WhoWhatWhy Articles on the Attack on CCDH and the GOP's Targeting of 'Censors'
Twitter/X owner Elon Musk has made Goliath-sues-David headlines for his legal attack on Center for Countering Digital Hate for calling out the propagation of hate speech on his platform. However, there is more to the story.
During his June 20th appearance before Rep. Jim Jordan's (R-OH) Weaponization Subcommittee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the CCDH a "dark money" organization in retaliation for being featured on their Disinformation Dozen and Pandemic Profiteers lists. Kennedy has been deeply involved in the global spread of COVID-19 disinformation online and off, including at extremist rallies in the US (Defeat the Mandates) and Germany. The self-fashioned “censorship” victim has been trying to sue a Daily Kos blogger over a post about his appearance at a 2020 Berlin rally alongside Michael Ballweg, founder of the Querdenken — a German anti-science, anti-democracy, violence-prone extremist organization that has come under investigation for ties to neo-Nazis.
The same day as Kennedy’s trip to Congress, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller's America First Legal announced their own investigation into the CCDH, accusing it of "government collusion." A week later, the pro-hydroxychloroquine, anti-vax organization America's Frontline Doctors — made for Trump’s failed 2020 re-election campaign — released their own retaliatory "Disinformation" Dozen list. Kennedy has worked with AFLDS's insurrectionist founder Dr. Simone Gold and is involved in legal action fighting medical license accountability for disinformation doctors like her.
Then, Elon Musk sued the CCDH. As we have discussed, Musk funded the early treatment research of a tech millionaire who would become one of the most radical and dangerous anti-vaxxers, Steve Kirsch, who has worked with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and created a Super PAC for Kennedy's chaos campaign.
As Trump faces an overdue, ever-growing mountain of legal problems, the far Right leans on distracting disinformation like a crutch. In doing so, they continue to put the safety of public health officials, public health, and democracy itself at risk.
Read here.
A follow up article builds on this one and discusses Jordan’s mounting attack. The still MAGA-helmed GOP runs on Trumpian lies, with the election and COVID-19 misinformation being the major topics. Discussed here is the MAGA movement’s reliance on online disinformation from the get go (Cambridge Analytica), the legal action that has stopped government and the medical community from investigating disinformation (and some compromised individuals involved in that legal action), and the powerful connections of those crying censorship.
Please read.