The weird, hateful world of online Clinton conspiracies
Illness, links to radical Islam, and a trail of death – it’s just another day for the Right-wing blogosphere.
Hillary Clinton is a psychotic murderer who suffers from syphilis and is months away from death, and her chief of staff is a secret Muslim terrorist – at least according to some parts of the internet.
Most of the recent flurry stems directly from InfoWars, a conspiracy-fuelled political website run by shock jock Alex Jones that funds itself partly through the sale of supplies necessary for doomsday preparation, such as bulk vitamins and a year’s worth of long-life food.
InfoWars has been pushing the ‘‘Clinton is sick’’ theory hard in the last few weeks – with stories including ‘‘Experts: Hillary is a sociopath and could have brain damage’’ and ‘‘Hillary health cover-up implodes’’.
But the first recent coverage to get attention came from a littleknown YouTube user, DaPhoneyRapperz, who uploaded a video supposedly showing the Democratic presidential nominee convulsing and having seizures – mainly the same few bits of video of Clinton laughing or making faces, looped to a creepy soundtrack – on July 21. It has more than 2.2 million views.
The InfoWars articles on Clinton’s health are all written by Paul Watson, the site’s editor-at-large.. He believes the US government was highly involved in the 9/11 attacks.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre has called Jones ‘‘almost cer- tainly the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America’’. Rolling Stone magazine has called him ‘‘the most paranoid man in America’’. The ‘‘sick Hillary’’ story is not new. Back in May 2014 , Karl Rove, former senior adviser under President George W Bush, first began pushing the story, questioning whether the former secretary of state had suffered a traumatic brain injury after a fall in December 2012, rather than a blood clot, as Team Clinton says. Clinton’s team immediately dismissed the claim, and a former White House communications director who worked with Rove called his comments ‘‘off the wall’’. In January this year, Right-wing site Breitbart claimed that a law enforcement source had said Clinton’s long toilet break during a primary debate was because of cognitive problems from the fall.
WikiLeaks is now on board, tweeting leaked Clinton emails saying she identified with ‘‘decision fatigue’’ and was interested in a drug that helped exhausted people stay awake. Decision fatigue is not a medical illness, but a phenomenon in which people struggle to make decisions if their brain is tired from constant decision-making – essentially a marketing psychology idea created from studying shoppers.
Then Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor turned Trump talking head, raised the ‘‘sick Hillary’’ debate during a recent Fox News appearance.
Clinton appeared on Jimmy Kimmel’s talkshow this week to prove she was in good health – a move that popular Twitter troll Mike Cernovich (who believes that date rape does not exist, and the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter did not act alone) saw as a win for Right-wing Twitter and blogs.
Rove is still pushing the supposed ‘‘brain injury’’, appearing on Fox’s The Kelly File this week with a timeline of supposedly damning events and quotes from Clinton officials and husband Bill, much to host Megyn Kelly’s amusement.
For years Right-wing commentators have also speculated that Clinton’s chief of staff, Huma Abedin, known as her closest adviser, is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamic organisation.
‘‘Why aren’t we talking about Huma and her ties to the Muslim Brotherhood? Why aren’t we talking about the fact that she was an editor for a sharia newspaper?’’ asked Sean Duffy, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin , who has been pushing the ‘‘sick Hillary’’ theory.
The Muslim Brotherhood theory stems back to 2012, when Frank Gaffney, dubbed ‘‘one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes’’ by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, released a report from his organisation the Centre for Security Policy claiming that three of Abedin’s relatives were connected to the Brotherhood – including her father, who died in 1993.
Shortly afterwards Michele Bachmann, founder of the Tea Party, called on federal agencies to examine whether Abedin fuelled the Brotherhood’s agenda. Republican Senator John McCain spoke out against Bachmann, declaring: ‘‘These attacks on Huma have no logic, no basis and no merit.’’
Another favourite of Clinton conspiracists is the ‘‘Clinton body count’’, a claim that a number of mysterious deaths over the years are somehow tied to the Clintons. The recent death of Democratic National Convention staffer Seth Rich, who was shot while walking in his suburban Washington, DC neighbourhood just days before the convention started, helped to reignite the story.
InfoWars has a list of the Clinton body count, with dozens of names – from lawyers to criminals – of people who have died and are in some way connected to the Clintons. This week InfoWars’ Watson claimed that Google is not autofilling in its search ‘‘Clinton body count’’, although other search engines do – part of a wider theory that Google is suppressing negative stories about the Clintons.