How I Became Fake News – POLITICO Magazine
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Ryan M. Kelly/The Daily Progress/AP
How I Became Fake News
I witnessed a terrorist attack in Charlottesville. Then the conspiracy theories began.
By BRENNAN GILMORE
Last Sunday evening, I received a worried call from my sister asking if I had spoken with my mother and father. I had spent the day doing interviews about the vehicle attack I witnessed the day before while protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and had not been in front of a computer all day. She told me that my parents’ home address had been posted on a neo-Nazi conspiracy theorist message board.
“They are suggesting that you arranged the attack, Brennan,” she said. “There are death threats against you.”
Story Continued Below
On Saturday morning, I witnessed James Fields smash his car into a crowd of demonstrators, killing Heather Heyer and wounding nineteen others. Albeit I instantaneously collective the footage with police on the scene, it took me a half-hour to determine to post it publicly. I was worried about how the footage might be used by the “alt-right” and felt awkward knowing that I had most likely filmed someone’s death. I did not want the attention posting the movie was likely to bring. I consulted with friends and family, some of whom were also at the counterprotest and some of whom were watching the coverage from outside Charlottesville. They all urged me to share the movie, and when I heard from friends that some media outlets were suggesting that it might have been an accident or that the driver might have been attempting to escape an angry mob, I knew I had to post it. The movie I took—and the scene I witnessed with my own two eyes—clearly demonstrated the attack was intentional. Fields drove down two empty blocks and plowed straight into the crowd before fleeing in switch sides.
Movie of car hitting anti-racist protestors. Let there be no confusion: this was deliberate terrorism. My prayers with victims. Stay home. pic.twitter.com/MUOZs71Pf4
— Brennan Gilmore (@brennanmgilmore) August 12, 2017
Within the next twenty four hours, almost every major American news network and a diversity of international press outlets asked to interview me about the attack. I was too shaken to sleep on Saturday night, but I spent all day Sunday conducting interviews. I attempted to give a frank account of what I had seen on Fourth Street and react clearly to questions about the situation more broadly. I said there was one side and one side alone responsible for the death I witnessed—the Nazis and white supremacists who brought their ideology of violence and hate to our town. It was their man who drove his vehicle into the crowd. I thought these points were straightforward and uncontroversial.
Boy was I wrong.
Hours after an interview I did with Alex Witt of MSNBC, neo-Nazi commentators began posting about me on 4chan, Reddit and YouTube. These crack researchers bragged that they had discovered I worked for the State Department (it’s in my Twitter bio), that I have a connection to George Soros (he very publicly donated to the campaign of my former boss, Tom Perriello), and that I spent time in Africa working in conflict areas (information available in major news outlets).
Desperate to lay blame on anyone besides the alt-right, they seized on these facts to suggest a counter-narrative to the attack, claiming there was no way that someone with my background just happened to be right there to take the movie. Even disregarding the fact that someone with my background—raised in Virginia, UVA graduate, lives in Charlottesville, worked to resolve ethnic conflicts overseas, politically progressive—is exactly the kind of person you’d expect to find at a protest against Nazis, their theories were absurd and illogical. They wrote that I was a CIA operative, funded by (choose your own escapade) George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the IMF/World Bank, and/or a global Jewish mafia to orchestrate the Charlottesville attack in order to turn the general public against the alt-right. I had staged the attack and then worked with MSNBC and other outlets managed by the left to spread propaganda. They claimed my ultimate objective was to embark a race war that would undermine and then overthrow Donald Trump on behalf of the “Deep State.” (I’m generalizing here as the theories are widely variant and logically inconsistent, and I’m only aware of the petite percentage I could be bothered to read.)
As these theories spread, I embarked receiving hate mail. Some people sent me fairly tame comments on social media like, “God has a special place for you Gilmore,” “you are a lounging communist Nazi” and “fuck you cuck.” Others threatened to kill me. One commenter posted that he’d like to torment me to see “the extent of my CIA training.” I was followed and accosted on the street in Charlottesville, and there have been many attempts to hack into my online accounts. One site posted all of my known addresses and family members, including the house I grew up in, where my parents still live.
Normally, I would have just overlooked these threats and certainly would not have commented on them publicly. I consider it an honor to be attacked by people who have none, and I am willing to put up with private risk to speak out against Nazis. I believe that it is incumbent on white people in particular to take the risks necessary to confront and restrain white supremacists, given the inherent and intentional risk they present to all communities of color.
My parents feel similarly and took having their address posted online by hate groups in stride. Within days a letter showcased up in their mail, containing four pages of text explaining why I would burn in in hell, as well as a suspicious white powder. While the powder was a hoax, their local police department took all the threats earnestly, confiscated the letter and stepped up patrols around the house. My parents’ foot precaution was to pick the remaining tomatoes from their garden, “so the Nazis wouldn’t get them.” Even in the South, there must be a limit to our hospitality.
However, these are not normal times, and a duo of things made me feel the need to speak out about these conspiracy theories and threats.
Very first, at some point during the week, it occurred to me that there was a pretty good chance these conspiracy theories had made their way to the White House. While they primarily appeared only on obscure, wacko sites with pictures of bald eagles shooting machine guns, within seventy two hours, they had gone “mainstream.” Infowars posted a “bombshell” investigation into Charlottesville that showcased it was all a Soros plot, and I was the key operative. The president of the United States has been a guest on the very showcase that echoed theories suggesting I was, at best, an accessory to murder and, at worst, the orchestrator of the entire event, including hiring Nazi and antifa actors, staging a confrontation, and then working with allies in the mainstream “leftist” media to blind the world to the “reality.”
While some people in Facebook messages, tweets and comment boards were calling for my head, others were tweeting at various conservative leaders, including Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump and Sean Hannity, to open an investigation into my alleged role in the attack. On Thursday, Hannity broadcast claims on his radio showcase that the protesters in Charlottesville were paid. Albeit I wasn’t mentioned by name, there’s a clear connection inbetween the conspiracy theories circulating about me orchestrating the attack and this segment, which aired on a showcase listened to by millions. Several days later, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, a sitting U.S. congressman, called for a federal investigation of Charlottesville, alleging that protests were paid for and arranged “by compels of evil beyond what normal people can think about,” as part of a democratic agenda to make the two thousand eighteen midterm elections about race. Within less than a week the conspiracy theory had gone from an alt-right message board to millions across the country on broadcast television and radio and was being parroted by a national politician.
Trump has parroted Infowars several times, something even Infowars founder Alex Jones has described as “surreal.” Hannity dined with Trump a few weeks ago. Did I actually have to worry that the president of the United States might launch an investigation against me because I happened to capture footage of a white supremacist terror attack and spoke publicly about what I spotted? I realized I couldn’t rule it out, and that frankly scares the hell out of me—for my family, but particularly for our country.
Over the past week, I’ve seen personally the very real harm that these conspiracy theories have on our public discourse. The danger is not necessarily that a large number of people will believe them in their entirety. Instead, it’s that they muddy the waters on issues that should be about right and wrong. This is truly dangerous. If we are to get beyond this current acute manifestation of the cancer of American racism and begin to heal, the right must join with the left to excise the malignancy of white supremacy from our politics and society. Conspiratorial thinking and confusion on what is real make this much tighter.
When he heard about the nature of the threats I had received, one law enforcement officer said, “Well, there are two sides to every story.” Coming from rural Virginia, where Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are buried and where Trump received a healthy majority of the vote, perhaps I should not have been taken aback, but I admit I was.
I love the area where I grew up, and I love the people who live there, including many of my closest friends who are enormously conservative, with whom I grew up hunting, fishing and playing bluegrass. But in this story, there are not two sides.
I know what I spotted on Saturday, and I know which side was responsible. I spotted a man who identified himself as a Nazi purposefully drive his car into a group of protesters. White supremacist and Nazi ideology is inherently violent. They would deny nonwhite Americans their rights by any means possible and have historically used violence and intimidation to achieve their purpose. The groups that marched in Charlottesville on Saturday were strenuously armed and, according to their own words, they came ready and, at least in some cases, hoped for violence.
By introducing doubt about what happened, even if their theories conflict with one another, these sites make it lighter to argue that the Unite the Right rally was not just about white supremacy. In fact, we heard the president say that there were good people who were just there to defend Southern history and culture and peacefully protest removing the Robert E. Lee statue. Just as his equivocation and failure to condemn the alt-right enables and helps grow their twisted movement, the president’s warm embrace of conspiracy theories, rejection of journalistic standards, and propagation of noncredible sources of information embolden and grow the numbers of Americans looking for another explanation besides the awkward truth.
Sometimes the story is not complicated: Nazis are bad, and I just happened to witness one of them commit a terrorist attack. I didn’t want the attention that came with having seen this horrific act, but I will proceed to join the millions of Americans speaking out about its unquestionable cause.
We need to stop reading and believing imaginary plots. And we all need to proceed to speak out and act, both against white supremacy and the culture of conspiracy that has taken root in our country.
How I Became Fake News – POLITICO Magazine
POLITICO Magazine
The Friday Cover is POLITICO Magazine’s email of the week’s best, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Ryan M. Kelly/The Daily Progress/AP
How I Became Fake News
I witnessed a terrorist attack in Charlottesville. Then the conspiracy theories began.
By BRENNAN GILMORE
Last Sunday evening, I received a worried call from my sister asking if I had spoken with my mother and father. I had spent the day doing interviews about the vehicle attack I witnessed the day before while protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and had not been in front of a computer all day. She told me that my parents’ home address had been posted on a neo-Nazi conspiracy theorist message board.
“They are suggesting that you arranged the attack, Brennan,” she said. “There are death threats against you.”
Story Continued Below
On Saturday morning, I witnessed James Fields smash his car into a crowd of demonstrators, killing Heather Heyer and wounding nineteen others. Albeit I instantaneously collective the footage with police on the scene, it took me a half-hour to determine to post it publicly. I was worried about how the footage might be used by the “alt-right” and felt awkward knowing that I had most likely filmed someone’s death. I did not want the attention posting the movie was likely to bring. I consulted with friends and family, some of whom were also at the counterprotest and some of whom were watching the coverage from outside Charlottesville. They all urged me to share the movie, and when I heard from friends that some media outlets were suggesting that it might have been an accident or that the driver might have been attempting to escape an angry mob, I knew I had to post it. The movie I took—and the scene I witnessed with my own two eyes—clearly demonstrated the attack was intentional. Fields drove down two empty blocks and plowed straight into the crowd before fleeing in switch sides.
Movie of car hitting anti-racist protestors. Let there be no confusion: this was deliberate terrorism. My prayers with victims. Stay home. pic.twitter.com/MUOZs71Pf4
— Brennan Gilmore (@brennanmgilmore) August 12, 2017
Within the next twenty four hours, almost every major American news network and a diversity of international press outlets asked to interview me about the attack. I was too shaken to sleep on Saturday night, but I spent all day Sunday conducting interviews. I attempted to give a frank account of what I had seen on Fourth Street and react clearly to questions about the situation more broadly. I said there was one side and one side alone responsible for the death I witnessed—the Nazis and white supremacists who brought their ideology of violence and hate to our town. It was their man who drove his vehicle into the crowd. I thought these points were straightforward and uncontroversial.
Boy was I wrong.
Hours after an interview I did with Alex Witt of MSNBC, neo-Nazi commentators commenced posting about me on 4chan, Reddit and YouTube. These crack researchers bragged that they had discovered I worked for the State Department (it’s in my Twitter bio), that I have a connection to George Soros (he very publicly donated to the campaign of my former boss, Tom Perriello), and that I spent time in Africa working in conflict areas (information available in major news outlets).
Desperate to lay blame on anyone besides the alt-right, they seized on these facts to suggest a counter-narrative to the attack, claiming there was no way that someone with my background just happened to be right there to take the movie. Even overlooking the fact that someone with my background—raised in Virginia, UVA graduate, lives in Charlottesville, worked to resolve ethnic conflicts overseas, politically progressive—is exactly the kind of person you’d expect to find at a protest against Nazis, their theories were absurd and illogical. They wrote that I was a CIA operative, funded by (choose your own escapade) George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the IMF/World Bank, and/or a global Jewish mafia to orchestrate the Charlottesville attack in order to turn the general public against the alt-right. I had staged the attack and then worked with MSNBC and other outlets managed by the left to spread propaganda. They claimed my ultimate aim was to begin a race war that would undermine and then overthrow Donald Trump on behalf of the “Deep State.” (I’m generalizing here as the theories are widely variant and logically inconsistent, and I’m only aware of the petite percentage I could be bothered to read.)
As these theories spread, I commenced receiving hate mail. Some people sent me fairly tame comments on social media like, “God has a special place for you Gilmore,” “you are a lounging communist Nazi” and “fuck you cuck.” Others threatened to kill me. One commenter posted that he’d like to torment me to see “the extent of my CIA training.” I was followed and accosted on the street in Charlottesville, and there have been many attempts to hack into my online accounts. One site posted all of my known addresses and family members, including the house I grew up in, where my parents still live.
Normally, I would have just disregarded these threats and certainly would not have commented on them publicly. I consider it an honor to be attacked by people who have none, and I am willing to put up with individual risk to speak out against Nazis. I believe that it is incumbent on white people in particular to take the risks necessary to confront and restrain white supremacists, given the inherent and intentional risk they present to all communities of color.
My parents feel similarly and took having their address posted online by hate groups in stride. Within days a letter displayed up in their mail, containing four pages of text explaining why I would burn in in hell, as well as a suspicious white powder. While the powder was a hoax, their local police department took all the threats earnestly, confiscated the letter and stepped up patrols around the house. My parents’ foot precaution was to pick the remaining tomatoes from their garden, “so the Nazis wouldn’t get them.” Even in the South, there must be a limit to our hospitality.
However, these are not normal times, and a duo of things made me feel the need to speak out about these conspiracy theories and threats.
Very first, at some point during the week, it occurred to me that there was a pretty good chance these conspiracy theories had made their way to the White House. While they primarily appeared only on obscure, wacko sites with pictures of bald eagles shooting machine guns, within seventy two hours, they had gone “mainstream.” Infowars posted a “bombshell” investigation into Charlottesville that showcased it was all a Soros plot, and I was the key operative. The president of the United States has been a guest on the very demonstrate that echoed theories suggesting I was, at best, an accessory to murder and, at worst, the orchestrator of the entire event, including hiring Nazi and antifa actors, staging a confrontation, and then working with allies in the mainstream “leftist” media to blind the world to the “reality.”
While some people in Facebook messages, tweets and comment boards were calling for my head, others were tweeting at various conservative leaders, including Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump and Sean Hannity, to open an investigation into my alleged role in the attack. On Thursday, Hannity broadcast claims on his radio showcase that the protesters in Charlottesville were paid. Albeit I wasn’t mentioned by name, there’s a clear connection inbetween the conspiracy theories circulating about me orchestrating the attack and this segment, which aired on a display listened to by millions. Several days later, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, a sitting U.S. congressman, called for a federal investigation of Charlottesville, alleging that protests were paid for and arranged “by compels of evil beyond what normal people can think about,” as part of a democratic agenda to make the two thousand eighteen midterm elections about race. Within less than a week the conspiracy theory had gone from an alt-right message board to millions across the country on broadcast television and radio and was being parroted by a national politician.
Trump has parroted Infowars several times, something even Infowars founder Alex Jones has described as “surreal.” Hannity dined with Trump a few weeks ago. Did I actually have to worry that the president of the United States might launch an investigation against me because I happened to capture footage of a white supremacist terror attack and spoke publicly about what I eyed? I realized I couldn’t rule it out, and that frankly scares the hell out of me—for my family, but particularly for our country.
Over the past week, I’ve seen personally the very real harm that these conspiracy theories have on our public discourse. The danger is not necessarily that a large number of people will believe them in their entirety. Instead, it’s that they muddy the waters on issues that should be about right and wrong. This is truly dangerous. If we are to get beyond this current acute manifestation of the cancer of American racism and begin to heal, the right must join with the left to excise the malignancy of white supremacy from our politics and society. Conspiratorial thinking and confusion on what is real make this much stiffer.
When he heard about the nature of the threats I had received, one law enforcement officer said, “Well, there are two sides to every story.” Coming from rural Virginia, where Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are buried and where Trump received a healthy majority of the vote, perhaps I should not have been taken aback, but I admit I was.
I love the area where I grew up, and I love the people who live there, including many of my closest friends who are utterly conservative, with whom I grew up hunting, fishing and playing bluegrass. But in this story, there are not two sides.
I know what I eyed on Saturday, and I know which side was responsible. I eyed a man who identified himself as a Nazi purposefully drive his car into a group of protesters. White supremacist and Nazi ideology is inherently violent. They would deny nonwhite Americans their rights by any means possible and have historically used violence and intimidation to achieve their purpose. The groups that marched in Charlottesville on Saturday were strenuously armed and, according to their own words, they came ready and, at least in some cases, hoped for violence.
By introducing doubt about what happened, even if their theories conflict with one another, these sites make it lighter to argue that the Unite the Right rally was not just about white supremacy. In fact, we heard the president say that there were good people who were just there to defend Southern history and culture and peacefully protest removing the Robert E. Lee statue. Just as his equivocation and failure to condemn the alt-right enables and helps grow their twisted movement, the president’s warm embrace of conspiracy theories, rejection of journalistic standards, and propagation of noncredible sources of information embolden and grow the numbers of Americans looking for another explanation besides the awkward truth.
Sometimes the story is not complicated: Nazis are bad, and I just happened to witness one of them commit a terrorist attack. I didn’t want the attention that came with having seen this horrific act, but I will proceed to join the millions of Americans speaking out about its indisputable cause.
We need to stop reading and believing imaginary plots. And we all need to proceed to speak out and act, both against white supremacy and the culture of conspiracy that has taken root in our country.