Quick thread:

Today, two election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, sued Gateway Pundit, alleging the site instigated a “deluge of harassment and threats.”

What Freeman alleges happened to her in the last year is deeply disturbing and is worth reading.
Ruby Freeman is a retired 911 operator who ran a small business selling accessories.

With workers dropping out due to COVID, her daughter, Shaye Moss, asked her to help count ballots in Atlanta. Freeman signed on as a temp.

Weeks later, the FBI would tell her to flee her home.
The trouble started a month after the election.

On Dec. 3, a Trump campaign lawyer presented surveillance footage to Georgia’s State Senate, claiming someone who “had the name Ruby across her shirt somewhere" found a “suitcase” full of ballots from “underneath a table.”
This is pretty easy to explain: Election workers were told to pack up for the night, so they put the ballots away. Later in the night, they were told to restart the vote, and not wait until the morning.

Freeman started counting votes again.
But conspiracy theorists raced to identify the woman with the “suitcase.” They noticed she had a purse that said “LaRuby” on it. That’s Freeman’s business.

This was enough for Gateway Pundit, which led with a photo and this sentence:

“Her name is Ruby Freeman.”
Gateway Pundit titled their story on Freeman “What’s Up, Ruby? Crooked Operative Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots in Georgia IS IDENTIFIED.”

The coverage went on for months, despite constant reality checks from Georgia’s Secretary of State and Bureau of Investigation.
This “investigation,” as Gateway Pundit called it, was quickly picked up by OAN.

Then-President Trump tweeted the video of OAN and Gateway Pundit’s Ruby Freeman investigation.
In the meantime, Freeman could no longer answer her phone, inundated with harassment.

Twice, strangers went to Freeman’s home and attempted to perform a “citizens’ arrest.” When Freeman wasn’t home, strangers would then harass her neighbors.
Around the holidays, Freeman was sent Christmas cards from harassers, the suit says.

“Ruby please report to the FBI and tell them you committed voter fraud. If not you will be sorry,” read one.
Let's take a break here to remind you what Freeman did to deserve all of this:

She moved ballots that had been put away for the night from underneath a table to above a table, then counted them.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump was still attempting to overturn the election, using the lies against Freeman as ammo.

In a leaked call with Georgia’s Secretary of State, Trump called Freeman “a professional vote scammer and hustler."
On January 6th, as some Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Freeman had already fled her home, at the advice of the FBI.

But on the same day, a crowd with bullhorns,“some on foot, some in vehicles,”surrounded Freeman’s Georgia home.
The harassment campaign was frequently racist, and targeted Moss and Freeman’s family.

“My son has had to answer dozens of calls and listen to people make graphic death threats about me and him,” Moss said.

She turned off the phone, leaving her son unable to do some schoolwork.
Now, Ruby Freeman says she “can’t imagine ever going back to election work.”
Here's our complete story about Freeman and Moss' defamation lawsuit against The Gateway Pundit.

The details are brutal.

nbcnews.com/tech/internet/…

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More from @oneunderscore__

12 Nov
Quick thread:

There is, finally, good news from the anti-vaccine beat.

It’s wrapped in some bad news.

The good: Mandates are working. Anti-vaxxers are exhausted, giving in and getting the shot.

The bad: They’re running home to “detox” in weird ways, hoping to “undo” it.
Antivaxxers on Facebook/TikTok are begging for advice on how to “detox” loved ones who got the shot.

They caved to mandates and want help from influencers.

Some say they’re doomed to death, infertility, or government tracking.

But others have “remedies.”

Like this:
On TikTok, anti-vaxxers have rallied around influencer Carrie Madej, who claims she can “detoxx the vaxx.”

Her solution? A bath with baking soda for “radiation” and epsom salt for “poisons.”

Then, she says, add Borax to clean out “nanotechnologies.”


(Don’t do this.)
Read 10 tweets
5 Nov
It would be impossible to draw up a more stereotypical antivaxxer argument than the one being outlined by Aaron Rodgers today.

For someone who believes he's a "critical thinker," he sounds identical to every old lady in my Ivermectin Facebook groups and Q Telegram channels.
The only real difference between Aaron Rodgers and the Ivermectin Facebook groups is that he sounds... behind.

The IVM groups have largely moved on, adding a litany of other "cures" because Ivermectin, to them, doesn't fully "work" on Delta. The Joe Rogan Battery is old now.
Also, the "vaccines will make you infertile" thing is not new, but it has kicked up recently, in part because people aren't dropping dead en masse as they projected.

Most people have the shot, and there hasn't been a mass death event.

Infertility creep is the big boogeyman now.
Read 4 tweets
2 Nov
So here's why this JFK Jr. meet-up is so weird, even by Q standards.

Most QAnon followers take its ostensible prophet, Q, at his word. They share and cite Q's 8kun posts like scripture, citing things like "Drop #1082."

Q has explicitly told his followers JFK Jr. is not alive.
The fact that people believe JFK Jr. is alive is, of course, Q's fault.

Here's the post that kicked off speculation JFK Jr. would reappear and become Trump's runningmate.

Q was referring to an assassination plot, but his followers think messianically.

Insert Zombie VP JFK Jr.
One day in December 2018, Q was clearly sick of how stupid and literal his followers were taking his intentionally vague, apocalyptic posts.

So Q point blank shut down a few conspiracy theories: No flat earth, no zombie JFK, Seth Rich is dead.

Also, elections are safe! Whoops!
Read 6 tweets
24 Sep
A quick thread:


It’s hard to explain just how radicalized ivermectin and antivax Facebook groups have become in the last few weeks.

They’re now telling people who get COVID to avoid the ICU and treat themselves, often by nebulizing hydrogen peroxide.

So, how did we get here?
Facebook bans explicit antivaxx groups, but they don't ban groups for quack "cures" that antivaxxers push instead.

So in the last couple of months, Ivermectin groups have become the new hubs for antivaxx messaging.

But there's a problem: Ivermectin, by itself, isn’t working.
The number of people in these ivermectin groups have exploded.

So has the number of people in the groups who have contracted COVID, since the groups are largely filled with unvaccinated people seeking "alternative therapies."

So they developed a makeshift “protocol.”
Read 8 tweets
15 Sep
Quick thread:

Here's the deal about this much hyped Saturday's "Justice for January 6" rally.

Users on the extremist forums that hyped the rally-turned-riot on January 6 are not so hot on this one.

They're telling each other not to go, fearing it's a honeypot from the feds.
In the days before January 6th, sites like TheDonald and 4chan were littered with pictures of people boarding planes, posting pictures of guns, their hotel rooms, even maps of the tunnels beneath the Capitol.

They're calling 9/18 an "FBI rally." You mostly see posts like this:
Pro-Trump extremist boards have basically conspiracy theory'd themselves into inactivity.

Everything is "glowing," their word for a setup. Everything's a "false flag" or "honeypot."

They realize now their own rhetoric has put them in a bit of a bind.
Read 9 tweets
13 Sep
Can't stress how wild the ivermectin Facebook groups have become. So many people insisting to each other to never go to an ER, in part because they might not get ivermectin, but sometimes because they fear nurses are killing them on purpose "for the insurance money."
The ivermectin Facebook groups are becoming fully anti-western medicine spaces, replete with the concept that ERs are killing you, maybe intentionally.

It's just a constant stream of DIY vitamin therapies and new, seemingly random antiviral drugs every day — but not the vaccine.
The ivermectin Facebook groups also offer a window into how pervasive antivaxx COVID "treatment" videos are on TikTok.

The groups serve as a de facto aggregator for antivaxx TikTok, a space that is enormous but inherently unquantifiable to researchers.
Read 5 tweets

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