{"id":13368,"date":"2007-10-26T09:15:03","date_gmt":"2007-10-26T13:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/13368.html"},"modified":"2007-10-26T09:15:03","modified_gmt":"2007-10-26T13:15:03","slug":"the-chain-email-gang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-chain-email-gang\/","title":{"rendered":"The chain (email) gang"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have some conservative relatives — I suspect everyone does — who forward on bizarre right-wing chain emails. The content usually ranges from the absurd to the offensive, but the common thread is always the same: the emails are as conservative as they are wrong. (I used to write back, explaining why the chain email is wrong, but that only seemed to encourage the misguided relatives.)<\/p>\n

What I didn’t fully appreciate, until reading Chris Hayes’ terrific new article<\/a> in The Nation, is that this is something of a cottage industry for the right these days.<\/p>\n

[T]he e-mail forward doesn’t fit into our existing model of the right-wing noise machine’s structure (hierarchical) or its approach (broadcast). It is, instead, organic and peer-to-peer…. The smear forward has its roots in two distinct forms of Internet-age communication. First, there’s the electronically disseminated urban legend (“Help find this missing child!”; “Bill Gates is going to pay people for every e-mail they send!”), which has been a staple of the Internet since the mid- ’90s. Then there’s the surreal genre of right-wing e-mail forwards. These range from creepy rage-filled quasi-fascist invocations (“The next time you see an adult talking…during the playing of the National Anthem–kick their ass”) to treacly aphorisms of patriotic\/religious uplift (“remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ…and the American Soldier”).<\/p>\n

For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk-radio, are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the mainstream media ignore…. Mike D’Asto, a 29-year-old assistant cameraman living in New York, received so many forwards from his conservative father he started a blog called MyRightWingDad.net, where he shares them with other unwitting recipients. “I suddenly have connected to all these people who receive these right-wing forwards from their brothers-in-law,” D’Asto told me. “Surprisingly, a very large number of people receive these.”<\/p>\n

And that, of course, is the problem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And what a problem it is. It’s difficult enough to push back against nonsense disseminated by Fox News or Limbaugh, but manufactured right-wing gossip spread via email is even more nefarious.
\n
\nHayes’ whole article is definitely worth reading<\/a>, but I just wanted to highlight a couple of points. First, it’s not a bipartisan problem.<\/p>\n

From the beginning, the vast majority of these Internet-disseminated rumors have come from the right. (Snopes lists about fifty e-mails about George W. Bush, split evenly between adulatory accounts of him saluting wounded soldiers or witnessing to a wayward teenager, and accounts of real and invented malapropisms. In contrast, every single one of the twenty-two e-mails about John Kerry is negative.) For conservatives, these e-mails neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The stories of the former’s perfidy and the latter’s heroism are, of course, never told by the liberal media. So it’s left to the conservative underground to get the truth out. And since the general story and the roles stay the same, often the actual characters are interchangeable.<\/p>\n

“A lot of the chain letters that were accusing Al Gore of things in 2000 were recycled in 2004 and changed to Kerry,” says John Ratliff, who runs a site called BreakTheChain.org, which, like Snopes, devotes itself to debunking chain e-mails. One e-mail falsely described a Senate committee hearing in the 1980s where Oliver North offered an impassioned Cassandra-like warning about the threat of Osama bin Laden, only to be dismissed by a condescending Democratic senator. Originally it was Al Gore who played the role of the senator, but by 2004 it had changed to John Kerry. “You just plug in your political front-runner du jour,” Ratliff says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And second, remember the chain email accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim<\/a>? Hayes digs into that, too, and highlights the bogus attack’s origin.<\/p>\n

On August 10, 2004, just two weeks after Obama had given his much-heralded keynote speech at the DNC in Boston, a perennial Republican Senate candidate and self-described “independent contrarian columnist” named Andy Martin issued a press release. In it, he announced a press conference in which he would expose Obama for having “lied to the American people” and “misrepresent[ed] his own heritage.”<\/p>\n

Martin raised all kinds of strange allegations about Obama but focused on him attempting to hide his Muslim past. “It may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel,” read Martin’s statement. “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles where Obama now enjoys support.” […]<\/p>\n

Within a few days of Martin’s press conference, the conservative site Free Republic had picked it up, attracting a long comment thread, but after that small blip the specious “questions” about Obama’s background disappeared. Then, in the fall of 2006, as word got out that Obama was considering a presidential run, murmurs on the Internet resumed. In October a conservative blog called Infidel Bloggers Alliance reposted the Andy Martin press release under the title “Is Barack Obama Lying About His Life Story?” A few days later the online RumorMillNews also reposted the Andy Martin press release in response to a reader’s inquiry about whether Obama was a Muslim. Then in December fringe right-wing activist Ted Sampley posted a column on the web raising the possibility that Obama was a secret Muslim. Sampley, who co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry and once accused John McCain of having been a KGB asset, quoted heavily from Martin’s original press release. “When Obama was six,” Sampley wrote, “his mother, an atheist, married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian Muslim, and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia…. Soetoro enrolled his stepson in one of Jakarta’s Muslim Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the rest of the world.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jim Kennedy, a former communications director for Hillary Clinton, explained, “Once [the charges] are out in the ether, they are very hard to combat. It’s very unlike a traditional media, newspaper or TV show, or even a blog, which at least has a fixed point of reference. You know they’re traveling far and wide, but there’s no way to rebut them with all the people that have seen them.”<\/p>\n

That’s apparently just the way the right-wing rumor mill likes it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have some conservative relatives — I suspect everyone does — who forward on bizarre right-wing chain emails. The content usually ranges from the absurd to the offensive, but the common thread is always the same: the emails are as conservative as they are wrong. (I used to write back, explaining why the chain email […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}