Mango Man-Baby files festering pile of whiny flawsuits against Big Tech CEOs

 Donald Trump's whiny lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and Google (and their respective CEOs) are absurdly flawed and almost certainly doomed to failure in court. But more than likely that doesn't matter to Trump, because, like most of his stunts, he's using the flawsuits to gain political capital as well as cold hard cash.

Note: I've added content to this post, including new links, since it was originally published on July 7, 2021.
~CC

I had so wanted -- and truly intended -- to stop blogging about TFG, aka The Former Guy, aka #NeverWasMyPresident Donald John Trump, but he just keeps doing stupid and potentially dangerous stuff, so once in a while I have to go against my own best intentions. An incorrigible litigant, Trump has just announced that he has filed class-action suits, in U.S. District Court for Florida's southern district, against Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google and its CEO Sundar Pichai. He alleges that they have wrongfully censored him and violated his First Amendment rights. A jury trial has been requested.

At a rambling news conference at his Bedminster, NJ golf course, the former Herr Twitler announced that he is the lead class representative in the flawsuits, which I suppose is a good thing for him, most likely being one of the few times he has ever been at the head of any class. He declared, "We're demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing and canceling that you know so well."

Somebody call the waaaaaahmbulance!

He added that the flawsuits will "go down as the biggest class action ever filed because thousands of people want to join."

The complaints demand that punitive damages be paid to Trump and his fellow plaintiffs -- amount to be determined at trial -- and that all suspended/banned social media accounts be reinstated. Also on the list of [demand-in-one-hand-and-crap-in-the-other-and-see-which-hand-fills-up-first] asks is for the court to toss out Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as "an unconstitutional delegation of authority." Trump's attorneys claim that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not in fact private tech firms but instead are arms of the federal government, by virtue of having worked with legislators and governmental agencies such as the CDC to create and enforce policies on misinformation.

When I heard about Trump's latest legal stunt my first thought was, "The next step, probably already underway, will be for the Trumpaganda machinery to spew out invitations to get on board the class action train. The invites will go to millions of the gullible and ignoranti who may feel that they, too, have been cruelly wronged by having their hate speech, lies, and wild conspiranoid rants removed by Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube." I figured that the messages would go out via text, email, social media, and any other method available, accompanied by yet another craven attempt to pick the pockets of the marks. The whole scam would be framed as a noble effort to salvage the First Amendment rights of all good Americans -- and indeed to save America -- from the evil intentions of the "radical left" and other enemies. (Shades of serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, though on a significantly larger and far more dangerous-to-democracy scale.)

And it looks like I was right about the pickpocket plan. It was a no-brainer, really.

But, as I've noted here several times previously, this is simply not a First Amendment issue. And the Trump attorneys' claim that the Big Tech companies are arms of the federal government don't change that fact. This CNET article, first published in January 2021 and updated in May, explains the basics.

Free speech protection under the First Amendment to the US Constitution applies only to the government censoring speech. It doesn't mean private companies can't decide what types of speech they allow on their platforms. Companies can and do have their own standards and policies that users must follow.

And they can remove users who violate those standards.

"It's a common mistake people make in understanding First Amendment protections," said Clay Calvert, a law professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. "There is no constitutional right to tweet or post on Facebook."

The article also details the reasons Trump and other sources of right-wing toxicity were de-platformed. Most of it had to do with Trump and gang's clear incitement of the deadly Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

I suspect, however, that none of that legal -- and moral -- stuff will stop the snowflakes from whining about their 1A rights being violated. Whining is what they do best, as discussed at length here previously. (See additional Whirled links at the end of this post.)

How likely is Trump to prevail? It seems the chances are not good. According to a Daily Beast piece carried on the Yahoo! News site, constitutional law experts are getting a chuckle from the legal arguments presented in the complaints.

“This lawsuit is a stunt and it’s unlikely to find traction in the courts,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told The Daily Beast.

“The argument here that Facebook should be considered a state actor is not at all persuasive. It’s also difficult to square the arguments in the lawsuit with President Trump’s actions in office. The complaint argues that legislators coerced Facebook into censoring speech, but no government actor engaged in this kind of coercion more brazenly than Trump himself.”

Regarding Trump's real agenda, the Daily Beast article continues:

One former Facebook official close to the company described the lawsuits to The Daily Beast as “a desperate fundraising appeal disguised as a lawsuit.” As if to prove the point, Trump’s political action committee swiftly began fundraising after the announcement, sending out a text blast that billed the lawsuits as a fight against censorship.

No big surprise there. 

David Corn at Mother Jones also gets that with Trump, it's all about the grift.

Other than ginning up the Big Lie believers, there is another strong reason for Trump to proceed with this case: money. Lots of money. No sooner had Trump’s lawyers filed when his grift-machine kicked into action. A text message was sent to Trump supporters hitting them up for donations. “President Trump is filing a LAWSUIT against Facebook and Twitter for UNFAIR CENSORSHIP!” it proclaimed. It urged the recipients to send in a donation within “the NEXT HOUR” to qualify for a 500 percent match. (These matches, often ballyhooed in fundraising emails and texts, are basically a con.) And this solicitation promised that donors would end up on a list that “President Trump sees.” Really? Who believes Trump sits there and pores over the names of the folks who send him small donations of five or ten bucks?

But those small devotions add up. A lot. In the months after the November election, Trump collected about $100 million in such contributions. His pitch then was hysterical: I was robbed. He repeatedly pushed the false claim that the election had been stolen from him. And his supporters embraced his propaganda. A recent poll showed that two-thirds of Republicans do not accept Joe Biden’s victory as legitimate. And from these people Trump sucked up millions. 

And if you want a more detailed perspective about the foundational flaws in these complaints (jurisdiction, to begin with, not to mention ludicrous anachronisms, and typos and misspellings that would embarrass competent attorneys) -- as well as the dubious qualifications of the lawyers filing them -- see this piece by David Badash, reprinted with permission from Alternet and posted on The National Memo. Be sure to follow the Twitter links in the article, because several of the tweets contain screen shots of some of the stupidest parts of the complaints.

You'd think that with all of Trump's money, and that of his fellow plaintiffs, they'd be able to hire some competent lawyers who know how to spell, and that know something about the history of social media (or "social medial," according to the Trump lawyers), the Communications Decency Act (or the "Community Decency Act," according to the Trump lawyers), and so forth, not to mention something about the First Amendment. It's almost as if the legal eagles are deliberately working towards a dismissal. But then again, as noted above, the grift is the whole idea, and between now and the almost inevitable dismissal, the Trump machine will be able to pick a lot of pockets.

Stay tuned...

PS, added July 9, 2021: No takedown of The Donald's stupidity would be complete without the inimitable Aldous J Pennyfarthing, whose July 8 piece on the Daily Kos explores what will most likely happen if Trump and his ace team of attorneys decide to actually go forward with the actions.

You probably saw that Donald Trump has decided to sue Facebook, Twitter, and Google for supposedly violating his First Amendment rights ... by enforcing their own terms of service. As lawsuits go, this one is pretty embarrassing. If lawsuits could walk up stairs with toilet paper stuck to the bottom of their shoes while their flaccid, flaxen shocks of corn husk hair decamped from their helmetless Darth Vader heads, that’s what this cosmic yak shart of a lawsuit would be doing right now.

Unfortunately for Trump, lawsuits trigger depositions, and it’s very unlikely that he’ll want to sit for another one of these—especially since his Twitter and Facebook bans were directly tied to his actions on Jan. 6.

Take the time to watch the clips from Trump's 2015 Trump U. deposition.

Related on this Whirled:

Re right-wing whining...

Although these posts express my own strongly held opinions about issues such as Big Tech and free speech and the First Amendment and right-wing whiners and politics, most of the posts also acknowledge that there are nuances. Most notable among these nuances is the fact that the major social media platforms do in fact exercise enormous power over the public conversation, not to mention their control over users' personal information -- and yes, they have often abused these controls. In other words, I get that there's "another side." But I also believe that those on "the left" have been "victimized" as much as (if not more than) those on the "right."

• May 31, 2021: Right-wing whiners celebrate (unconstitutional) Florida bill against Big Tech "censorship"
  Florida's governor Ron DeSantis proudly signed his name to legislation that would fine Big Tech companies eye-popping amounts of money for "censoring" conservative voices, and made it easier for individual snowflakes to file their own suits. Right-wingnuts cheered the new law, although weeks later a federal judge temporarily blocked it. But DeSantis and his group of brave whiners aren't going to give up.
• November 22, 2019: Triggered: Traitor Tot touts his own Trump-branded whine
  A look at Donnie Trump Junior's book, Triggered, which became a bestseller with the help of some strategic bulk purchasing, and which was so rife with whining that it might as well have been titled, Poor Little Rich Boy. One wag gave it an equally if not more appropriate title, Daddy, Please Love Me.
• March 25, 2019: Trump as Julius Seizer? Health Ranger endorses tyrannical solution to online "censorship" of right-wingers
  Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, alt-health huckster, conspiracy peddler, loyal Trumpist, and fascist-masquerading-as-patriotic-American-freedom-fighter, declared that Trump should just "seize" the domains of Facebook, Twitter, et al. until the Big Tech companies stopped "censoring" conservanoids and started behaving properly.
• March 21, 2019: Red, red whine: Devin Nunes' defamation flawsuit against Twitter, a bogus bovine, et al.
  The whole world got a chuckle out of Nunes' attempts to sue a fake cow on Twitter. This post takes a look at that, and also explores the question of who whines the most these daze: the right or the left? (Spoiler: The right.)
• August 2018: Alex Jones and the usual whiners: censor-y deprivation?
  Manic conspiranoid right-wing rabble-rouser Alex Jones has been one of the loudest voices in the "censorship" wars. He was miffed that he was being "silenced" because of the atrocious claims he made about the Sandy Hook school murders being a hoax. This was one of the first posts where I explored some of the nuances, noting that although the de-platforming of Jones is not a First Amendment issue, and he truly is disgusting, issues around social media are not all black-and-white.
• February 2017: Another tempest in a teapot: Google delists and relists whiny Health Ranger
  This guy is a first-class whiner, but crossed the line when he posted content comparing the "censorship" of contemporary "conservatives" with the stuff that Hitler did. Of course he wasn't the first and will be far from the last "conservative" snowflake to do so.
• May 28, 2016: Facebook "censors" Leonard Coldwell again: somebody call the waaaahmbulance!
  Most of the world hasn't even heard of this former Kevin Trudeau buddy/fake doctor/cancer quack/alt-health fraudster/faux-tivational ranter/conspiracy loon/neo-Nazi/alleged predator, but I've written about him because of his relevance to the usual beat of this blog, and because his lunatic views unfortunately mirror those of an increasing number of folks who are living in a world of "alternative facts." Coldwell has repeatedly been thrown in Facebook jail because of his hate speech, and every time it happens he whines that it's because he is such a sterling repository of "truth" and Facebook just can't handle it.

Re incompetent lawyers filing ludicrous (and ultimately dismissed) flawsuits...

The other reason I have written so much about Coldwell is more personal: he tried for years to silence me and some of my fellow bloggers, most notably, the fab Jason "Salty Droid" Jones. After several years of online defamation and threats and attempts to incite others to act against those who wrote the truth about him, Loony Lenny finally resorted to flawsuits -- which, not surprisingly, flopped.

• September 12, 2015: A dish best served cold (and Salty)
  This one is about the 2015 suit Lenny filed against me, Jason Jones, and a few others --  though clearly I was the primary target. The lawsuit was fundamentally flawed on jurisdictional grounds (filed in the wrong court), not to mention that several of the defendants were not only improperly named, but never properly served. And, like Trump's Big Tech flawsuits, the complaints lacked merit and were rife with typos and grammatical errors. But that didn't stop both Lenny and his lawyers from boasting about them. This post also contains a link to my previous post about the flawsuit. But it actually centers around Part 1 of Jason's summation of the failed action. Spoiler: Suit was voluntarily dropped by plaintiff, four months after being filed, because his own lawyers advised he do so. It was the only competent thing they did during the entire life of the case.
• April 3, 2014: Salty Droid corners Coldwell and kicks him right in his Krautsack
  Prior to the suit against Schmidt, Jones, et al., Coldwell sued Jason Jones, for defamation per se, through an attorney he apparently found on one of those rent-a-lawyer sites (but who was actually a personal injury attorney, not a defamation lawyer). Unfortunately for Coldwell, every one of the blog posts cited in the complaint were actually written by someone else, an Israeli blogger named Omri Shabat. In fact, Omri was also named in the suit -- but as an aka for Jason "Salty Droid" Jones. In other words, Jason got sued for something that someone else wrote! This post also contains the link to Jason's account of the failed suit against him. Spoiler: Three weeks after the suit was filed, the lawyer withdrew as counsel for unspecified "professional reasons" and Coldwell apparently never found a substitute attorney, judging from the fact that the suit was dismissed in court for want of prosecution. In other words, nobody showed up.

From what I've seen so far, it appears that Trump's current batch of lawyers are easily as incompetent as Loony Lenny's were, and the complaints they filed equally as absurd. May they experience the same fate as the "Coldwell files."

* * * * *
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Snopes "scandal" has fake-news and conspiracy mongers foaming at the mouth

So 2016 has come and gone, and what a trail of wreckage it left. Today started out stormy in my neck of the woods -- there's a 30-foot-long tree limb, knocked down by the wind, in our backyard -- but it turned into a brilliant and lovely day, as if to proclaim, "Hey, it's the very first Monday of a brand new year, and the world should look fresh and new and bright and happy!" But in reality there is no such thing as a clean slate just because the calendar turns over to a new year. It doesn't work that way. In reality Leonard Cohen is still dead (as are Princess Leia and her mom and a host of others). And even worse, Donald J. Trump is still the not-my-president-elect.

Granted, more rational heads have pointed out that 2016 was not a record year for celebrity deaths, and that despite the horrors of 2016, lots of good stuff happened too (and hopefully Drumpf and his wrecking crew won't be able to reverse all of it). Even so, Leonard Cohen is... well, you know. And Drumpf... well, you know. Not to belabor a point or anything.

But let's get down to business. 2016 also stands out as the year that fake news finally came into its own (which arguably played a part propelling the Orange Blowfish to electoral victory). And the mention of fake news brings us to the point of this post.

On several occasions on past blog posts and on Facebook, I have cited the fact-checking/mythbusting site Snopes.com, and have defended it against its many critical-thinking-impaired detractors who proudly and defiantly proclaim that (1) they never trust anything they read on Snopes; and (2) anyone who does believe or cite Snopes is a gullible sheeple or an idiot. I have written that although I don't consider Snopes infallible, even as I don't consider any source infallible, I believe it to be a reliable source and a good starting point for doing one's own research about silly social media memes and too-bad-to-be-true Internet rumors.

Accordingly some folks might be wondering if some recent Snopes buzz -- regarding founders David and Barbara Mikkelson's highly contentious divorce, David Mikkelson's remarriage to a former sex worker, and a couple of Snopes fact checkers' political affiliations, kinky proclivities and (oh, the horror!) pot smoking -- constitutes an elephant-in-the-room situation for my Whirled.

Indeed, there's a whole lot of what I see as completely unjustified schadenfreude bubbling up in the fever swamps of the alt-right and the conspiracy industry, some of whose true believers have jeered at me and called me an idiot (or a paid shill of George Soros/Hillary Clinton/the New World Order) for being a Snopes fan. It's not a stretch to imagine some of them snickering at me -- and at other Snopes supporters -- right about now.

I'm sorry to disappoint any detractors, but I welcome that elephant and am more than happy to discuss it. The reason I haven't addressed the issue before now is that I was preoccupied with the holidaze, work deadlines and other stuff related to my real life. Now that I have a bit of a breather, let's talk about the Snopes "scandal" that has so many right-wing haters and conspiracy nutcakes foaming at the mouth (and perhaps secretly masturbating -- admit it, Lenny).

The big story was "broken" by the notorious right-wing UK tabloid The Daily Mail, aka The Daily Fail (here's that link again). This, I feel compelled to point out, is the same tabloid whose online tentacle is a co-defendant in a $150 million lawsuit by incoming First Lady Melania Trump. The suit concerns a story about suggestions (mere suggestions, mind you, not accusations) that Melania might have once been a sex worker herself, as in "paid escort." (Here's a link to that September 2016 complaint.) The Mail retracted and apologized (or apologised, as the case may be), but the suit has gone forward. Melania made her first appearance in court on December 12, 2016.

Anyway. The headline on the Snopes story is as lurid as one might expect from The Fail:

EXCLUSIVE: Facebook 'fact checker' who will arbitrate on 'fake news' is accused of defrauding website to pay for prostitutes - and its staff includes an escort-porn star and 'Vice Vixen domme'

As per its usual practice, The Fail precedes the actual article with a bulleted list, for the benefit, I suppose, of people who are in too much of a hurry, or too reading-challenged, to wade through the typo-ridden main article:

Facebook has announced plans to check for 'fake news' using a series of organizations to assess whether stories are true 

One of them is a website called Snopes.com which claims to be one of the web's 'essential resources' and 'painstaking, scholarly and reliable' 

It was founded by husband-and-wife Barbara and David Mikkelson, who used a letterhead claiming they were a non-existent society to start their research 

Now they are divorced - with Barbara claiming in legal documents he embezzled $98,000 of company money and spent it on 'himself and prostitutes' 

In a lengthy and bitter legal dispute he is claiming to be underpaid and demanding 'industry standard' or at least $360,000 a year

The two also dispute what are basic facts of their case - despite Snopes.com saying its 'ownership' is committed to 'accuracy and impartiality' 

Snopes.com founder David Mikkelson's new wife Elyssa Young is employed by the website as an administrator 

She has worked as an escort and porn actress and despite claims website is non-political ran as a Libertarian for Congress on a 'Dump Bush' platform 

Its main 'fact checker' is Kimberly LaCapria, whose blog 'ViceVixen' says she is in touch with her 'domme side' and has posted on Snopes.com while smoking pot

Now let me say right off that I am not suggesting at all that The Fail made this up from whole cloth. I'd been wondering for some time whatever happened to Barbara Mikkelson, whose work from past years still appears on Snopes but who is no longer named as one of the founders. I have no problem believing that there was an acrimonious divorce between David and Barbara (I'd heard some vague buzz about it some time ago), nor am I particularly shocked that David Mikkelson took up with a former sex worker who is now a website admin at Snopes. As for one of the fact checkers being in touch with her "domme side" and insinuating that she has smoked pot while posting on Snopes.com... yawn. Would anyone be scandalized by a blogger or journalist posting while enjoying a glass of wine?

The embezzlement accusations are more serious, but that's between the Mikkelsons and their lawyers. And frankly I don't know enough about the details of the case to make a comment. I'm not trying to let Dave Mikkelson off the hook for anything, and if I were going to take sides I'd be inclined to take sides with Barbara at this point. But if you read The Fail's report you will notice that they did not provide a link to the actual legal documents that were cited in the piece, although they did display what presumably are screen shots of snippets of said documents. So I can't really address the documents or the conflicts they supposedly describe with any authority. And neither can you, and neither can the writers on any of the alt-right hate sites that picked up the story, unless any of you have actually read all of the documents.

And the alt-right/conspiracy nutter sites did indeed take this story and run, and run, and run with it.

The alt-right blog Zero Hedge was even less subtle than The Fail with its headline:

Snopes Co-Founder Embezzles $98,000, Drops Weight, Leaves Fat Wife And Marries Actual Whore

And this piece, which appears on racist, hatemonger and conspiracy nut Jeff Rense's site (though not authored by Rense himself), is downright pornographic. You can almost see the writer, "journalist" Yoichi Shimatsu, salivating. Shimatsu is a yuuuge believer in the idiotic Pizzagate fake scandal, and so apparently is Rense. Here are the two of them blathering on video.

The stupidest and most evil man in Scamworld, Not-Doktor Leonard Coldwell, who is a passionate Snopes hater (and Trump lover), curated a piece from the right-wing Daily Caller for his "blog."

And not surprisingly, the self-proclaimed king of the (fact)free press, Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, bubbled over with righteous glee about the Snopes dramas, with this headline:

Prostitutes for the Presstitutes: SNOPES fact-checkers revealed to be actual whores, fraudsters and deviant left-wing fetish bloggers

Naturally, Mikey inserted himself into the drama.

Facebook recently announced it would rely on SNOPES to “fact-check” news articles to make sure Facebook operated with high integrity standards and full transparency. In reality, the announcement was a thinly-veiled attempt to censor independent journalism by labeling real news “fake news” with the help of all the left-wing (actual) whores and fraudsters at SNOPES.

Now, Mikey's sites are prime examples of fake news, pseudo-science, conspiracy lunacy, dirty SEO tricks and right-wing propaganda (regarding the latter, so much for political neutrality, which so many of the Snopesophobes, including Adams, claim is missing from Snopes). His Natural News site was once described by a blogger on the Rational Wiki site as being the Daily Mail of Alternative Medicine. So it stands to reason that he might feel threatened by Facebook's attempts to crack down on the phonies. But hey, Mikey, you want "deviant?" You want "fraudster?" Have you taken a look at your pudgy little pal Lenny? For that matter, have you delved into the personal lives and private and public failings of the "independent journalists" whom you claim to be the real guardians of truth and morality? No, I didn't think so.
 
But I digress. Where Natural News is concerned, it seems that Snopes can give as good as it gets. So it's perfectly understandable that Mikey would hate them so much.

Perspective
Let's look at this a little more closely. First off, the disagreements between two people involved in a rancorous divorce do not necessarily invalidate those people's efforts in other aspects of their lives. So The Fail's snarky bullet point (i.e., "The [Mikkelsons] also dispute what are basic facts of their case - despite Snopes.com saying its 'ownership' is committed to 'accuracy and impartiality'") is irrelevant. Even if it is true that Barbara and David Mikkelson can't agree on the "basic facts" about their personal affairs, this does not invalidate the fact-checking and mythbusting work done over the years by the Mikkelsons, Kim LaCapria, or any other Snopes "staffer."

And the "whore" that the right-wingers are jeering about -- David Mikkelson's new wife, Elyssa Young -- is not a fact-checker on Snopes; she is just an administrative assistant. Not that being a sex worker would render someone incapable of being a fact checker, but I think the haters are making much too big a deal out of Young's position (ahem) at Snopes.

In fact The Fail seems to be making much too big a deal out of a lot of things about Mikkelson's new bride. Take this bullet point (please): "She has worked as an escort and porn actress and despite claims website is non-political ran as a Libertarian for Congress on a 'Dump Bush' platform."

Elyssa Young was an unsuccessful Libertarian candidate in 2004 -- nearly 13 years ago. But again, she was not then and is not now (to my knowledge) a Snopes fact-checker. And even if she had been, and assuming that she allowed her Libertarian tendencies to influence her work, that would have actually made the common allegation that Snopes has a "liberal bias" even sillier. Libertarians may skew liberal on certain social issues, but they're pretty much in sync with the right wing and the Tea Party on everything else.

Then there's the much-criticized Kim LaCapria, who is often described as the top fact-checker on Snopes. The alt-right haters have long accused her of leftist tendencies, though quite a few of her stories have debunked left-wing memes and have effectively defended people such as Donald Trump. Now the haters are drooling over the fact that she has some sexy web sites and that she claimed to have posted on Snopes after smoking pot. Meh. LaCapria clearly has a life apart from Snopes, and if that offends you, hey, don't visit her web sites. If you think her work is affected by her pot smoking and you don't trust her because of that, keep in mind that her pieces on Snopes, like all the articles on the site, provide links to other sources, so you can do further research on your own. So c'mon, put down that bottle of bourbon, Lenny, and learn to use the Internet for something besides reinforcing your own biases.

The big but
I did find one critical piece about the Snopes "scandal" that made a few valid points about Snopes and its fact-checking methods. This article by Kalev Leetaru on Forbes.com is worth reading, although I think that Leetaru, like other critics, made too big a deal out of Elyssa Young's past political activities. I think he also reacted too strongly to David Mikkelson's reluctance to divulge details of his personal legal troubles.

But at least Leetaru made an effort to reach out to Mikkelson, and he made some excellent suggestions about how Snopes could improve by being more forthcoming about its assessment process. So while I don't expect either Barbara or David Mikkelson to air all of their personal dirty laundry to the world, I do think that there's room for improvement on Snopes.com.


Separating real fake news from fake fake news
I don't want to veer too far off-track from the main point of this post, but since fake news has become such a force, and fighting fake news has now become a thing as well, and Snopes has been front and center in that fight since long before "fake news" became a trending topic, here's another piece that bears sharing. It's partly about how the fake-news perps and believers have gone all Pee-Wee Herman ("I know you are, but what am I?") on their accusers in the mainstream media.

Some supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump have also taken up the call. As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of “Fake news!”

Until now, that term had been widely understood to refer to fabricated news accounts that are meant to spread virally online. But conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself, incredulous about suggestions that fake stories may have helped swing the election, have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.

In defining “fake news” so broadly and seeking to dilute its meaning, they are capitalizing on the declining credibility of all purveyors of information, one product of the country’s increasing political polarization. And conservatives, seeing an opening to undermine the mainstream media, a longtime foe, are more than happy to dig the hole deeper.

And that's a pretty dangerous trend. I only hope that Snopes can survive this latest round of attacks so it can continue to be a force in the fight against fakery. We need you now more than ever, Snopes.


Carry it on
Snopes.com started out as a hobby on the old-school newsgroup circuit -- in those ancient days before social media and really, even before blogs -- and over the years it grew from there. It is possible that at some level its founders may have always considered it a hobby, albeit a lucrative hobby. But at some point along the way Snopes managed to also become a legitimate and much-cited source of information about misinformation, perhaps surprising its founders more than anyone else. Yet to my knowledge neither Barbara nor David Mikkelson ever pretended to be infallible or to be experts in anything.

This October 19, 2016 piece on the Webby Awards site gives a more balanced perspective about Snopes' history.

And here's a December 25, 2016 piece in the New York Times about Snopes and David Mikkelson.

You might also be interested in this December 2015 Washington Post interview with David Mikkelson, in which he discusses, among other things, Snopes' role as a political reporter and fact-checker. (Keep in mind that even though the vast majority of the right-wing bitching and whining and griping about Snopes is based on its political content, Snopes did not start out as a political site, and it still reports on many topics besides politics.)
 
As far as I'm concerned, Snopes remains a legitimate source of information, despite the allegations about hookers and pot smoking and yes, even despite the allegations of David Mikkelson's embezzlement. I hope the Mikkelsons get that latter bit worked out soon and that they can get on with their lives.

Is Snopes a perfect source? Of course not. Is there room for improvement? You bet (see Forbes.com article linked to above). But let's separate the salacious from the serious, the voyeur fodder from the valid criticism about Snopes' methods. Even though in his private life David Mikkelson may be a complete sleazeball, and although some of the Snopes "staff" may be involved in kinky activities on their own time, Snopes, with all of its imperfections and juicy non-scandals, still beats the pants off of the army of alt-right wingnutters and misinformation mongers such as Natural News, Breitbart, Alex Jones, WorldNut Daily, The Daily Caller, Pamela Geller, Stormfront, Jeff Rense and, of course, anything by Leonard Coldwell.

And one more point: I find it utterly astounding that many of the same people who are so scandalized by David Mikkelson's private life, and those of some of the Snopes staffers, apparently aren't scandalized at all by the garish, lurid spectacle that is Donald John Trump. Just saying.

* * * * *

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Fourteen years after Sedona "sweat lodge" deaths, James Arthur Ray, now a full-on reich-wing conspiranoid, is still hustling and whining (and his victims are still dead)

 

Today, October 8, 2023, is the 14th anniversary of the day that sociopathic New-Wage/McSpirituality guru/cult leader James Arthur Ray killed two of his followers: Kirby Brown and James Shore, and set in motion the death, nine days later, of a third follower, Liz Neuman. The instrument of their deaths was a fake and utterly reckless "sweat lodge" ceremony in Sedona, Arizona, that also injured dozens of other participants. The phony sweat lodge was the "final challenge" at Ray's pricey "Spiritual Warrior" workshop.

Ray, who had shot to fame following his appearance in the simplistic and crassly materialistic New-Wage moviemercial The Secret, was convicted of negligent homicide for the three deaths in Sedona -- and consequently served less than two years in an Arizona state prison -- but he was never criminally charged in the death of yet another follower, Colleen Conaway, at a San Diego Ray event a couple of months before Sedona.

For Ray, the daze of the four- and five-figure live events such as Spiritual Warrior would seem to be over, and that's a good thing. His homicide creds are right there at the top of the page on Google search results along with the promotional stuff, and although he has been struggling mightily to make a comeback since his release from prison more than 10 years ago, framing the whole Sedona thing as a super-major trial and tribulation for him, his audience -- both live and online -- has shriveled like the balls of a long-time steroid user.

JAR joins up with the reich-wing conspiranoids and conspicuous contrarians
For instance, a glance at Ray's Xitter account shows a pathetic level of engagement via responses and reposts, and a minuscule number of views. Granted, the same could be said about my Xitter account too, which gets even less engagement and fewer views than Ray's, but I'm a social media nobody and never pretended to be anything but that.

When I checked out Ray's Xitter today, I admit to feeling a stab of pity for him, so I decided to engage, since nobody else was doing so. I responded to a post on which he wrote, "We have seen more real time footage of Israel in the last two days than we've seen in 3 years from Ukraine. What's really going on in Ukraine?"

I had already seen those very words from numerous reich-wing politicos and proud contrarians who litter my feed despite my best efforts. Actually I remember first seeing it as a Xitter post by Donald J Trump Junior, aka DJTJ, aka Traitor Tot, the eternally triggered, coked-up elder son of #NeverWasMyPresident Donald J Trump. And from what I've seen, the commentators who have cited this post, either agreeing with it or scoffing about it, have all attributed it to DJTJ.

This clearly was not an original thought, in other words, despite the fact that Ray presented it as his own, rather than as a repost or a quote post. So I complimented him on his parroting of right-wing talking points before casually mentioning that October 8, 2023 is the 14th anniversary of his Death Lodge. (I didn't take the time to point out that, especially in the days and weeks following the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine back in February 2022, there was nonstop, wall-to-wall, multimedia coverage of the matter, and a slew of real time footage. Even now there's abundant coverage.)

Ray engaged right back, telling me that I was parroting "mainstream propaganda" and that I should watch the video pinned in his feed, but insinuating that I probably won't because I am "rooted in mind control." My first thought upon reading this was that James Arthur Ray has zero standing when it comes to calling out mind control, since relentless, aggressive, targeted mind control was his stock in trade for years, and was a central cause of the deaths and injuries of his followers.

And in case you're wondering, the reason his response does not show up on the screenshot that appears at the beginning of this post is that he hadn't yet responded at the time I created the graphic, and I didn't feel like going back and revising it. But you can see the exchange for yourself right here. You might also observe that so far, nobody has "liked" either my response or his response to me; at least that was the case last time I checked. [Update: It now appears that my response has one "like." His response to me still has zero likes, although it does have more views than my comment, for some reason. I guess he checks back frequently.]

I think it's pointless for me to engage further in that particular conversation, but between you and me, it looks as if Jimmy A Ray has jumped aboard the reich-wing conspiranoia train. A closer look at his Xitter feed reveals that in between the usual self-promo posts, bits of McSpirituality wisdumb, and whining about being censored on social media for being a truth-teller, there is an abundance of reich-wing political pearl clutching about Biden, Obama, immigrants invading the US through the Southern border, and so forth. Oh, yeah, and retweeting vintage Donald J Trump, or retweeting posts that lionize Orange Droolius.

Which comes as no surprise on this Whirled: in the past few years it has become increasingly clear that Scamworld and reich-wing politix go together like peas and carrots. And the scammers all seem to luv their Mango Mussolini.

Ray, like so many others, seems to have discovered a $weet $pot in the marketplace of ideas, prompting him to pander to the gullible, the disillusioned, and the broken: people who, if they're at all politically inclined, are for the most part moving steadily rightward, lured by the deeply toxic siren song of Trumpism. He welcomes with open arms the conspiranoids and conspicuous contrarians who see a demonic (leftist/liberal) plot behind every adverse event, and who, like rebellious tweenagers, reflexively reject everything that they perceive as "mainstream" if it doesn't fit their narrative.

Many of these are the same folks who flock to serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, who has been crapitalizing for years on "forbidden" information that "they" (the government, Big Pharma, mainstream culture, et al.) "don't want you to know." And in many cases, they're the same ones who have donned the red caps and prostrated themselves before the MAGA maniac. You can hardly blame JAR for wanting some of that action.

"Yes! We are all individuals!"
What's amusing is that Ray is taking great pains to brand himself as the guru of "Independent Thinking" (it's right there in his Xitter description), when in fact -- and forgive me for stating the obvious -- that's nothing more than a ruse to suck people into his web. In the pinned video that he urged me to watch but scornfully concluded that I probably wouldn't -- but that I did in fact watch (there's a YouTube link to it in the second to last paragraph of this post) -- he declared that even though he had become famous via the The Secret for teaching the Law of Attraction, his core specialty for decades had been teaching people how to think independently and reject the mainstream narrative. (He also claimed his teachings were Bible-based. Uh-huh.)

Accordingly, his accusation that I was parroting mainstream propaganda was right on-brand, even if it was totally off the mark. Ray's shtick is anything but original, of course. Kevin Trudeau and numerous others in Scamworld -- not to mention Trump himself -- have claimed in their own ways to nurture "individuality" and "independent thinking" and other flavors of empowerment, when in fact they're only encouraging rejection of the mainstream in order to redirect loyalty to themselves. You know, just like cult leaders do. Again, forgive me for stating the obvious.

As for that video that Ray cited in his response to me, I suppose I can also be forgiven for thinking at first that it might be an examination, however misguided, of the truth about the wars in Ukraine and Israel, since that was the topic of his original post, and since it was that post to which I was referring when I said he was parroting right-wing talking points. But I should have known better, should have immediately snapped to the fact that Ray, ever the malignant narcissist, makes everything about him.

He was focused not on the matter of the two wars, or to the issue of partisan talking points, but on my mention of the Death Lodge anniversary. And that pinned video (to which, again, there's a YouTube link in the next paragraph) was indeed all about him, presenting a very skewed narrative of the horrible events in 2009, and how unfairly and unjustly he had been treated for something that wasn't his fault, but that the mainstream media painted as his fault. We've heard it all before.

In any case, as long as he continues to try to claw his way back to the top of an industry that has more than its share of sociopaths and predators, I feel duty-bound to post periodic reminders of why you should not listen to James Arthur Ray. He is still spewing his toxic lies, still playing his dual role of faux-hero and martyr -- and most of all, still refusing to take any blame for the deaths and injuries of his faithful followers -- and the people he killed are still dead.

Never forget.

This post has been expanded and updated since its original publication on October 8, 2023.
~ CC

Related on this Whirled

• October 2010: Musings on a tragedy and its meanings.
  I published this on the one-year anniversary of the infamous "sweat lodge," framing my musings around a review of Connie Joy's Tragedy in Sedona: My Life in James Arthur Ray's Inner Circle. That's another one you need to read.
• April 2019: From drawn-and-quartered martyr to "Crisis Coach": James Arthur Ray's newest desperate gimmick
  This is just one of numerous posts about Ray's arrogant yet pathetic attempts to reestablish himself as a selfish-help superstar. In this one we focus on Ray's efforts to brand himself as a "Crisis Coach."
• August 2020: Whiny babies of Scamworld
  Of the three "whiny babies" I wrote about in this post, James Arthur Ray is the worst, because even after being directly responsible for the deaths of four people at his events, and directly responsible for the physical and emotional injuries of countless others, he continues to paint himself as the real victim.
• October 2022: 13 years after James Arthur Ray's deadly sweat lodge, cults are still a danger
  This post, published last year on the Death Lodge anniversary, was a tale of two Virginias, one despicable one (that would be the infamous Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, insurrectionist extraordinaire, who was once a member of a selfish-help cult), and one admirable one: Virginia Brown, mother of one of James Arthur Ray's death lodge victims, Kirby Brown. One of the ways that Kirby Brown's family chose was to found a nonprofit organization, SEEK Safely to help educate the public, hold self-help leaders accountable, and hopefully avoid more deaths and injuries at the hands of reckless gurus. Even if you don't read my post, I urge you to visit the SEEK Safely site, which is continually expanding. You will find a wealth of useful information, as well as opportunities to get involved if you're so inclined.

Another tempest in a teapot: Google delists and relists whiny Health Ranger

A fiery screed from the rabid right
A cloud of lies and a piercing, "I've been censored!"
...The Health Ranger whines again!
[Cue William Tell Overture]

I've been noticing that lately there is a lot of intensely whiny snowflakery in Scamworld, and some of these whimpering snowflakes happen to be alt-right nuts as well as scammers. They do love their persecution narratives, it seems, even more than they love their Cheeto Jesus and their guns. One such alt-right scammer (and friend of scammers) is Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, long-time frauduct peddler, histrionic promoter of conspiracy narratives, and passionate Donald Trump supporter.

For quite some time now Adams has been beating his chest about being a heroic voice of truth, standing bravely on the front lines of the fight against the "lying mainstream media." More recently he volunteered himself as a soldier defending the "legitimacy" of Trump's "presidency." I wrote about that just this past December:

In an "open letter" to His Unholy Orangeness, Adams urges Trump to refuse to let the mainstream press corps into his (ultra)White House at all. After all, declares Adams (repeating by rote what every faithful Trumpian knows), the mainstream media are Drumpf's enemy and "they will do anything and everything to destroy you."

Though Adams' faux-fight against the legitimate press has been an overwrought attempt to get the #NotMyPresident's attention, so far I've seen no evidence that Drumpf has even acknowledged the existence of Mike Adams. This is in contrast to Trump's bromance with top-of-the-steaming-heap conspiracy monger, Alex Jones.

But being ignored has not kept Adams from sticking his nose as far up Drumpf's aperture as he can possibly get it, rooting around up there and then smearing the results all over his pro-Trump platforms. Apparently he thinks that if he keeps on doing that, his efforts will be rewarded eventually. In that regard Mike Adams is like many other loudmouths on the alt-right, as noted by the Washington Post last November, immediately following the election.

So let's get to the whiny part already. Adams' latest online drama, which plays right into his "brave warrior for truth" shtick, occurred last week when his main site, Natural News, got penalized -- "delisted" -- by Google. For several days he whined and whined and whined about it, beginning with a "Red Alert" on February 23, which bore this headline (accompanied by a picture of a nuclear bomb detonating):

RED ALERT: Fascist Google begins PURGE of pro-Trump websites as prelude to massive false flag or coup attempt

On that same day, a White House petition was initiated to "Ban Google's Blatant Suppression of Free Speech." At the time I'm writing this, the petition has 64,851 of the 100,000 sigs needed in order for the White House to at least acknowledge it.

By February 26 Adams was in full shrill conspiracy mode:

Mike Adams, Alex Jones attacked… is it a prelude to a false flag event targeting Trump?

As most of you are aware, last week we witnessed massive attacks on independent media. Alex Jones, who is by far the leading voice in the war against tyranny, was stripped of $3 million in ad revenue after being banned from AdRoll. We saw Milo, one of the loudest Trump supporters, be ripped apart after making irresponsible statements that the media was able to manipulate into pro-molestation remarks, causing him to lose his $250,000 book deal and step down from Breitbart. And now NaturalNews.com, which has been a pioneer in exposing the lies of big pharma, vaccine makers, and dirty food pushers, has had all of its 140,000 articles scrubbed from Google, even while Google refuses to provide any evidence justifying the blacklisting. We see this for what it is; a massive conspiracy to silence the truth.

Before all of these events unfolded, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, had a suspicion that something was about to happen when an anonymous person offered Adams $50000 to destroy Alex Jones. On his February 17th podcast Adams explained that after he had refused to take the money or lie about Jones, the person threatened that the media would retaliate and destroy Adams. Just five days later we witnessed this come to fruition.

Are these attacks on such high profile independent media members a result of being Pro-Trump? Jones has a direct connection to Donald Trump and had a significant influence on him being elected. Milo has been an avid cheerleader for Trump and his executive orders on immigration. Adams owns the popular Trump.News website, which provides real news about what is happening in the Trump administration, and threatens the fake news spewed out by mainstream media.

The mention of Milo above was, of course, a reference to Milo Yiannopoulos, whose book deal was recently canceled by Threshold Books, a division of publisher Simon and Schuster. Here's Vox:

Shortly after Threshold’s deal with Yiannopoulos was announced, prominent liberal intellectuals announced that they would be boycotting Simon & Schuster. The Chicago Review of Books announced that it would not review any Simon & Schuster books in 2017. Literary superstar Roxane Gay pulled her upcoming book from Simon & Schuster’s list.

And that’s because Yiannopoulos is not a garden-variety conservative author. He is a professional troll who weaponized Twitter as a tool for (racist, sexist, transphobic) harassment so effectively that Twitter was forced to permanently ban him. On his ongoing college speaking tour, he has doxed trans students, putting their lives in danger. He routinely makes hyperbolically offensive statements like “feminism is cancer,” designed to rile up liberals, and then when liberals get angry, he winks and says he didn’t really mean it: He was just being provocative.

But none of that — not Yiannopoulos’s history of harassment and bigotry, not the widespread outcry and the loss of major authors — was enough for Threshold Books to think twice about acquiring his book in the first place, let alone cancel his contract. It took the resurfacing of a video in which Yiannopoulos explicitly defends pedophilia for Threshold to pull the plug.

For many on the left, including writers like Gay, the timing of Threshold’s decision demonstrates that the publisher doesn’t really care about Yiannopoulos’s right to free speech so much as it liked what he was saying before he got to the part about pedophiles — and, more importantly, that it believed its customers would like what he was saying. Threshold thought it could make money from his book, and now it doesn’t think it will.

...In other words, Threshold has sent a clear message: Explicit bigotry, harassment, and hatred are tolerable among conservative thinkers. Defense of child molestation is where we draw the line in the sand.

Don't shed any tears for Milo, though; I have no doubt he'll take his book elsewhere and find acceptance. I suspect he still has a large platform and a dedicated fan base. It's all about free speech, you know.

Anyway. In a separate post on February 26, Adams groused that Google had refused to 'splain its "blacklisting" of Natural News.


Conspiracy-fan-in-disguise Erin Elizabeth, the Health Nut (previously mentioned on this Whirled) got in on the hysteria and histrionics early on with this brief post. Her conspiracy-minded fans joined in the conversation; you can read their thoughts about "censorship" and various devious plots thereof in the comments to the post.

And my favorite blogging doctor David Gorski, aka Orac, whom Adams has viciously defamed, enjoyed a brief moment of schadenfreude.

Google did speak up about the matter shortly after the whinefest began. Apparently a webmaster guidelines violation was the real reason for the "banning," which, it should be noted, wasn't an outright ban but just a penalty. And as for the delisting occurring without warning, the Search Engine Land article noted this:

Natural News said in its post that “Google sent no warning whatsoever to our ‘webmaster tools’ email address on file with them,” but not all penalties will receive a notification via Google Search Console. More extreme and deceptive violations will not receive such notifications.

But Adams insisted that Google was lying about their reasons, and he insisted that several "liberal" sites such as CNN, HuffPost and BuzzFeed were guilty of the same violations he'd been accused of, and they hadn't been penalized.

Whine, whine, whine.

In any case, as of today (February 28) Natural News is safely back on Google's index.
Naturally Adams claimed credit, insinuating that the petition he had started had done the trick and that "your voices have been heard." Basically his "official statement" about the relisting was yet another extended whine...

As Natural News was being censored by Google, we were also being assaulted and called liars by the same left-wing media that routinely attacks Donald Trump. By censoring Natural News, Google empowered a massive wave of defamation articles that deliberately sought to exploit the absence of Natural News in the rankings to spread knowingly false lies and hatred about Natural News and myself in particular.

In essence, Google just enabled one of the most vile hate campaigns ever witnessed on the ‘net, all while denying Natural News any ability to defend itself against such hate-based smears and malicious lies. It is the electronic equivalent of binding your hands, slapping duct tape over your mouth, and throwing you to the lions. All this from a company that once claimed to “do no evil.”

In effect, Google censored us, then allowed others to smear us, then hosted a webmaster forum which attacked us and called us liars, then refused to provide us with any evidence of wrongdoing, all while silencing our ability to defend ourselves in the public space.

There’s no question in my mind that none of this would have ever happened if Natural News had been a Clinton-supporting website. There’s no question in my mind that Natural News was discriminated against because we were a convenient political target that could be silenced as part of an elaborate smear campaign to drag our reputation through the mud, scare away future visitors and harm our revenue-generating traffic as a form of economic sabotage...

Somebody call the waaahhhhhmbulance.  

Speaking of vile hate campaigns, Google has also enabled Natural News' vile hate campaigns against people such as David Gorski/Orac, and for that matter, against Hillary Clinton and everyone who voted for her... but I digress.

None of this is to suggest that Google is a completely benign force or that its penalization of websites is always logical or consistent. We all know that's not the case, and website owners and bloggers have been bitching about this for years and years. But in this case the reason for Natural News' delisting seemed fairly straightforward, and with the problem fixed... there's no problem, right? Wrong. Adams felt compelled to inject his overwrought conspiracy narrative and political ranting into the matter, even bringing Herr Drumpf and Adams' customary nattering about "false flags" into the drama. But hey, it added to Adams' martyr creds and probably didn't hurt his revenue stream.

And don't forget that Adams has his own search engine, GoodGopher. GoodGopher filters out what they consider "disinformation" and government/Big Pharma propaganda, instead stacking their search results with alt-nutty and rightwing sites (euphemistically dubbed "independent news media") such as NaturalNews (of course!) as well as Breitbart, The Blaze, Washington Times (which is owned and run by Moonies), Drudge Report, Western Journalism and more.

On GoodGopher you can choose "mainstream media" for your results, but you'll mostly get FOX News results, and if you get an outlet such as the Washington Post you'll see it has been "flagged by the user community for malicious or misleading content." Clearly, "misleading" and "malicious" are in the eye of the beholder. (This blog doesn't show up in the listings under either independent or mainstream media. It's as if it simply doesn't exist on the Internet at all. Maybe this going-on-eleven-years experiment was just a dream...) 

Adams also has his own "alternative" to Wikipedia, the ludicrously misnamed "TruthWiki," which is chock-full of fluff/promo copy for predatory fraudsters and right-wing nutcake political ranting. 

In any case Adams is still fighting the good fight and continuing to wax histrionic about the "vile assaults" that he and Natural News are "enduring" from "lunatics" and people whose minds have been poisoned by fluoride and mercury and whatnot.

Adams' whining reminds me of the whining of the stupidest and most evil man in Scamworld, Not-Doktor Lenny Coldwell, whenever Lenny gets suspended from Facebook, which is fairly frequently. Lenny generally whines that he got "banned" because he supports Trump and/or because he tells the "truth" about cancer cures. But in truth he gets thrown in Facebook jail because people report him for hate speech. Both Lenny and Adams play the martyr card to the max, falsely claiming they're being censored for truth-telling.

In a more general sense the Health Ranger's laments also remind me of serial scammer Kevin Trudeau's vintage whines (and current gripes) about being oppressed by the government for telling the "truth" and fighting for your and my First Amendment Rights.

Meanwhile, the true threat to the First Amendment (and much of the rest of the Constitution) is sitting in the Oval Office with his wrecking crew, plotting out ways to destroy America and re-mold it according to their plutocratic, theocratic agenda.

By the way, there is another Natural News article that has been making the social media rounds lately, bearing the headline:

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler arrested and executed ‘fake news’ journalists who rightfully claimed that Jews were being exterminated

Adams didn't write that piece; it was authored by prolific right-wing propagandist and Natural News contributor Don Wrightman, but it is prominently featured on the Natural News site, and as I write this it is at the top of the list of "Most Viewed Article" on the site. And even though it was published in December 2016, it is currently being shared on numerous right wing sites. Some folks who are emphatically not right-wingers are sharing it as well on social media, not considering the source and the real reason for the article.

Given the context, including the links within the article (particularly the link to Adams' "truth-telling" site liberty.news), it is abundantly clear that this piece was a protest against critics of Mike Adams and his fellow "independent journalists" rather than a statement about Herr Drumpf's war against the legitimate media. So all of you Trump critics who have been sharing this article should probably reconsider your choice. Clearly this piece is little more than another blatantly transparent effort to make Trump's and Adams' critics, including the media, look like the real "Nazis"/threats to freedom, while portraying Adams, Alex Jones, Breitbart and the rest of the fact-free "press" as the true First Amendment defenders/martyrs.

And c'mon people. Y'all are too smart to believe that.