Drew Holden Profile picture
Nov 5, 2021 24 tweets 17 min read Read on X
🧵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.
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.

But for those who’ve asked, I finally set up my account to receive tips, so if you’d like to throw me some beer money (Venmo or Bitcoin), you can click this icon on my page.
Sorry, didn’t realize that feature was just on mobile. If easier, Venmo is Drew-Holden-1. But, please, don’t feel obligated, and thank you to the folks who have already been incredibly generous.

and for folks who have asked, I’ve got a patreon, too. It’s: patreon.com/drewholden360?…

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More from @DrewHolden360

Sep 17
🧵Thread🧵

The media, focused solely on Trump, haven’t seemed interested in fact checking Kamala Harris. And not for lack of opportunity.

So I decided to. Below are some false and misleading statements from last week’s debate.

I could only fit so many. But give it a read. ⤵️
For starters, I think this image typifies how the media treat the two candidates.

Dale’s sentiment here applied broadly to the rest of the media, who had eyes only for Trump. Image
So let’s look at Harris, shall we?

1. She claimed that she was the only one on the debate stage with a plan for the middle class.

That’s the type of claim the media usually says “needs context,” as the Biden-Harris admin has failed the middle class, as even CNN acknowledged.

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Read 27 tweets
Sep 16
🧵Thread🧵

Look, I know there’s bigger news today, but with Biden’s “black jobs” quip on Friday, I’ve gotta revisit the media meltdown on the term, as stupid as it is.

Do you remember how insulted & offended the press were when Trump said “black jobs”?

I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
Some quick context: Biden in a speech on Friday, referred to jobs as “black jobs,” as in held by black folks.

If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because Trump said it at his debate with Biden a couple months ago.

The media went ballistic.
Just look at the indignation here from @axios when Trump used the phrase.

“Reality check.” I mean, cmon!

And so now what, Axios? Is Biden suddenly a monster, too?
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Read 23 tweets
Aug 26
🧵Thread🧵

I was struck by the number of dubious statements and flat-out lies at the DNC.

It appears the mainstream media isn’t much interested in them, amid their jubilant, joy-full coverage. So I decided to do some fact-checking, focused on Biden’s speech.

There’s a lot. ⤵️
1. The first thing that jumped out to me was Trump’s alleged “very fine people on both sides” description of Charlottesville.

Haven’t we been over this, time and again? The context makes clear Trump didn’t mean the neo-Nazis. Even @snopes admitted it!

Yet Biden trotted it out.

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2. Biden claimed he and his admin “demonizes no one.”

What, then, about Biden’s remarks about Trump supporters? That they are “determined to destroy democracy,” practitioners of “semi-fascism,” and “a threat to the very soul of this nation.”

Is that not demonizing?

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Read 27 tweets
Aug 14
🧵Thread🧵

The media haven’t been interested in providing voters with much of a picture of Kamala Harris beyond “vibes.”

So I did the work for them and went back through what she’s actually said and done on policy and beyond.

It isn’t a pretty picture. Follow along ⤵️
There’s nowhere better to start than on immigration. Back in 2020, Harris was among the Dem candidates who supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

Now @politico claims she “promised to go tough on border security.”

Color me skeptical.
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Especially considering she supported eliminating ICE, tried to stop production on the border wall, and otherwise unwind the Trump policies that actually reduced illegal immigration.

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Read 26 tweets
Aug 12
🧵Thread🧵

I know it’s difficult to keep track of all of Tim Walz’s “stolen valor,” exaggerations & false claims about his time in the military.

I tried to compile as many as I could, as well as a few egregious cases of the media spinning for him.

Buckle in, there’s a lot. ⤵️
First, the false claims. To avoid a sort of journalistic stolen valor, I want to be clear: others did this work.

I’ll try to source as well as I can, starting with the latest Walz whopper: saying he took part in the Afghanistan surge in a 2010 debate.

From @NoVA_Campaigns: Image
There’s been a lot of good reporting. Perhaps none better than from @ChuckRossDC of the Free Beacon.

His first is on that Afghanistan claim, citing Walz’s repeated description of himself as a veteran of “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the gov’t name of the fight in Afghanistan.
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Read 25 tweets
Jul 24
🧵THREAD🧵

The media are already hard at work to mislead about VP Kamala Harris.

The latest is an effort to memoryhole Harris’s role leading Biden’s disastrous immigration policy as “border czar.”

Who’s up for some side-by-sides, lest we forget? ⤵️
There’s no better place to start than with @axios, who made waves today when they claimed that Harris was never the “border czar.”

The problem?

Axios had called her exactly that back in 2021.
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They added a truly Orwellian editors note after the backlash, claiming that they had misreported initially.

Really. Image
Read 24 tweets

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