor to help conduct the separate mortgage fraud investigations into Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff.In his letter to Mattei, he asked for several pieces of information and requested that the lawyer respond by Sept. 29.In the letter, Martin asks Mattei to keep the correspondence confidential because “I do not wish to litigate this in the media.” On Sept. 14, Jones posted a photo on his X account of him and Martin together, saying the two met in Washington, D.C.Jones recently asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his appeal of the $1.4 billion judgment. He also is appealing a $49 million judgment in a similar lawsuit in Texas filed by two other parents of children killed in Newtown. He has cited free speech rights, but he has acknowledged that the shooting was “100% real.”Jones claims Democrats have been targeting him for his speech.He filed for bankruptcy in late 2022. The Sandy Hook plaintiffs are now trying to liquidate Infowars’ assets in state court proceedings in Texas.
A senior U.S. Justice Department official sent a letter to a lawyer for relatives of victims killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, asking pointed questions about a retired FBI agent’s involvement in a defamation lawsuit that led to a $1.4 billion judgment against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Ed Martin Jr., who leads the Justice Department’s “weaponization working group,” asked in the letter whether retired agent William Aldenberg received any financial benefits from helping to organize the lawsuit, in which he was a plaintiff along with victims’ family members.
Aldenberg, like the parents and other relatives of the 20 children and six educators killed in the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, has been the subject of false conspiracy theories spread by Jones on his “Infowars” broadcasts.
Aldenberg was among the law enforcement officers who responded to the school and found the dead children. That then led to years of abuse from people who believed the shooting was a hoax, he has said. His share of the judgment totaled around $120 million.
Martin sends lawyer letter asking about retired agent
In a Sept. 15 letter to Christopher Mattei, a lawyer who represents Sandy Hook families, Martin suggested he was scrutinizing Aldenberg’s role in the lawsuit.
“As you may know, there are criminal laws protecting the citizens from actions by government employees who may be acting for personal benefit,” Martin wrote.
Mattei responded to the letter in a text message to The Associated Press.
“Thanks to the courage of the Sandy Hook families, Infowars will soon be finished,” he said, referring to the families’ efforts in court to liquidate Jones’ assets to help pay the judgment. “In his last gasps, Jones is once again harassing them, only now with the corrupt complicity of at least one DOJ official. It’s as disgusting as it is pathetic, and we will not stand for it.”
The Justice Department said it had no immediate comment Tuesday.
Martin, who has been examining President Donald Trump’s claims of anti-conservative bias inside the Justice Department, has sent letters to a host of targets in other, unrelated matters, seeking information or making appeals, but it’s unclear whether such requests have amounted to anything.
Jones posted a copy of the letter on his X account Tuesday, saying “Breaking! The DOJ’s Task Force On Government Weaponization Against The American People Has Launched An Investigation Into The Democrat Party / FBI Directing Illegal Law-fare Against Alex Jones And Infowars.”
Retired agent testified at the trial
Aldenberg joined the relatives of eight Sandy Hook victims in suing Jones, alleging defamation and infliction of emotional distress.
Aldenberg was one of the first witnesses to testify at the trial in 2022. He broke down on the witness stand as he described entering the two classrooms where children and educators were shot.
He also testified about how he and others in the community and law enforcement were targeted with threats and conspiracy theories, including one that claimed he was an actor who also pretended to be the father of a victim.
Messages were left at a phone listing and email addresses listed for Aldenberg in public records.
Relatives of the shooting victims testified that they were subjected to violent threats, in-person harassment and abusive comments on social media because of Jones.
Martin has been serving as head of the Justice Department’s “weaponization working group” since his nomination for top federal prosecutor in Washington was pulled amid bipartisan concerns about his modest legal experience and his advocacy for Jan. 6 rioters.
Attorney General Pam Bondi created the group to scrutinize matters in which conservatives have claimed they were unfairly targeted or treated.
Martin was also recently named a special prosecutor to help conduct the separate mortgage fraud investigations into Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff.
In his letter to Mattei, he asked for several pieces of information and requested that the lawyer respond by Sept. 29.
In the letter, Martin asks Mattei to keep the correspondence confidential because “I do not wish to litigate this in the media.” On Sept. 14, Jones posted a photo on his X account of him and Martin together, saying the two met in Washington, D.C.
Jones recently asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his appeal of the $1.4 billion judgment. He also is appealing a $49 million judgment in a similar lawsuit in Texas filed by two other parents of children killed in Newtown. He has cited free speech rights, but he has acknowledged that the shooting was “100% real.”
Jones claims Democrats have been targeting him for his speech.
He filed for bankruptcy in late 2022. The Sandy Hook plaintiffs are now trying to liquidate Infowars’ assets in state court proceedings in Texas.
President Donald Trump is escalating threats to crack down on what he describes as the “radical left” following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, stirring fears that his administration is trying to harness outrage over the killing to suppress political opposition.
Without establishing any link to last week’s shooting, the Republican president and members of his administration have discussed classifying some groups as domestic terrorists, ordering racketeering investigations and revoking tax-exempt status for progressive nonprofits. The White House pointed to Indivisible, a progressive activist network, and the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, as potential subjects of scrutiny.
Although administration officials insist that their focus is preventing violence, critics see an extension of Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political enemies and an erosion of free speech rights. Any moves to weaken liberal groups could also shift the political landscape ahead of next year’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress and statehouses across the country.
“The radical left has done tremendous damage to the country,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday morning when leaving for a state visit to the United Kingdom. “But we’re fixing it.”
Trump has sometimes made similar threats without following through. But now there’s renewed interest fueled by anger over the killing of Kirk, a conservative activist who was a prominent supporter of Trump and friends with many of his advisers.
More than 100 nonprofit leaders, representing organizations including the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation, released a joint letter saying “we reject attempts to exploit political violence to mischaracterize our good work or restrict our fundamental freedoms.”
“Attempts to silence speech, criminalize opposing viewpoints, and misrepresent and limit charitable giving undermine our democracy and harm all Americans,” they wrote.
White House blames ‘terrorist networks’
Authorities said they believe the suspect in Kirk’s assassination acted alone, and they charged him with murder on Tuesday.
However, administration officials have repeatedly made sweeping statements about the need for broader investigations and punishments related to Kirk’s death.
Attorney General Pam Bondi blamed “left-wing radicals” for the shooting and said “they will be held accountable.” Stephen Miller, a top policy adviser, said there was an “organized campaign that led to this assassination.”
Miller’s comments came during a conversation with Vice President JD Vance, who was guest-hosting Kirk’s talk show from his ceremonial office in the White House on Monday.
Miller said he was feeling “focused, righteous anger,” and “we are going to channel all of the anger” as they work to “uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks” by using “every resource we have.”
Vance blamed “crazies on the far left” for saying the White House would “go after constitutionally protected speech.” Instead, he said, “We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”
Asked for examples, the White House pointed to demonstrations where police officers and federal agents have been injured, as well as the distribution of goggles and face masks during protests over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.
There was also a report that Indivisible offered to reimburse people who gathered at Tesla dealerships to oppose Elon Musk’s leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency. Sometimes cars were later vandalized.
Indivisible’s leadership has said “political violence is a cancer on democracy” and said that their own organization has “been threatened by right-wingers all year.”
Nonprofits brace for impact
Trump’s executive actions have rattled nonprofit groups with attempts to limit their work or freeze federal funding, but more aggressive proposals to revoke tax-exempt status never materialized.
Now the mood has darkened as nonprofits recruit lawyers and bolster the security of their offices and staff.
“It’s a heightened atmosphere in the wake of political violence, and organizations who fear they might be unjustly targeted in its wake are making sure that they are ready,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the government watchdog group Public Citizen.
Trump made retribution against political enemies a cornerstone of his comeback campaign, and he’s mobilized the federal government to reshape law firms, universities and other traditionally independent institutions. He also ordered an investigation into ActBlue, an online liberal fundraising platform.
Some nonprofits expect the administration to focus on prominent funders like Soros, a liberal billionaire who has been a conservative target for years, to send a chill through the donor community.
Trump recently said Soros should face a racketeering investigation, though he didn’t make any specific allegations. The Open Society Foundations condemned violence and Kirk’s assassination in a statement and said “it is disgraceful to use this tragedy for political ends to dangerously divide Americans and attack the First Amendment.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, wrote on social media that “the murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence” but “Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said “it is disingenuous and false for Democrats to say administration actions are about political speech.” She said the goal is to “target those committing criminal acts and hold them accountable.”
Republicans back Trump’s calls for investigations
Trump’s concerns about political violence are noticeably partisan. He described people who rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as “hostages” and “patriots,” and he pardoned 1,500 of them on his first day back in the Oval Office. He also mocked House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi after an attack on her husband.
When Trump condemned Kirk’s killing in a video message last week, he mentioned several examples of “radical left political violence” but ignored attacks on Democrats.
Asked on Monday about the killing of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman over the summer, Trump said “I’m not familiar” with the case.
“Trump shrugs at right-wing political violence,” said Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of Indivisible, in a newsletter.
Some conservative commentators have cheered on a potential crackdown. Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist with a long record of bigoted comments, said “let’s shut the left down.” She also said that she wants Trump “to be the ‘dictator’ the left thinks he is.”
Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller and a former administration spokeswoman, asked Bondi whether there would be “more law enforcement going after these groups” and “putting cuffs on people.”
“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Bondi said. “And that’s across the aisle.”
Her comments sparked a backlash from across the political spectrum, since even hate speech is generally considered to be protected under the First Amendment. Bondi was more circumspect on social media on Tuesday morning, saying they would focus on “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence.”
Trump is getting more support from Republicans in Congress. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and others proposed legislation that would enable the Justice Department to use racketeering laws, originally envisioned to combat organized crime, to prosecute violent protesters and the groups that support them.
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas wants the House to create a special committee to investigate the nonprofit groups, saying “we must follow the money to identify the perpetrators of the coordinated anti-American assaults being carried out against us.”
___ Associated Press writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
[ad_2]
Chris Megerian, Lisa Mascaro, Alanna Durkin Richer, The Associated Press
Conspiracy theories about the death of Charlie Kirk have inundated X, TikTok, and Instagram in recent days. And while crackpot ideas have always followed major world events, there’s no denying that they’re much more common and widespread in the age of social media.
Kirk, a 31-year-old right-wing influencer, was shot and killed Sept. 10 while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. The graphic killing was captured on video from several angles since many people in the audience were filming his discussion, quickly uploading footage in the immediate aftermath.
The suspect in the killing, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, turned himself in to authorities late Thursday night local time, according to CNN. But the internet has been flooded with conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death, both before and after Robinson’s arrest.
FBI Director Kash Patel appeared on Fox & Friends on Monday morning, where he made various claims about the shooting that haven’t been formally presented to a court yet, much less confirmed. But if the broader picture that’s emerging is true—that one man acted alone by firing a rifle from a rooftop—many of the conspiracy theories that have popped up are absolutely ridiculous.
Below, we’ve got some of the most common categories of conspiracy theories circulating on social media right now.
‘AI Wrong Man’ theories
After the shooting, the FBI released images of the suspect showing him in sunglasses. The screenshots were pixelated and low quality, which led people on X to run them through Grok in an effort to get a better look. The problem is that running images through AI that attempts to upscale them doesn’t give you a better or more accurate image.
Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer with close ties to the White House, shared three images after screenshots of the suspect were first released by the FBI. One of the three images was the original screenshot. Two others were fake AI-enhanced images, giving her followers the impression that they were legitimate pictures of the man.
We looked at this problem earlier this month when people on social media were running Donald Trump’s photos through AI. The upscaler gave Trump a gigantic lump on his forehead, leading people to insist he had a serious medical condition. But that’s just what AI does to low-quality images. It will take shadows or creases in a person’s face and distort an image while attempting to make it look clearer.
We saw something similar happen during the Academy Awards in 2022 when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. The screenshots that people were taking from TV and then blowing up appeared pixelated. To fix that, people ran them through upscalers, and it created what looked like a weird prosthetic on Rock’s face. From there, a conspiracy theory emerged that there was a pad protecting Rock’s face, leading people to insist the whole thing had been planned in advance.
This is how conspiracy theories take off now, and they’re incredibly predictable. In fact, when Gizmodo saw folks on X running images of the suspect in Kirk’s shooting through Grok, we knew people would inevitably compare those fake images to the real mugshot. And sure enough, that’s exactly what’s happened.
A TikTok account called Politic Nick posted a video Saturday comparing an AI-manipulated image of the suspect to the mugshot that was released.
“Okay, these are two different people here,” the creator said. “The mouth is different, the chin is different. The face is shaped different. The nose is sharp on the left. His nose is sharp. His lips are different I mean, come on.”
That video has racked up 1.4 million views and it’s an incredibly popular sentiment on other platforms like X, where high-profile accounts like Jackson Hinkle and Anastasia Maria Loupis have focused on the mouths in both images. “They think you are stupid,” Loupis tweeted.
But the reason they look different is that the AI “enhanced” image did not present anyone with a more accurate impression of what the suspect looked like. These tools are not magic and can’t provide you with a better idea of his appearance. All the computer did was extrapolate from the information that was there. And it seems like all the people who’ve grown up on TV shows where investigators can “zoom and enhance” think that’s how it works in real life.
‘Just Look Harder’ theories
Another big bucket of conspiracy theories might best be described as “Just Look Harder” theories. The idea is that if you stare at someone in the background of a video from Kirk’s talk, you’ll discover a conspiracy hiding in plain sight.
This was a common tactic on X as millions of people were watching the extremely graphic videos of Kirk dying across all the major platforms. In the hours after Kirk was shot, a popular theory emerged that someone standing to Kirk’s right was giving “signals” to some unseen shooter.
There were clearly no signals, as anyone could see. But the power of suggestion, combined with watching the same horrific events played over and over, convinced a lot of people that perfectly normal behavior (one guy just had a phone in his hand) was somehow suspicious.
One of the most outlandish claims still circulating on social media is focused on a man who was standing near Kirk during his talk on campus. Val Venis, a former WWE wrestler who went by the name Big Valbowski, has helped share the theory that the unnamed man used something called a “palm gun” that was concealed in his fist as he moved his shirt sleeve to kill Kirk.
The claim is absurd, and it appears that online dipshits have only gravitated to the idea because the man in the video scratches his arm at the same time that Kirk was shot. That’s seriously all it was, as you can see in the censored clip we’ve got below. There’s no evidence that this man was doing anything but touching his own arm.
GIF: X with a redaction by Gizmodo to protect the identity of someone who was clearly just touching their own shirt
One video shared by Venis has over 17 million views on X at the time of this writing. Others from Venis sharing edits of the same incident have several million more. And there’s so clearly nothing there beyond a person touching their own arm and moving their shirt a little bit.
‘Everything is Trans’ theories
Another bucket of conspiracy theories around the death of Charlie Kirk includes the idea that the killing must’ve been perpetrated by someone who is trans. The false idea that trans people are disproportionately represented as killers seems to have roots in a 2023 school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, that killed seven people, including the shooter. The perpetrator in that case was indeed trans, and now X is flooded with claims that a shooter must be trans whenever a new mass shooting makes the news. As Politifact notes, trans people are much more likely to be the victims of violence rather than perpetrators.
After Kirk was killed, at least three different trans people were falsely blamed for the shooting on X, by Gizmodo’s count. Posts went viral with wild claims about various people who had absolutely nothing to do with Kirk’s death.
After it became clear that the suspect in this case was a cisgender man, the internet mobs tried to find other trans connections wherever they could. The Wall Street Journal initially reported reported Thursday that the bullet casings found at the scene were in some way “expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology,” citing a bulletin from the ATF. And while the newspaper edited the article later in the day to say that such a claim should be treated “with caution,” the damage was done. It turned out there was nothing on the bullet casings that mentioned the trans community.
It became so ridiculous that The Onion even wrote an article joking about how the suspect once had an Uber driver who was trans. But right-wing political operatives online are still obsessed with the idea that trans people are uniquely dangerous. FBI Director Kash Patel was asked whether Robinson’s roommate was trans and in a relationship with Robinson. Patel, who has a history of spreading conspiracy theories about QAnon and the January 6th insurrection, said that was true without providing any evidence.
Lots of unexplained questions remain
It’s easy to understand why conspiracy theories proliferate. Whenever a case unfolds, there are perfectly reasonable questions about facts that may not be known.
Countless questions remain about a motive for Kirk’s shooting and the potential political affiliation of the suspect. And it seems guaranteed that misinformation and disinformation will continue to run rampant on social media as we learn more. Unfortunately, guys like Kash Patel are not helping the situation as they rush to post on X before all the facts are truly known.
Patel wrote on the day Kirk was killed that, “The subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.” But that was premature. The person they had in custody was just an attendee there to hear Kirk speak. And while it’s completely normal for shitposters to spread misinformation far and wide before the facts are known, we now live in a world where that shitposter happens to be the director of the FBI.
What is the Jeffrey Epstein story, and what does it mean? Just asking questions. Today’s conversation is with journalist Michael Tracey, who has been picking apart what he calls the “Epstein mythology” for the past several weeks over at his Substack. In short, he thinks 90 percent of what most people believe about this case is false, and that this is mostly the fault of credulous establishment journalists who chose to uncritically publish alleged victims’ narratives and ignore inconvenient facts, as well as opportunistic alternative media figures who spun the story into a sprawling conspiracy for political and personal gain.
Tracey has been attacked and on the attack, and you’ll hear him air his many grievances with other journalists, lawyers, and politicians in this conversation, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.), whom he calls out as his “enemy” because she instructed police to remove him from an Epstein-related press conference after he asked a question about an accusers’ credibility in Washington D.C. this week.
The goal of this episode was to move beyond the personality clashes and egos and wild speculation and drill down into what it is we actually know and don’t know about Jeffrey Epstein. But as we talked, it became clear that this kind of detached analysis just wasn’t going to be possible, that the egos and the clashes and the agendas remain intricately tied up with how this story has unfolded. The incentives faced by establishment journalists, podcasters, accusers, and politicians have shaped this story and our understanding of it, mostly for the worse.
But in the marketplace of ideas, there is also a countervailing incentive to move against the herd and correct the record. And maybe a turbulent and confrontational personality like Michael Tracey–who admits in this interview that he’s “wired differently”–was exactly what was needed to break taboos, ask uncomfortable questions, and push for real disclosure about the nature of the story that has loomed over American politics for at least a decade.
Regardless of how one feels about Tracey’s tone or the soundness of his analysis, anyone who purports to care about this story should at least engage with the questions he’s asking and start asking their own questions about what the Epstein story really means.
This conversation has been edited for time and clarity.
Donald Trump appeared live from the Oval Office on Tuesday, standing in front of a podium and, though having emerged nearly an hour later than scheduled, looking entirely normal. Flanked by members of his administration and select Republican members of Congress, Trump announced that US Space Command would be moving from Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama. It was a seemingly mundane announcement, but the live appearance had deeper significance for the chronically online: proof of life after a weekend of rampant speculation about his health.
Presidential vitality has long been a reliable font for conspiracies, but the speed and breadth of the most recent round of speculation—spurred largely by a lack of scheduled public appearances, some slightly inopportune asides from Vice President JD Vance, and a news aggregator powered by the online betting site Polymarket—served as a reminder of how singular a figure Trump is in such matters. His tendency to engage with rumor and speculation himself and the rabidity of feeling he inspires in admirers and detractors alike both seem to play a large role.
“Trump’s death has been the subject of a lot of online content for years now, but especially over the past year, since he took office,” Taylor Lorenz, an internet-culture journalist and the author of Extremely Online, tells Vanity Fair. As morbid as it might be, she adds, “there’s this pent-up anticipation and excitement for it to happen.”
When people notice a confluence of any activity relating to Trump’s health, it becomes an opportunity to post jokes about the possibility of his passing, which fuels further speculation.
“It sort of just feeds itself,” Lorenz says.
“It feels cathartic for these people that feel like Trump has done enormous harm over the past two terms,” Lorenz explains, noting that that’s why you see Spotify playlists titled with some variation of “When It Happens,” made in preparation to celebrate Trump’s eventual demise.
Adam Cochran, a tech and crypto investor, as well as an academic who conducts what he considers to be independent investigative journalism, contributed extensively to the discourse, posting a 31-part thread proposing that the White House was partaking in a cover-up. With Cochran’s follower count of more than 200,000 on X, plus the additional boost that the platform’s verification system provides, the first post in his Sunday-afternoon thread has been viewed 11.3 million times, amassing 71,000 likes as of Wednesday afternoon. He argues that while some people, himself included, would celebrate Trump’s no longer being in office, “that is markedly different than wishing him ill.” Cochran tells VF that, in most cases, the crass jokes about Trump’s demise stem from “people’s frustrations rather than actual wishes of harm.”
During his Tuesday press briefing in the Oval Office, Trump was asked about the theories, dismissing them as “fake news.” Trump claimed that he was “very active, actually, over the weekend,” referencing his exhaustive Truth Social posting and visits to his Virginia golf club. He also pointed to appearances last week, including an interview he did with The Daily Caller.
A detailed view of the hand Donald Trump, September 2, 2025 in Washington, DC.by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
Concern over Trump’s transparency on the matter of his personal health is not entirely unwarranted. At the end of his term, Trump will be the oldest serving president ever, and his second term follows Joe Biden’s tumultuous presidency, which was often overshadowed by intense speculation over the now former president’s mental acuity.
“Trump has never been forthcoming about his health,” New York Times reporter and Trump chronicler Maggie Haberman told me in a June interview. She recalled October 2020, when Trump—who, she said, “views sickness as weakness”—was diagnosed with COVID and reportedly turned out to have been far more ill than he and the administration let on. Some officials believed, per Haberman, that Trump could have died had he not been given a Regeneron treatment involving monoclonal antibodies. “That’s scary, how perilous that moment was, and how little real-time information the public had,” Haberman said.
The account was active at least between September 2019 and January 2021, and had the username @PhDofbombsaway. It used several different screen names, including “Dr. Erwin J. Antoni III” and “Dr. Curtis LeMay,” an apparent reference to the US Air Force general who oversaw a campaign of firebombing Japan in World War II, promoted the use of nuclear weapons, and ran for the vice presidency alongside segregationist George Wallace in 1968. The account’s profile picture was a stock image of a fiery mushroom cloud.
The account’s persona was that of a deeply loyal Trump supporter engaging in conspiracy theories ranging from Covid denialism to attacks on Black Lives Matter, and even ones related to the death of Jeffrey Epstein. The posting, which was infused with a deeply hard-line Catholic worldview, at times displayed misogyny and a knowledge of Nazi military techniques.
Throughout 2020, the account shared Covid conspiracy theories, especially focusing on the claims that China had purposely manufactured the virus to destroy its enemies.
In February 2020, responding to a posting asking how many nuclear bombs America should drop on China if it turns out the country was responsible for Covid-19, the account—which was using the “Dr. Curtis LeMay” screen name, according to captures from the Internet Archive—wrote “All the bombs—trust me, I’m kind of the expert on this.”
The account posted a wide variety of conspiratorial content, as well as misogynistic content. In November 2019, for example, the person controlling the account claimed that Jeffrey Epstein “didn’t kill himself.” That same month, in response to a post about then presidential candidate Kamala Harris, they wrote, “She does her best work when life brings her to her knees.”
But the account was most consistently vocal in its embrace of the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election.
In the days after the November 3, 2020, election, the account posted hundreds of times as it fully embraced numerous conspiracy theories about how the vote had been rigged.
While citing dozens of different GOP lawmakers, Trump himself, and far-right influencers like Phillip Buchanan, the right-wing internet troll known as Catturd, the account most frequently shared claims of election conspiracies from an account called Election Wizard.
That account was run by Travis Vernier, a former Oklahoma City police officer who had no experience in assessing election data. Despite this, Election Wizard became one of the most influential voices in the Stop the Steal movement, to the point that Vernier was even invited to Mar-a-Lago for Trump’s 2022 announcement that he was running for president again.
As well as sharing conspiracy theories, the account bearing Antoni’s name repeatedly used violent rhetoric to declare how far it was willing to go to ensure Trump secured a second term in office.
“Truth is boring, facts are boring, and outrage is really interesting,” says Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole with truth. But what we try to do is just get as much information out there as possible.”
In the past week, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed a voting machine had changed a voter’s ballot in her Georgia district during early voting, and Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X, has promoted various conspiracy theories about voting machines and voter fraud both online and at a rally for Trump in Pennsylvania.
The floodgates are “very much” open, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works with state and local election officials.
“This is making election officials’ lives much more difficult,” he said.
Eric Olsen, who oversees elections in Prince William County, Virginia, said combatting misinformation has become an important and challenging part of the job.
“It’s really difficult from our position, a lot of times, because social media feels like a giant wave coming at you and we’re in a little canoe with a paddle,” he said. “But we have to do that work.”
On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly attempted to sow doubt about the upcoming election – something he did ahead of his two previous bids for the White House. Even after he won in 2016, he claimed he had lost the popular vote because of a flood of illegal votes and he formed a presidential advisory commission to investigate. The commission disbanded without finding any widespread fraud.
This year, Trump claims that Democrats will cheat again and uses “Too Big to Rig” as a rallying cry to encourage his supporters to vote. Election experts see it as laying the groundwork to again challenge the election should he lose.
The conspiracy theories that have surfaced in recent weeks are not new. There have long been claims of “vote flipping,” with the most recent ones surfacing in Georgia and Tennessee.
What to know about the 2024 Election
A claim in Georgia’s Whitfield County was highlighted by Greene on Alex Jones’ “InfoWars” show. Jones has a history of spreading falsehoods and was ordered to pay $1.5 billion for his false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a hoax.
County election officials issued a statement, noting the case involved one voter out of 6,000 ballots that had been cast since early voting began. The ballot was spoiled, and the voter cast a replacement that was counted. Officials said there was no problem with the voting machine.
Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said every report they’ve seen so far of someone saying their printed ballot didn’t reflect their selections on the touchscreen voting machine has been a result of voter error.
“There is zero evidence of a machine flipping an individual’s vote,” he said. “Are there elderly people whose hands shake and they probably hit the wrong button slightly and they didn’t review their ballot properly before they printed it? That’s the main situation we have seen. There is literally zero — and I’m saying this to certain congresspeople in this state — zero evidence of machines flipping votes. That claim was a lie in 2020 and it’s a lie now.”
In Shelby County, Tennessee, county election officials said human error was to blame for reports of votes being changed. Voters had been using their fingers instead of a stylus to mark their selections on voting machines, officials said.
In Washington state, Republican Jerrod Sessler, who is running for the state’s 4th Congressional District seat, shared a video on social media this week that claimed to show how easily fraudulent ballots can be created. But the video did not make clear that voter information on each ballot is checked against the state’s voter list.
“A ballot returned using fake voter registration information would not be counted and is illegal in Washington state,” Charlie Boisner, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office, said in an email.
Musk recently invoked Dominion Voting Systems as part of his remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania, seeming to suggest its equipment was not trustworthy. Dominion has been at the center of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election and settled its defamation lawsuit against Fox News last year for $787 million over false claims aired repeatedly on the network. The judge in the case said it was “CRYSTAL clear” that none of the allegations made by Trump allies on the network were true.
In a statement, Dominion said it was “closely monitoring claims around the Nov. 2024 election” and was “fully prepared to defend our company & our customers against lies and those who spread them.”
A request for comment from Musk was not immediately returned.
He has often sparred online with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Recently, the two tangled over Musk’s claim that there were more registered voters in Michigan, a presidential battleground state, than people eligible to vote. Benson said Musk was including in his count inactive voters who are scheduled for removal. A federal judge on Tuesday tossed out a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee claiming problems with the state’s voter list.
During an interview last month, Benson said she was disheartened to see someone in Musk’s position repeating false information.
“If he was sincerely committed, as he says he is, to ensuring people have access to information, then I would hope that he would amplify the truthful information — the factual, accurate information — about the security of our elections instead of just amplifying conspiracy theories and in a way that directs the ire of many of his followers onto us as individual election administrators,” Benson said. “It’s something that we didn’t have to deal with in 2020 that creates a new battlefront and challenge for us.”
___
Fernando reported from Chicago. Associated Press writers Kate Brumback in Atlanta and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed to this report.
___
The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government’s top disaster relief official said Sunday that false claims and conspiracy theories about the federal response to Hurricane Helene — spread most prominently by Donald Trump — are “demoralizing” aid workers and creating fear in people who need recovery assistance.
“It’s frankly ridiculous, and just plain false. This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” said Deanne Criswell, who leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people, and that’s what we’re here to do. We have had the complete support of the state,” she said, referring to North Carolina.
AP AUDIO: Correspondent Julie Walker reports after the deluge, lies and misinformation are clouding the recovery effort from Hurricane Helene.
Republicans, led by the former president, have helped foster a frenzy of misinformation over the past week among the communities most devastated by Helene, promoting a number of false claims, including that Washington is intentionally withholding aid to people in Republican areas.
Trump accused FEMA of spending all its money to help immigrants who are in the United States illegally, while other critics assert that the government spends too much on Israel, Ukraine and other foreign countries.
“FEMA absolutely has enough money for Helene response right now,” Keith Turi, acting director of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery said. He noted that Congress recently replenished the agency with $20 billion, and about $8 billion of that is set aside for recovery from previous storms and mitigation projects.
There also are outlandish theories that include warnings from far-right extremist groups that officials plan to bulldoze storm-damaged communities and seize the land from residents. A falsehood pushed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., asserts that Washington used weather control technology to steer Helene toward Republican voters in order to tilt the presidential election toward Democrat Kamala Harris.
Criswell said on ABC’s “This Week” that such baseless claims around the response to Helene, which caused catastrophic damage from Florida into the Appalachian mountains and a death toll that rose Sunday to at least 230, have created a sense of fear and mistrust from residents against the thousands of FEMA employees and volunteers on the ground.
“We’ve had the local officials helping to push back on this dangerous — truly dangerous narrative that is creating this fear of trying to reach out and help us or to register for help,” she said.
President Joe Biden said in a statement Sunday that his administration “will continue working hand-in-hand with local and state leaders –- regardless of political party and no matter how long it takes.”
Meantime, FEMA is preparing for Hurricane Milton, which rapidly intensified into a Category 1 storm on Sunday as it heads toward Florida.
“We’re working with the state there to understand what their requirements are going to be, so we can have those in place before it makes landfall,” she said.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government’s top disaster relief official said Sunday that false claims and conspiracy theories about the federal response to Hurricane Helene — spread most prominently by Donald Trump — are “demoralizing” aid workers and creating fear in people who need recovery assistance.
“It’s frankly ridiculous, and just plain false. This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” said Deanne Criswell, who leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people, and that’s what we’re here to do. We have had the complete support of the state,” she said, referring to North Carolina.
Republicans, led by the former president, have helped foster a frenzy of misinformation over the past week among the communities most devastated by Helene, promoting a number of false claims, including that Washington is intentionally withholding aid to people in Republican areas.
Trump accused FEMA of spending all its money to help immigrants who are in the United States illegally, while other critics assert that the government spends too much on Israel, Ukraine and other foreign countries.
“FEMA absolutely has enough money for Helene response right now,” Keith Turi, acting director of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery said. He noted that Congress recently replenished the agency with $20 billion, and about $8 billion of that is set aside for recovery from previous storms and mitigation projects.
There also are outlandish theories that include warnings from far-right extremist groups that officials plan to bulldoze storm-damaged communities and seize the land from residents. A falsehood pushed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., asserts that Washington used weather control technology to steer Helene toward Republican voters in order to tilt the presidential election toward Democrat Kamala Harris.
Criswell said on ABC’s “This Week” that such baseless claims around the response to Helene, which caused catastrophic damage from Florida into the Appalachian mountains and a death toll that rose Sunday to at least 230, have created a sense of fear and mistrust from residents against the thousands of FEMA employees and volunteers on the ground.
“We’ve had the local officials helping to push back on this dangerous — truly dangerous narrative that is creating this fear of trying to reach out and help us or to register for help,” she said.
President Joe Biden said in a statement Sunday that his administration “will continue working hand-in-hand with local and state leaders –- regardless of political party and no matter how long it takes.”
Meantime, FEMA is preparing for Hurricane Milton, which rapidly intensified into a Category 1 storm on Sunday as it heads toward Florida.
“We’re working with the state there to understand what their requirements are going to be, so we can have those in place before it makes landfall,” she said.
Can artificial intelligence technology help fix difficult problems? It’s a generic question that you see more of these days, and the answer is typically no. But a new study published in the journal Science is hopeful that large language models may actually be a useful tool in changing the minds of conspiracy theorists who believe incredibly stupid things.
If you’ve ever talked with someone who believes ridiculous conspiracy theories—from a belief that the Earth is flat to the idea humans never actually landed on the Moon—you know they can be pretty set in their ways. They’re often resistant to changing their minds, getting more and more mentally dug in as they insist something about the world is actually explained by some very implausible theory.
A new paper titled “Durably Reducing Conspiracy Beliefs Through Dialogues With AI,” tested AI’s ability to communicate with people who believed conspiracy theories and convince them to reconsider their worldview on a particular topic.
The study involved two experiments with 2,190 Americans who used their own words to describe a conspiracy theory they earnestly believe. The participants were encouraged to explain the evidence they believe supports their theory and then they engaged in a conversation with a bot built on the large language model GPT-4 Turbo, which would respond to the evidence given by the human participants. The control condition involved people talking with the AI chatbot about some topic unrelated to the conspiracy theories.
The study’s authors wanted to try using AI because they guessed that the problem with tackling conspiracy theories is that there are so many of them, meaning that combatting those beliefs requires a level of specificity that can be difficult without special tools. And the authors, who recently spoke with Ars Technica were encouraged by the results.
“The AI chatbot’s ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months, challenging research suggesting that such beliefs are impervious to change,” Ekeoma Uzogara, an editor, wrote about the study.
The AI chatbot, known as Debunkbot, is even publicly available now for anyone who would like to try it out. And while more study is needed on these kinds of tools, it’s interesting to see people who find these kinds of tools useful for battling misinformation. Because, as anyone who’s spent time online recently can tell you, there’s a lot of nonsense out there.
From Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats in Ohio to the idea that Kamala Harris was wearing a secret earpiece hidden in her earring during the presidential debate, there have been countless new conspiracy theories that emerged on the internet this week alone. And there’s no indication that the pace of new conspiracy theories will slow down anytime soon. If AI can help fight against that, it can only be good for the future of humanity.
