Thread by @DrewHolden360

🧵Thread🧵

In the closing days of the VA election, @ProjectLincoln sent a group of fake white supremacists to a Youngkin rally.

Turns out, it was originally meant as an obvious joke that spiraled when too many Dems took it seriously.

Let’s unpack how the hoax spread.⤵️

First some context, @theintercept & @ryangrim wrote up internal LP emails to confirm this, story below.

Maybe it should’ve given people pause that one of the supposed proud boys was a girl & one of the “white supremacists” was black.

It didn’t. theintercept.com/2021/11/03/lin…

Unsurprisingly, a lot of folks on one side of the political aisle were quick to jump on the story.

One viral tweet calling it a “disgusting” reference to Charlottesville got retweets from @RexChapman, @RachelBitecofer, @rolandsmartin & @TheDemCoalition

That also included @ProjectLincoln who, again, originally planned this thing as an obvious stunt before their supporters bought into the hoax, which is a nearly Shakespearean thing to have happen on the eve of Election Day.

But they weren’t alone. We had a whole outrage cycle for this one.

Here’s @DavidCornDC, who has been repeatedly duped by the most extravagant claims tied to “Russian collusion,” swallowing this one hook, line and sinker.

There was an interesting level of insistence that Youngkin denounce something that people supporting his opponent (if not his opponents own team, more on that later) had done.

Care to explain that one, @joelockhart or @USJewishDems?

If I were a member of Congress who had fallen for not just the Russiagate hoax but was also the victim of a Chinese honeypot, I simply wouldn’t rush to push out unconfirmed and dramatic reports that align with my priors. @ericswalwell.

In retrospect it is enormously rich that @MattNegrin would use this stunt to blame the media for not being tough enough on Republicans *over an obvious hoax*

Even members of @TerryMcAuliffe’s own campaign got involved in pushing this disinformation.

Seems hard to claim that “this is who Glenn Youngkin’s supporters are” when it’s your own team, @christinafreund. And “disqualifying” seems a stretch, @jengoodman75.

The original reporting on this one...wasn’t ideal. Despite this pretty obviously not passing the sniff test, @holmes_reports, tweeted out a picture of the fake proud boys without additional context (or bothering to ask questions), which kicked off the firestorm.

And of course, that led to other people presuming this was real news.

Here’s @themaxburns jumping all over the fake story.

For a lot of very online people, the hammer of “Republicans are evil” is the only tool they’ve got, and so things like racial hoaxes are too tempting a nail to pass up.

@Blackamazon
@AndreaChalupa
@NormEisen
@ThePeterPaige

And there were plenty more like these from @MattLesser (okay kinda funny), @prof_gabriele and @mcbyrne that helped amplify a fake story.

I mean, this guy, @glennkirschner2, was a prosecutor for thirty years.

If he could fall for this, what else might he have believed without evidence simply because it fit his priors?

I don’t like to include local news outlets - they have a tough and mostly thankless job as it is - but this story from @NBC29 in VA *after* an enormous amount of pushback perfectly captures why these hoaxes keep happening.

But the real cherry on top came later, when @ReutersWorld ran an objectively false story calling the Lincoln Project Republicans, which led at least @SethAbramson & @aaronbergcomedy to conclude that this was a false-false flag.

Just incredible.

Now, you’ll notice that these tweets were never flagged for disinformation or anything of the sort.

Something tells me that if the parties were reversed, some outlets may call this an organized attempt to spread lies days before an election to suppress the vote.

The takeaway here should be clear: as I’ve said many times before, if a story perfectly, hilariously and inexplicably confirms all of your priors, it may well be too good to be true.

It never hurts to wait for more details to come out.

And it should go without saying, but it’s despicable behavior from @ProjectLincoln at a time when racial relations are, by any metric, bad and trending worse.

Using that as a way to score cheap retweets on Twitter is shameful.

This story isn’t over, though. What I want to know is who these tiki torch wielding Dems are and what their affiliation with the VA Dems or McAuliffe campaign are.

As @alec_sears has pointed out, many of them look oddly identical to staffers affiliated with one or the other.

https://twitter.com/alec_sears/status/1454135043903922180

If that’s the case, it wouldn’t just be an obvious embarrassment, but it would mean someone is lying.

Both the VA Democratic Party and the McAuliffe campaign have denied involvement on the record.

My gut tells me that there are more shoes to drop on this story, and more information to get to the bottom of.

But in the meantime, we should remember that actual disinformation is bad no matter who does it. As this event makes clear, that includes folks on the left, too.

These threads have always been yeoman work, something I do because I think it’s important.

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