Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

Bridgen is an irresponsible, bullshit-posting crank. Either he's a fucking idiot, or he's abusing other people's ignorance to fearmonger & spread hateful, divisive, #disinformation. (It could well be both).

This bollocks has been repeatedly debunked for half a century.

https://twitter.com/ABridgen/status/1643178412213764096

A time-honoured ploy in the political arena has been to discredit your opponents (& their ideas) by demonizing them - it's part of 'divide & rule'.

This usually means claiming the ideas your opponents advocate were implemented by Nazis or Communists.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1598253090280701952?s=20

Bridgen's post is of a purportedly genuine document, which is typically claimed to have been discovered "in May 1919 at Dusseldorf, Germany, by allied forces" & first printed in the US in the Bartlesville, Oklahoma Examiner-Enterprise.

It's total bollocks.

When columnist Bob Greene checked out the "Communist Rules for Revolution" with leading Russian specialists in the mid-1980s, they said the list was (like Bridgen) "a total fraud," "an obvious fabrication," & "an implausible concoction of American fears & phobias."

When The New York Times ran an article on the "Communist Rules for Revolution" in 1970, it had already been circulating for about 25 years.

The NYT reported that neither the National Archives, the Library of Congress, nor university libraries had a copy of any such document.

Lee Metcalf checked with the FBI, CIA, & the Internal Security Subcommittee: "exhaustive research" proved the rules to be "completely spurious," adding "the extreme right also follows rules, one of which is to make maximum use of false, misleading, & fear-inspiring quotations."

many members of congress have received copies of the Communist "rules" list from alarmed constituents over the years &, believing that nobody else was yet aware of them, have inserted them into the Congressional Record. The fake list has also been reproduced in many newspapers.

The earliest known publication dates from 1946, which coincided with events such as Winston Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech, in which he issued a warning to citizens of the US that "Communist parties constitute a growing challenge & peril to Christian civilization."

The timing & overwhelming evidence suggests it's far more likely this list was compiled by Americans in 1946 than by Russians in 1919.

Circulation of the fake list of 'Communist Rules for Revolution' really took off during the height of the Cold War in 1954.

1954 was the year when bullshitting Florida state attorney George A. Brautigam endorsed the document as genuine, & for many years afterward, printed versions of the list included Brautigam's statement of its authenticity & reproduced his signature at the bottom.

Even though the Soviet Union has long since ceased to be, & the number of Communist countries remaining in the world can be counted on the fingers of one hand, the list is still cited as evidence that the west is experiencing moral & political decay fostered by outside forces.

As folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand wrote of this piece back in 1986:

Andrew Bridgen is now a certifiable basket case conspiracy theorist, & imho, in need of a medical or psychological intervention. MPs are not supposed to spread obviously fake bullshit. So he'll probably end up as a GB "News" presenter.

Carl Sagan warned us in 1995:

Thread quotes extensively from this article: snopes.com/fact-check/com…