Category: Conspiracy Theories

Trump and his crazy conspiracy theories

Trump calls Mueller investigation ‘attempted coup’

President Donald Trump on Wednesday blasted special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as an “attempted coup” that failed and praised Attorney General William Barr for saying he is investigating how the probe began — a move congressional Republicans have long advocated.

“This was an attempted coup. This was an attempted takedown of a president and we beat them. We beat them,” Trump told reporters at the White House ahead of his departure for Texas. “So the Mueller report, when they talk about obstruction, we fight back. You know why we fight back? Because I knew how illegal this whole thing was: It was a scam.”

At about the same time, Barr, on Capitol Hill, said “I think spying did occur: on the Trump campaign and he wanted to look into how it began and whether it was legally justified.

Trump also blasted what he called the “haters of Trump” and “dirty cops” and bad people” who worked on the investigation but, according to him, still found no evidence of the campaign colluding with Russia to influence the presidential election.

“What has been found during this period of time are the illegal acts of getting this whole phony investigation started. And hopefully that’s where people are going now. That’s where people are going, and it’s very interesting. It was an illegal investigation,” Trump said.

Trump said he still has not read the Mueller report and said he’s not interested in the report, beyond the possibility that the Justice Department could look into the origins of the investigation.

“As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care about the Mueller report. I’ve been totally exonerated. No collusion, no obstruction,” Trump said. “I am not worrying about something that never, ever should have taken place.”

[ABC News]

Trump claimed wind turbines cause cancer

President Donald Trump on Tuesday launched his latest wild attack on wind turbines, an energy source that has long attracted his ire.

“They say the noise causes cancer,” the president said of the turbines at the National Republican Congressional Committee fundraiser in Washington, DC.

Trump linked the technology to his former presidential rival Hillary Clinton, saying she “wanted to put up wind.”

“If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations your house just went down 75% in value. And they say the noise causes cancer, you tell me that one, OK?” Trump said, imitating the whirring noise made by the turbines.

He went on to express concern for the effect of turbines on wild-bird populations.

“The thing makes so much noise, and, of course, it’s like a graveyard for birds. If you loved birds, you’d never want to walk under a windmill again,” Trump said.

Scientists have long rejected the decades-old claims of those who say that wind turbines cause a variety of illnesses, including cancer.

Simon Chapman, a professor in public health at the University of Sydney in Australia, in a 2012 article reviewed stories of people who had illnesses they blamed on turbines.

He suggested that the illnesses — which were real — were not attributable to the turbines but instead were “psychogenic,” which means they were caused by anxiety and unrest.

It is true that many birds are killed by flying into wind turbines. However, far more are killed by flying into cellphone and radio towers, or by being mauled to death by cats.

In February, Trump lost a long-running legal battle with the Scottish government over a wind farm near one of his golf courses.

Before the 2016 US presidential election, he launched the battle over an offshore farm near his golf course in Aberdeenshire in northwest Scotland. He lost and had to pay legal bills for himself and the Scottish government.

Last week, Trump attacked wind power at a rally in Michigan, saying that if the wind doesn’t blow, televisions and other electronic devices will lose power.

In fact, turbines can store the energy to be used in times of calm.

[Business Insider]

Trump tells Republicans they lost in 2018 because the election was rigged

President Donald Trump warned Congressional Republicans to be “paranoid” that Democrats were rigging elections.

Trump spoke at a fundraiser for the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), the organization in charge of House elections for the GOP.

During his remarks, Trump denied that he was a reason why Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives during the blue wave of the midterm elections.

“I say, what the hell do I have to do with it?” Trump said, according to Washington Postnational political reporter Felicia Sonmez.

Trump then seemed to suggest the 2018 midterms were stolen.

[Raw Story]

Trump Mocks and Jeers Media, Calls For Revenge as Crowd Chants ‘Lock Them Up!’

At President Donald Trump‘s rally in Michigan on Tuesday he went after the media hard several times over the Russia investigation and the Mueller report. At one point, he mocked cable news for slumping ratings and called Rep. Adam Schiff, “Little pencil neck.”

Referring to the media and Democrats and “deep state” together, Trump said “this group of major losers did not just ruthlessly attack me, my family, and everyone who questioned their lies. They tried to divide our country, to poison the national debate, and to tear up the fabric of our great democracy, the greatest anywhere in the world.”

“They did it all because they refused to accept the results of one of the greatest presidential elections, probably number one in our history.”

“Many people were badly hurt by this scam, but more importantly our country was hurt. Our country was hurt. And they’re on artificial respirators right now. They’re getting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Little pencil-neck Adam Schiff,” he said, pausing for a crowd reaction. “He has the smallest, thinnest neck I’ve ever seen. He is not a long ball hitter.”

He mocked Schiff’s voice, saying “there still could have been some Russia collision,” and then, describing Schiff, said, “Sick. Sick.

He brought up Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and the committee investigations and added, “These people are sick.”

“Sick. Every single deal, every single paper. All of the Democrat politicians. The media bosses. Bad people. The crooked journalists, the totally dishonest TV pundits — and by the way, they know it’s not true. They just got great ratings,” he said. “By the way, their ratings dropped through the floor last night, did you see that?”

There was another big crowd reaction, but it was even bigger as he praised Fox News hosts and their ratings.

“Our friends — Tucker, Sean, Laura — through the roof last night,” he said.

He then said that everyone who “perpetuated the single greatest hoax in the history of politics, they have to be — I’m sorry — they have to be accountable.”

The crowd then began chanting “lock them up” and “lock her up” mixed together.

“Just think of it. A fake dirty dossier, millions and millions of dollars paid for it. By who? Crooked Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the Democrat party,” he said. The crowd booed and there were some renewed “lock her up” chants.

“They failed in one way. Can you believe it? Maybe I got lucky. They published and printed all of these horrible law lies, they couldn’t get any of the media to print it. Thank you very much, I appreciate it. You never know.”

He then gave the media “a lot of credit” for not publishing news about the dossier prior to the election, though there were no cheers for them from the crowd for that.

[Mediaite]

Trump demands Schiff ‘be forced to resign from Congress’

President Donald Trump on Thursday demanded that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff resign from Congress over his accusations that Trump conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump, in a Thursday morning tweet, accused Schiff (D-Calif.), without evidence, of spending the past two years “knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking” about the Russia investigation.

He “should be forced to resign from Congress!” Trump added.

Schiff has emerged as a target of the right this week after Attorney General William Barr’s announcement over the weekend that special counsel Robert Mueller found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government and that there was not enough evidence to charge the president with obstruction of justice.

High-level Republicans from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) to White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway have repeatedly called for Schiff to step down from his post leading the House Intelligence Committee for promoting the collusion theory.

House Democrats have firmly stood behind Schiff, and the California congressman has doubled down on his claims, telling The Washington Post this week that “undoubtedly there is collusion.”

Schiff and Trump have constantly butted heads since Trump came into office, as Schiff pushed for a more thorough investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia as a member of the minority party for the first two years of the president’s term.

The congressman had been a staple on cable news shows throughout the Russia investigation, maintaining that there was evidence Trump had conspired to work with Russian operatives. In the days since Barr summarized Mueller’s findings, he pledged to push forward with his own committee’s inquiry into the issue.

[Politico]

Trump says wind power doesn’t work because ‘it only blows sometimes’

President Trump late Wednesday repeated his opposition to wind power, pushing a misleading claim that it would not work as an energy source because the wind “only blows sometimes.”

The president made the comments during a phone interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, as part of his remarks on how his presidency has been “tougher … on Russia” than any other past presidents.

“It’s what we have done with energy and oil and gas. That’s all competition from, for Russia,” Trump said. “You look at the Ukraine. You look at so many different levels. You look at our military.”

“You look at the fact that we would have been powered by wind, which wouldn’t have worked by the way because it only blows sometimes and lots of problems come about.”

The comment echoes Trump’s repeated past criticisms of wind power. Just one week earlier, he mocked the concept of wind power by mimicking a man telling his spouse: “Turn off the television darling, please. There’s no wind, please turn off the television quickly.”

The Department of Energy explains on its website that power grids are designed to accommodate variability from energy generation sources, such as wind and solar, without having to rely on “backup” energy sources.

Trump, who campaigned on restoring coal jobs to the U.S., has long opposed wind turbines based on a number of arguments, including saying that the “windmills” will decrease property values and that turbines are a “killing field” for birds.

The Energy Department also notes that bird deaths from wind turbines are rare and pale in comparison to bird deaths from collisions with buildings and declining habitats from infrastructure development.

According to a new study released this week by a nonpartisan think tank, solar and wind power are on track to phase out coal as cheaper energy alternatives within the next few years.

[The Hill]

Reality

Pompeo says it’s ‘possible’ President Trump raised to ‘save the Jewish people’

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said it’s possible that President Donald Trump may exist to “save the Jewish people” from what an interviewer called “the Iranian menace.”

The statement came during an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Networkpublished Thursday. During the interview, CBN’s Middle East bureau chief Chris Mitchell referenced the Jewish celebration of Purim, in which adherents commemorate the Jewish people being saved from genocide in Persia, which is modern day Iran.

Mitchell compares Trump to Queen Esther, who saved the Jews according to The Old Testament story.

“Could it be that President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from an Iranian menace?”

“As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible,” Pompeo answered. 

The U.S. has placed sanctions on Iran for what the administration has claimed is their funding of violent and destabilizing activities throughout the Middle East. The U.S. placed more sanctions on Iran on Friday just as Pompeo said the U.S. will continue to curb the influence of Iran and Hezbollah.

The secretary of state is overseas for a Middle East swing, having visited Israel and Lebanon. On Thursday, he visited the Western Wall with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The visit is seen as a show of support for Israel. 

The president tweeted on Thursday that “it is time” the U.S. recognize Israel’s sovereignty over Golan Heights, a disputed piece of land that Israel captured from Syria in 1967. Trump argued the decision, which was welcomed by Netanyahu, is critical for Israel’s security. However, critics say it could further inflame Middle East tensions

[USA Today]

Trump retweets QAnon conspiracy theorist, via Larry the Cable Guy, to slam the TSA

From a QAnon conspiracy theorist to actor James Woods to comedian Larry the Cable Guy to the leader of the free world. Thus travels information in the age of Twitter and President Trump, who took a late-night swing at a familiar punching bag — the Transportation Security Administration — via a nearly two-year-old video spread by a character on the far fringes of the Internet.

“Not a good situation!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday just before midnight about the clip of a young man subjected to a very thorough pat-down by a TSA agent.

Trump’s critique of the TSA, an agency he has lashed out at repeatedly on the campaign trail, is hardly extreme. The video he retweeted garnered millions of views and sparked outrage back in March 2017 after a woman named Jennifer Williamson filmed her son, who she said had a sensory processing disorder, at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

But the source who belatedly brought the video to Trump’s attention, through a winding path of Twitter celebrities, is likely to raise new questions about where a president fond of spreading conspiracy theories gets his information.

The video was reshared on Monday by a Twitter account called Deep State Exposed, which is operated by Jeremy Stone, a follower of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Stone’s twitter bio includes the phrase “WWG1WGA,” shorthand for “Where We Go One We Go All,” a rallying cry for the bizarre theory that ties together the Pizzagateconspiracy and a supposed “deep state” plot to control American politics. Stone soon added a follow-up tweet to the viral video claiming that “TSA goes out of their way to hire high school dropouts with an inclination for sexual perversion. It’s mind control!!!”

On his Twitter feed, Stone regularly mixes fake Hillary Clinton quotes with truly odd conspiracies. The next clip posted after the video retweeted by the president was a piece of shaky cellphone footage suggesting that empty Walmarts are being used as “CONCENTRATION CAMPS SET TO HOUSE AMERICAN CITIZENS!!”

Tuesday night was not Trump’s first brush with that account’s particular brand of paranoia. The Twitter bio for Deep State Exposed boasts of nine retweets from the president. The feed made headlines in September 2017 when Trump reshared a meme from the account about Hillary Clinton’s book “What Happened.”

Stone’s latest presidential nod of approval tapped into a long-simmering point of anger for Trump: the TSA and the American airport experience in general. In May 2016, Trump complained that the TSA was “falling apart.” At the Republican National Convention two months later, Trump called the agency a “total disaster”and promised that he would “fix TSA.” Yet, among Trump’s budget moves was a proposal in 2017 to slash TSA’s funding to help pay for his border wall.

At rallies and in interviews, Trump also routinely complains that America’s airportsare “like from a third-world country.”

So it’s no surprise that the video of the young man in Dallas undergoing an intense body search would resonate. James Woods, an actor turned conservative social media activist who has been suspended from Twitter in the past for sharing a hoax, helped spread the clip by tweeting it with the simple phrase, “Uh…”

Larry the Cable Guy, a stand-up comedian famed for his “Git-R-Done” catchphrase, then weighed in, calling the video “Absolutely ridiculous!”

“How many times do you have to feel a kid up to figure out he’s not a threat? This is infuriating and hard to watch,” the comedian tweeted, which caught the president’s eye hours later. Donald Trump Jr. also joined in the outrage, calling the video “sickening.” (Deep State Exposed quickly thanked the president’s son for the retweet, adding in a fake Hillary Clinton quote for good measure.)

As for TSA, the agency in 2017 defended its handling of the viral pat-down at the Texas airport, noting that the procedure took “approximately two minutes” and “was observed by the mother and two police officers who were called to mitigate the concerns of the mother.” The agency even wrote a lengthy blog post titled “TSA Mythbuster: The Rest of the DFW Pat-down Story” to combat blowback from the incident.

“TSA allows for a pat-down of a teenage passenger, and in this case, all approved procedures were followed to resolve an alarm of the passenger’s laptop,” spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein told The Post at the time. “The passengers were at the checkpoint for approximately 45 minutes, which included the time it took to discuss screening procedures with the mother and to screen three carry-on items that required further inspection.”

[Washington Post]

President Trump pledges to get to ‘the bottom of’ alleged anti-conservative bias on social media

President Donald Trump doubled down on his words of support for conservatives on social media – a group he says has faced “big discrimination.”

“Things are happening, names are taken off, people aren’t getting through, you’ve heard the same complaints and it seems to be if they are conservative, if they’re Republicans, if they’re in a certain group there’s discrimination and big discrimination,” Trump said.

“I see it absolutely on Twitter and on Facebook which I have also and others,” Trump said during a joint press conference in the Rose Garden with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday.

“I get to see what’s going on first hand and it is not good, we use the word ‘collusion’ very loosely all the time and I will tell you there is collusion with respect to that because something has to be going on and when you get the back scene, back office statements made by executives of the various companies and you see the level of, in many cases, hatred they have for a certain group of people who happen to be in power, that happen to have won the election, you say that’s really unfair,” Trump continued. “So something’s happening with those groups of folks who are running Facebook and Google and Twitter and I do think we have to get to the bottom of it.”

Twitter says it enforces its rules “dispassionately and equally for all users, regardless of their background or political affiliation.”

His comments come on the heels of a lawsuit by Rep. Devin Nunes, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is suing political strategist Liz Mair, Twitter and two twitter accounts for negligence, defamation, insulting words and civil conspiracy.

The lawsuit was first reported by Fox News.

[ABC News]

Trump Parrots Fox & Friends Segment Claiming Climate Crisis is ‘Fake News,’ ‘Fake Science’

In his latest Fox & Friends live-tweeting session, President Donald Trumpapplauded former Greenpeace president Patrick Moore for saying the planet’s climate crisis is “fake news” and “fake science.” This comes after Trump echoed a segment of the show where one of his former campaign staffers called on Jews to abandon the Democratic Party.

Moore was invited onto Fox & Friends because he called Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) a “pompous little twit” for her latest defense of the Green New Deal. Sure enough, he used his segment to call the proposal “completely ridiculous” and push his denial of climate change.

Moore went on to bash the majority of the scientific community for their concerns about climate change, saying Greenpeace has been “hijacked by the extreme left” to sell “sensationalism, misinformation, and fear.” He also suggested that global warming could be a good thing, saying that burning fossil fuels and releasing more greenhouse gases will “fertilize” the planet, resulting in a net positive for the environment.

As it were, Greenpeace has responded to Trump, saying that contrary to Moore’s claim, he did not co-found the organization, and they essentially renounced him ever since he started operating as a lobbyist and an advocate for polluters and corporate energy industries.

It’s worth noting the Trump Administration released a report from multiple federal agencies last year that determined global climate change could have extreme long-term consequences for the United States. Then again, Trump has made his skepticism of man-made climate change perfectly clear in the past, so his parroting Moore could just be confirmation bias on his part.

[Mediaite]

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