Russians seize upon Ore. Bible burnings
WASHINGTON — For some of President Donald Trump’s loudest cheerleaders, it was a story too good to check out: Black Lives Matters protesters in Portland, Ore., had burned a stack of Bibles, and then topped off the fire with American flags. There was even a video to prove it.
The story was a near-perfect fit for a central Trump campaign talking point — that with liberals and Democrats comes godless disorder — and it went viral among Republicans within hours of appearing earlier this month. The New York Post wrote about it, as did the Federalist, saying the protesters had shown “their true colors.” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said of the protesters, “This is who they are.” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, tweeted that antifa had moved to “the book burning phase.”
The truth was far more mundane. A few protesters among the many thousands appear to have burned a single Bible — and possibly a second — for kindling to start a bigger fire. None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.
Yet in the rush to paint all the protesters as Bible-burning zealots, few of the politicians or commentators who weighed in on the incident took the time to look into the story’s veracity, or to figure out that it had originated with a Kremlin-backed video news agency. And now, days later, the Portland Bible burnings appear to be one of the first viral Russian disinformation hits of the 2020 presidential campaign.
With Election Day drawing closer, the Russian efforts to influence the vote appear to be well underway. U.S. intelligence officials said last week that Russia was using a range of techniques to denigrate Democrats and their presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden. And late last month, intelligence officials briefed Congress on Russian efforts — both covert and overt — to stoke anger over the nationwide racial-justice protests.
The video on which the story is based came from the livestreaming site Ruptly, which made the Bible burning a focus of its protest coverage that night. RT, the network that runs Ruptly, also wrote an entire story about the Bible burning.
Ruptly and RT then let Twitter take it from there.
The video was first tweeted by an account that lists Oklahoma City and Abu Dhabi as its users’ location and has only a few dozen followers. It was soon after deleted. But before it disappeared, the tweet was picked up by Malaysian Ian Miles Cheong, who has amassed a large Twitter following by playing a right-wing American raconteur on social media.
Cheong added his own commentary to the initial tweet, wildly exaggerating what the Ruptly video showed. “Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland,” he wrote.
His tweet quickly became the basis for an entire day of outrage from right-wing news outlets, Republican political figures and altright commentators. It was Cheong whose tweet spurred the younger Trump, Cruz and numerous other high-profile Republicans to weigh in. It was also held up as evidence of the protesters’ depravity by prominent alt-right conspiracy theorists like Jack Posobiec, a correspondent for the One America News Network, which is much favored by the president.
It has since been retweeted more than 26,000 times.