In another carefully orchestrated smear campaign a fraudulent lawsuit was actually filed against Donald Trump claiming he raped a 13-year-old girl.14 Most Trump-hating liberal mainstream media outlets wouldn’t even report on the frivolous lawsuit because they knew it was a vicious hoax to defame him, but a few did, including The New York Daily News and People magazine. Word of the lawsuit circulated on Twitter and Facebook when unscrupulous websites published the allegations, knowing such an inflammatory headline would get them some web traffic.15 Rosie O’Donnell even tweeted about it to her one million Twitter followers multiple times, along with the hashtag #TrumpRape, either believing it to be true, or just trying to spread the story around hoping to hurt him.16
The person behind the lawsuit was later identified by the London Guardian as a former producer for the Jerry Springer show, who has a history of being accused of making sensational and false claims about celebrities in order to get media attention.17 But despite carefully crafted fake news stories designed to smear Donald Trump, like the 13-year-old girl rape hoax and the Russian hookers golden showers dossier, the liberal media kept claiming that ‘fake news’ about Hillary Clinton spread through social media had ruined the 2016 presidential election, in effect, ‘stealing’ it from her.
It wasn’t just people who were writing satirical articles that some gullible people may have thought were true, or completely fake stories on obscure websites which hoped to hurt Hillary Clinton that were the culprits. Instead, a new scandal erupted claiming the Russians were behind the new fake news phenomenon as part of a plot to install Trump as their “puppet president.” One of the biggest liberal newspapers in the country, The Washington Post, which was dedicated to stopping Donald Trump from becoming president, came out with an article two weeks after the election titled, “Russian Propaganda Effort Helped Spread ‘Fake News’ During Election, Experts Say,” which claimed that the fake news stories about Hillary Clinton were part of a disinformation operation launched by the Russians in order to help Donald Trump win.18
Their article started off saying, “The flood of ‘fake news’ this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.”19
President Obama’s advisor Dan Pfeiffer tweeted a link to the article and asked, “Why isn’t this the biggest story in the world right now?”20 This new angle on the ‘fake news conspiracy’ now focusing on “the Russians” quickly ballooned out of control, going beyond the McCarthyism panic of the 1940s and 50s when Senator Joseph McCarthy thought there were secret Communists in Congress around every corner working to undermine the United States. A new war against fake news was just beginning that would raise important concerns about censorship and the secret agendas of mainstream media corporations, social media giants, and Internet search engines.
Why all this concern about fake news, and why immediately after the election? As you will see in this book, the Liberal Establishment was creating a smokescreen to implement dramatic new censorship policies for social media and the Internet as a whole. They concluded that if they could control the information people see and hear on social media, they could possibly prevent the kind of upset that occurred when Hillary lost the election from happening again.
As Jim Morrison, singer of the 60s rock band The Doors, proclaimed, “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind,”21 and with mainstream media losing its power in recent years from countless new websites, blogs, YouTube channels and Facebook pages functioning as news outlets◦— the monopoly that major media companies had on the control of information for decades was collapsing. Today, anyone with a Facebook page can post an article, a picture, or a video, and in a matter of minutes it can be seen by just as many people as something broadcast on the national news by a major television network.
The media oligarchy could no longer control what information the public was consistently fed, or what information was purposefully ignored. Many people started to see this new ‘fake news’ scare as a veiled attempt at censorship and a bold move to try and take back control of the distribution of media, which is why I wrote this book.
The New York Post ran an article titled, “The War on ‘Fake News’ Is All About Censoring Real News,” which said, “Scrambling for an explanation for Donald Trump’s victory, many in the media and on the left have settled on the idea that his supporters were consumers of ‘fake news’◦— gullible rubes living in an alternate reality made Trump president,”22 and noted that this new ‘fake news’ scare itself was fake news, and there was a growing backlash from conservatives who saw this witch hunt for what it was.
Just a few weeks later The New York Times admitted, “‘Fake news’ as shorthand will almost surely be returned upon the media tenfold,”23 as conservatives began to throw the term back in the face of the mainstream media. One outlet published an article cautioning against the growing fake news panic titled, “Stop Calling Everything ‘Fake News’” and pointed out, “Two months ago, almost no one was talking about fake news. A Google Trends search for the term shows that it barely registered before October. Now you can hardly turn on the real news without hearing it.”24 The backlash was getting so bad that even President-Elect Donald Trump, in a now-famous outburst, called CNN “fake news” at his first press conference of 2017.25 Some people in the audience could be heard applauding him and “You are fake news” became an instant meme.
Like never before, the mainstream media kept making mountains out of molehills and using their platforms to influence public opinion by framing everything Donald Trump did and said in a negative light. Their constant criticism and nitpicking was soon difficult to distinguish from satire or parody because much of it was so absurd, but unfortunately millions of Americans couldn’t help but get swept up in their manufactured controversies. Anti-Trump hatred would soon grow to extremes few could have imagined as the constant disinformation was whipping people into a frenzy.
Conservatives fought back and started fact checking the liberal media like hawks, and every time CNN or another major ‘news’ organization would report a false or absurdly biased story, Trump supporters would shout from the rooftops about it and use each instance to mock the diminishing credibility of mainstream media.
Liberals pushed back even harder and began labeling conservative websites, YouTube channels, and social media personalities not just as “fake news,” but as “extremists” and “racists” who post “hate speech.” Facebook began implementing “fact checkers” and issuing warnings when people would post links to certain stories or websites, as well as outright banning links to some or labeling them “spam” when someone tried to share them. The major social media platforms also implemented stricter terms of service and vowed to crack down on people posting “hateful content,” which in reality is often just mild criticism of certain liberal policies or ideologies.
YouTube began demonetizing (removing advertisements from) videos covering certain topics they deemed “not advertiser-friendly,” thus preventing ‘YouTubers’ like myself from making money off them, which for many people is a part-time or full-time job and how we pay our bills. This was just the beginning of a censorship tsunami that was heading our way. Liberals would begin going after the advertisers on conservative websites and TV shows to pressure them to pull their sponsorships.26 Google began scrutinizing websites and YouTube channels which use their Ad Sense system to generate revenue. Anti-feminist videos, videos criticizing radical LGBT activists, or ones calling to stop illegal immigration or the massive influx of Muslim refugees were now being stripped of advertisers in droves.27