If you didn’t know any better, you could be forgiven for assuming that the far right was waging a campaign to get Merriam-Webster to add “my political enemies” to its list of definitions of “pedophile.” For years, “pedophile” (often shortened to “pedo”) was used as semi-ironic 4chan shorthand for anyone internet trolls thought was a weirdo. […]
Author: Ali Breland
Mass Shootings and Our Never-ending Doomcycle
The beats are almost always the same. A shooter enters a crowded space with a loaded gun, usually one modified to kill dozens of people in seconds—and usually one that they obtained legally. They open fire and murder innocents. Earlier this month it was 10 patrons at a Buffalo supermarket; this week it was 19 children […]
Is “Dark MAGA” Actually Anything?
In March, a friend texted me a screenshot of a Twitter Spaces conversation about what looked like a potential new movement on the online right: “Dark MAGA.” No one had covered it yet. I had the coveted chance to break some news. Except, there was a snag: After I started looking around it was clear there […]
QAnon’s Chief Enabler Ran a Website Where He Brushed Off Concerns About Pedophilic Content
The QAnon conspiracy has always stood on a morbidly ironic contradiction: “Q,” the pseudonymous poster who claimed to be a government insider batlling elite liberal pedophiles, infamously became a phenomenon by posting on 8chan, a website where users had allegedly established a child porn swapping network. 8chan’s proprietor is Jim Watkins—an American but often Philippines-based pornographer, pig farmer, and […]
Militias Still Have a Safe Space on YouTube
Much of the public scrutiny toward militia groups has focused on national outfits whose members were indicted for sedition, obstructing congressional proceedings, or bringing a firearm to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Tech companies have accordingly tried to limit the groups’ presence on their platforms. But a new report published Friday by the […]
Obama Is the Latest Celebrity Disinformation Expert, But He’s Not the First
Are you at an interregnum point in your high-profile career? Did you recently come out of a very stressful situation? And are you trying to stay relevant but semi-retired and/or just have your hands in a lot of different things but still want to do a little more? Might I suggest that you consider becoming […]
Elon Musk Wants to Buy Twitter, Even After a Federal Judge Says He Used It to Spread Lies
While Elon Musk might be on the cusp of buying Twitter, he could also be on the cusp of losing a securities fraud case over how he has used it. On Friday, court filings in a class-action lawsuit emerged showing that a judge ruled earlier this month that Musk’s 2018 tweets claiming he had secured funding […]
New Records Show Tax Money Paid for Madison Cawthorn’s Resort Booking
Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), a politician who has made it a point to rail against colleagues who “love wasting your hard-earned tax dollars,” appears to have used more taxpayer money on lodging and food related to his staff retreat than almost anyone else in Congress. The largest expenditure was $2,950 to a resort near Asheville. […]
The Pope Calls for Peace in Ukraine
Pope Francis called for peace in Ukraine in an Easter address before a crowd of tens of thousands in the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square, in the first such gathering to mark the holiday since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. “We have seen all too much blood, all too much violence. Our hearts, too, have […]
Stranger Dangers: The Right’s History of Turning Child Abuse Into a Political Weapon
At some point between the ’80s and now, leaving children unattended in public became unthinkable. To let children as old as, say, 10 walk by themselves became grounds to investigate parents for neglect. As a child of the late ’90s and early 2000s, I knew latchkey kids existed, but nearly exclusively from the aging 1980s […]