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Anonymous, Part II
I'm seeing a list, attributed to Anonymous, of settlements of child rape cases associated with Trump.
It's not from Anonymous; it's from Legal Schnauzer. It was posted there publicly in January 2019 and it still is. It is probably not real. Not because I find Trump getting away with such things for a long time beyond the bounds of possibility (just look at Epstein), but because of who has this news and who doesn't. I know it's fashionable to blame mainstream media for ignoring things these days, but Roger Shuler, who runs Legal Schnauzer, is not a trustworthy independent source. Pretty much every time he's wound up in court on a defamation charge he's lost (which is really hard to do when you're writing about public figures), and while there are a *lot* of questions about whether that time he was arrested was an overstep on First Amendment grounds, pretty much all the First Amendment people being concerned about him were like "yes he's an inflammatory liar about everything; you just can't jail him for that" (which is true), so this is not an argument for his truthfulness. In general he doesn't source anything he's saying and going looking for any other hint of anyone else saying it produces nothing.
But sometimes he does give a source. In the post we're discussing, he sources something called the Wayne Madsen Report.
Y'all. Wayne Madsen has also said the that the USS Cole was bombed by Israel and that Obama was secretly gay, and The Guardian once had to pull a story based on information from him because it was found out to be flagrantly untrue. He's a conspiracy theorist. You can't trust anything he says. (If you're about to go "But even a stopped clock is right twice a day!" I will point out you still need evidence. If he's the only person saying a thing and there's no evidence, it's probably not true.)
While we're talking about this, if it were to be true, it would be including the names of child rape victims. That right there is a warning sign that whoever you're talking to at the very least doesn't care about collateral damage, especially in a situation like Trump, and that's a warning sign that you should be doing a more thorough check on their facts.
And while there are plenty of problems with the way mainstream media is covering the protests, sometimes the reason the media is ignoring a thing is because it isn't true. Do you *really* think someone like Ronan Farrow would be ignoring this if there was *any* evidence for it?
There's plenty of awful stuff Trump has done that we have real, good evidence for. There's no need to invent more.
(If you're someone who saw right off that this is a conspiracy theory and want to know why I'm bothering to spend time debunking it... well, two reasons. One, the name Anonymous carries a lot of weight with people who don't realize they're not like a journalistic organization-- that this is probably completely different people and "it came from Anonymous" is not in itself a reason to trust it the way "It came from The Guardian" might be. Two, people making up child rape to make a political point pisses me off.)
It's not from Anonymous; it's from Legal Schnauzer. It was posted there publicly in January 2019 and it still is. It is probably not real. Not because I find Trump getting away with such things for a long time beyond the bounds of possibility (just look at Epstein), but because of who has this news and who doesn't. I know it's fashionable to blame mainstream media for ignoring things these days, but Roger Shuler, who runs Legal Schnauzer, is not a trustworthy independent source. Pretty much every time he's wound up in court on a defamation charge he's lost (which is really hard to do when you're writing about public figures), and while there are a *lot* of questions about whether that time he was arrested was an overstep on First Amendment grounds, pretty much all the First Amendment people being concerned about him were like "yes he's an inflammatory liar about everything; you just can't jail him for that" (which is true), so this is not an argument for his truthfulness. In general he doesn't source anything he's saying and going looking for any other hint of anyone else saying it produces nothing.
But sometimes he does give a source. In the post we're discussing, he sources something called the Wayne Madsen Report.
Y'all. Wayne Madsen has also said the that the USS Cole was bombed by Israel and that Obama was secretly gay, and The Guardian once had to pull a story based on information from him because it was found out to be flagrantly untrue. He's a conspiracy theorist. You can't trust anything he says. (If you're about to go "But even a stopped clock is right twice a day!" I will point out you still need evidence. If he's the only person saying a thing and there's no evidence, it's probably not true.)
While we're talking about this, if it were to be true, it would be including the names of child rape victims. That right there is a warning sign that whoever you're talking to at the very least doesn't care about collateral damage, especially in a situation like Trump, and that's a warning sign that you should be doing a more thorough check on their facts.
And while there are plenty of problems with the way mainstream media is covering the protests, sometimes the reason the media is ignoring a thing is because it isn't true. Do you *really* think someone like Ronan Farrow would be ignoring this if there was *any* evidence for it?
There's plenty of awful stuff Trump has done that we have real, good evidence for. There's no need to invent more.
(If you're someone who saw right off that this is a conspiracy theory and want to know why I'm bothering to spend time debunking it... well, two reasons. One, the name Anonymous carries a lot of weight with people who don't realize they're not like a journalistic organization-- that this is probably completely different people and "it came from Anonymous" is not in itself a reason to trust it the way "It came from The Guardian" might be. Two, people making up child rape to make a political point pisses me off.)