Revealed: Trump-linked consultant tied to Facebook pages warning election will cause civil war
Amilitia-promoting father and son duo of fake news publishers and a Trump-connected social media consultant are linked to pages which promote the idea of an American civil war with material presented in a way that appears to be an effort to sidestep Facebook’s factchecking system.
Comments on their Facebook pages and other materials obtained by the Guardian show that some rank and file Donald Trump supporters are enthusiastically receiving the message that they should prepare for violence against their perceived political enemies in November.
The network is comprised of websites owned and operated by Dino Porrazzo Sr and Dino Porrazzo Jr, whose company, AFF Media, is headquartered in Pinon Hills in California. The pair have been running rightwing websites since at latest 2013, according to DNS website records.
The Porrazzos now run a network of websites that enthusiastically promote Trump, and far right anti-government militias like the Three Percenters, and offer distorted versions of current events. One of their Facebook pages, “Prepare to Take America Back” (PTTAB) at the time of reporting had 794,876 followers. Analysis with social media metrics tool Crowd tangle shows that over the last three months PTTAB posts have been shared over 141,000 times, and on average 9,600 times a week.
At that time, the page’s header featured the logo of the Three Percenters, a decentralized group that the ADL calls a “wing of the militia movement”; a group of armed men in tactical gear; and a modified copy of the US presidential seal.
In general, the page promotes conspiracy theories and criminal allegations about Democratic party politicians, liberal celebrities and leftist protesters, some of which – like persistent claims that Hillary Clinton will be imminently arrested – overlap with aspects of the so-called “QAnon” conspiracy theory movement.
The page makes free use of political memes, but many posts link to a small cluster of rightwing websites designed to appear like news outlets. Increasingly, over the course of 2020, the page has been warning of a stolen election, and suggesting this will lead to civil war.
Repeatedly in September, the page linked to a story on the website Right Wing Tribune, headlined “Radical Left Prepares For ‘Mass Public Unrest,’ ‘Political Apocalypse’ And Possible Civil War Should Be Expected If Biden Loses [Opinion]”, with Facebook captions including “the left wants war”.
The story had a limited basis in fact, in that a number of progressive groups had met in early September to discuss the prospect of civil unrest and political violence after the election with a belief that the violence they were anticipating would be coming from Trump supporters and the far right.
Nevertheless, the Right Wing Tribune piece concluded with a conspiracy theory: “These groups are heavily focused on removing President Trump from office as well as different scenarios which all lead to a second revolution in which they control our nation as a “New America”.”
Similarly distorted stories warning of a “siege of the white house”, peppered the page throughout September and warnings of a post-election civil war were posted over the last year.
Last November, the page linked to a site called Flag and Cross, and a story
which it described as an “excellent opinion piece”, entitled “Winning the New Civil War (OPINION)”.
The piece claimed on the basis of antifascist protests and comments by Democratic politicians that, “We have many strong indications that this is a hot war”.
The transparency page for PTTAB discloses that PTTAB is managed by Southern California-based AFF Media Inc, and that the Vici Media Group “partners with this page”.
According to California records, AFF Media was incorporated on Donald Trump’s inauguration day, 20 January 2017; in other documents, Dino Porrazzo Jr is listed as CEO and CFO, and Dino Porrazzo Sr as secretary. But the Guardian has discovered that the Porrazzos are further involved in running a dizzying array of interconnected sites and social media pages. The Annenberg Public Policy initiative lists two of their websites on its “Misinformation Directory” of “websites that have posted deceptive content”.
One of the listed sites is Right Wing Tribune. But all of the other sites linked to by the PTTAB Facebook page also appear to belong to AFF, with similar design, shared bylines and shared source code.
The Porrazzos have been previously reported as having links to the Three Percenters, a decentralized, national militia movement that the Southern Poverty Law Center categorizes as anti-government extremists.
Their online empire is large. Another Parazzo site, Flag and Cross is listed as the administrator of another Facebook page, United States Constitution, which has 1.2 million followers.
A Guardian review of that site’s content shows a similar pattern of linking to Porrazzo-connected websites, and warnings of civil war stretching back to the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections.
Becca Lewis researches online extremism and disinformation at Stanford University. In a telephone conversation, she said that the page and the associated websites represented a sophisticated effort to skirt Facebook’s fact-checking efforts.
“It seems as though they are being very strategic in their messaging so as to not be shut down,” Lewis said, adding that viewing the ostentatious labeling of opinion as an effort to sidestep factchecking is “absolutely a reasonable assumption”.
In June, Heated reported that climate change deniers were exploiting the same loophole to “make any climate disinformation ineligible for factchecking by deeming it “opinion”. In August, NBC reported that Facebook had systematically relaxed its factchecking rules for conservative outlets and personalities.
In a telephone conversation, Dino Porrazzo Jr asserted that PTTAB had had “zero fact-check violations”, characterizing his websites as “opinion websites based on fact”. Asked if they were fact-checked at all, Porrazzo said “no”, but added: “I don’t work at Facebook”. Asked if he thought that there really was a civil war coming, Porrazzo accused the Guardian of “writing a hit piece to get me thrown off Facebook”, and then ended the conversation.
Facebook Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Porrazzos also have links to Republican officials.
The registered agent for the company is an elected official in California, Ensen Mason, who was elected as San Bernardino county auditor-controller in California as a nonpartisan candidate, but who is listed as a member of the San Bernardino Republican party.
In an email, however, Ensen Mason said that in relation to the Porrazzos, his accounting firm’s role “is strictly limited to accounting services and registered agent”.
The Vici Media Group, meanwhile, is run by Patrick Mauldin, who is a social media consultant for the Trump campaign and other Republican politicians, and his brother, Ryan.
The company was hired in 2016 by one-time Trump campaign manager and recently-resigned campaign consultant, Brad Parscale, to be part of the team that was widely credited with winning Trump the election. In June, Patrick Mauldin was identified as the creator of a fake Joe Biden site that was compared in New York Times reporting to “disinformation spread by Russian trolls”.
In an email, Ryan Mauldin disavowed the Porrazzos’ publishing output, writing, “Vici Media Group was engaged for a small, non-content-related project by the managers of the page.”
Mauldin added, “We have no input on the content published by the various sites or the comments made on that content. We are not working for the Trump campaign.”
Mauldin did not immediately respond to attempts to further clarify the nature of their work for the Porrazzos, and to clarify New York Times reporting as recent as June 2020 that said Patrick Mauldin was on a retainer for the Trump campaign, and considered a “rising star”.
Porrazzo refused to specify the nature of AFF’s relationship with Vici Media Group.
Meanwhile, the content of the Porrazzo pages does appear to trigger extreme responses among users. Hundreds of user comments on the page’s posts suggest the use of violence against perceived political enemies. On a 5 September post linking to a Right Wing Tribune article suggesting that Democrats will foment civil war if Biden loses, one user commented, “a short civil war with the democrats and those who support socialist policies will go a long way to help Make America Great Again”.
Another connects civil war to their belief that a Trump loss is impossible, writing “If [Biden] wins, it’ll be from fraud on an industrial scale, and the lesson that’ll have to be taught for that will necessarily be no less industrial.”
Many welcome the prospect of armed conflict – one writes “That’s fine with me open season on democrats!”. Another deployed accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse as a positive example, writing “I think it will be more whining, crying, rioting, looting and a lot of Kyles protecting their cities, towns and neighborhoods.”
Asked to comment on the site’s apparent reach, and the nature of its community, Lewis, the extremism researcher, said: “This is not some dark corner of the internet, this is not a fringe thing, it’s mainstream Republicans that are stoking this.”
On links to the Trump campaign, she said that the distorted content and the violent user comments formed a kind of “feedback loop”, and that “Trump and his campaign staff have been masters at exploiting these feedback loops”.
On Tuesday night, meanwhile, following the Guardian’s outreach to the Porrazzos and Facebook that day, Dino Porrazzo announced on Twitter that he “HAD TO DELETE A FEW ARTICLES I WROTE TODAY BECAUSE THEY WERE DEMED FALSE BY BASEMENT DWELLING LIBERAL FACT CHECKERS”.
This is not some dark corner of the Internet, this is not a fringe thing, it’s mainstream Republicans.
Becca Lewis, Stanford University
spreader. The idea that my exhalations might be lethal to others revealed a moral entanglement. That simple act of giving and receiving air that I had been doing all my life, mostly without thinking, could put strangers at risk.
Italy’s stay-at-home orders seemed extreme, before they went global. We watched as other countries tried to dodge their own lockdowns, fearful of the costs. It was true that several forms of the unnecessarily multilayered Italian police forces prowled the streets, and that people were being fined for violating the orders. But Italy was also the first western democracy to institute lockdown measures, and it would have been impossible without the consent of the people. Our lockdown came with the slogan “Io resto a casa”: I stay at home. The use of the first person invoked a sense of responsibility that was essential to its success.
Moral entanglement quickly developed into moral action: here was something we could do. The seemingly ethically distant act of staying home could reduce the opportunities for transmission and help to save lives. This small act of collective power made other actions possible.
The social technology of solidarity is nothing new, but in the first half of 2020 it has felt radically necessary. It was happening locally: in my quartiere, “solidarity boxes” appeared on the streets and were filled with food for those in need. Neighbours checked on each other. Flash mobs and music kept our spirits up. Children made banners and hung them from balconies, proclaiming that all would be well. But it was also happening online and internationally, as we shared care and information, art and recipes, tech support and jokes, as we passed on the news and learned one another’s survival strategies. We were physically separated but we were not isolated. We had all become agents in a network of care.
Italy often seems a divided country, where corruption is rife and trust in the state is low. As a foreigner, I was amazed at how quickly this sense of collective agency was mobilised. Perhaps it was because elders are valued here, or because the analogy of war evoked an intergenerational debt – many of those dying had survived the second world war; some had fought fascism. But those same networks had mobilised in Australia during the bushfires, and were mobilising again as the pandemic response grew serious. Something similar had happened in Wuhan: alongside, and often in spite of, an authoritarian surveillance state, the collective sensibility ran deeply within Chinese culture.
It wasn’t trust in the state that mobilised people, but trust in each other.
These networks of solidarity and mutual care are similar to the breath, in a way. They’re almost an autonomic function. In a healthy society, a strong community, you don’t have to think about them most of the time. But when you are struggling or ill, they are life or death.
***
In late May, as Italy began to emerge from lockdown, a video of the killing of George Floyd reignited the Black Lives Matter movement. Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe”, were already a familiar refrain. They’d been said 11 times to New York police officers by Eric Garner in 2014. They’d been said 12 times by David Dungay Jr, as he was being restrained to death by correctional officers at Long Bay jail in 2015.
We all breathe the same air, but we don’t breathe equally. As the Black Lives Matter movement returns with fresh vigour, it arrives with the lessons of the pandemic in hand. There are clear links between the direct state violence experienced by George Floyd and the indirect state violence which distributes healthcare unequally, which removes the safety nets from under certain communities, and which bails out businesses and leaves ordinary people to fend for themselves.
In the United States, the links were brutally clear. Black people were dying from the virus at twice the general rate; when the protests began, one in 2,000 Black lives in America had already been lost to Covid-19. Writing in ProPublica, journalist Akilah Johnson pointed out that the pandemic “has laid bare the structural racism baked into the American health system”. At the same time, shared vulnerability has helped bring people to action. One Black Lives Matter founder, Opal Tometi, told the New Yorker that the pandemic has made people “more tender or sensitive to what is going on”.
“I can’t breathe” was spelled out at the Black Lives Matter protest in Meanjin (Brisbane) on 3 June with 433 candles: 432 for the Aboriginal people who have died in custody since the royal commission ended in 1991, and one for George Floyd. When asked about the protests, prime minister Scott Morrison said: “We don’t need to draw equivalence here.” But to many, the patterns are obvious. Organiser Bo Spearim told NITV: “Aboriginal people, black people, Indigenous people, we’ve made that connection.”
The pandemic has highlighted gaping inequalities in Italian society, too. La Repubblica estimates half the Italian workforce has applied for emergency payments; the state’s capacity to provide was quickly overwhelmed. According to Istat, Italy’s national statistics agency, 27% of the Italian population is at risk of poverty. In the south it is 45%. With no savings to get through quarantine, the poorest have suffered most, particularly migrants. A million additional people have accessed food aid.
Italy has allocated temporary residency to over half a million undocumented farm workers, and there is a renewed campaign to pass jus soli laws that have been on ice since 2017, laws that would allow citizenship to anyone born in Italy. Black Lives Matter protests here are connecting police violence and the deaths of migrants at sea: one placard read, “Under water, under the knee, I can’t breathe.”
“‘I can’t breathe’ suddenly equates racism with the deprivation of air,” wrote Ben Okri in the Guardian. “‘I can’t breathe’ hints at the apocalypse of human values.” The question of who breathes, and who suffocates, is a question of who deserves to live, of who is human. A question of who is part of a community of care, and who is exiled from it. A question that will only become more urgent as the climate crisis develops.
***
In the first weeks of Italy’s lockdown, Australia appeared to exist in a previous version of reality. It seemed a fragile place that couldn’t see its own fragility, a place where a fiction of innocence still prevailed. People went about their ordinary lives, perhaps reconsidering their travel plans. The prime minister announced a ban on large gatherings, then attended a 3,000-person church service before it came into effect. I worried that our leaders weren’t taking this emergency seriously.
I often write about the climate crisis, so I’ve had some version of this Cassandra complex for a while now. Long fascinated by the particularly Australian intersection of climate denialism, colonisation and selective amnesia, I was afraid that all these familiar mechanisms would lead to catastrophe. It wasn’t unreasonable to expect disaster; I’d already watched it play out once this year, during the worst bushfire season on record. The scale of those fires would once have been unimaginable, a scene from climate fiction. Now the media was calling it a “new normal”.
But normality had already left us. The climate emergency was moving fast, and it was getting personal. While ordinary people were quick to act in solidarity and care, finding each other food and housing or raising muchneeded funds for our largely volunteer rural firefighters, the federal government had been just as quick to pass responsibility to the states. I read the letter that a group of senior firefighters had sent the prime minister earlier in 2019, warning of disaster. I saw the photos of him on holiday in Hawaii. I’ve been a volunteer firefighter for eight years; I know how risky it is. And there these politicians were, gaslighting the public on the reality of the climate crisis, even as people were dying from it.
Friends that had bought P2 masks to get through the fires were using the same masks to get through the pandemic. Both events involved a struggle for air, an awareness of the breath that is at once symbolic and deeply, physically real. Taken into the body, I hoped this shared vulnerability might become transformative.
As Italy rebuilds, politicians here speak of constructing a greener, more egalitarian country. The EU is placing the European Green Deal at the centre of its recovery, quadrupling its Just Transition fund to €40bn. I’m struck again by the sense that Australia exists in another version of reality.
Spared the worst of the pandemic so far, its possibilities for change are already being snatched away: free childcare replaced by gas fields, income support evaporating, dreams of shiny new kitchens in unaffordable houses. Our government handed the gas lobby the keys to the family car, in the form of its Covid-19 Coordination Commission, and the results have been depressingly predictable.
The climate crisis is a public health emergency. If it moves more slowly than the virus, it’s also far more lethal. Like the pandemic, its harms are unevenly distributed, exacerbating preexisting inequalities. It demands urgent action, global cooperation, scientific and medical expertise. It is inseparable from social transformation, from an awareness of how much we all depend on each other – and how much our collective power can achieve. In a just world, no one should have to fight for oxygen.
• This essay will be part of the anthology Fire, Flood and Plague, edited by Sophie Cunningham and published by Penguin Random House in December