No, Anthony Weiner was not set up. And someone supposedly as intelligent as teacherken should know better. (Same goes for everyone who recced that bullshit.)
Just because the story making that claim appeared in The Hill doesn’t mean it’s true, as a simple check of The Hill’s source would make clear:
The teenage girl who had exchanged sexually explicit text messages with former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) lied about her age and political motivations to harm Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, according to a report by the investigative news site WhoWhatWhy.
Had Ken — or anyone who recced that garbage — bothered to check, they would have found that WhoWhatWhy is yet another insane conspiracy theory website run by a lunatic-fringe conspiracy theorist — a guy who fancies himself, an “investigative journalist” — by the name of Russ Baker.
Here are some of the things Russ Baker believes, thanks to his amazing investigative reporting skills:
In his 2008 book Family of Secrets, Baker outlines alleged historic connections between the Bush family with the Central Intelligence Agency, and asserts that President George H.W. Bush was linked to the Watergate scandal and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.[4] Lev Grossman of Time magazine said that Baker "connects the dots between the Bushes and Watergate, which he far-fetchedly describes not as a ham-handed act of political espionage but as a carefully orchestrated farce designed to take down President Richard Nixon.[26]
Family of Secrets contends that the first President Bush became an intelligence agent in his teenage years and was later at the center of a plot to assassinate Kennedy that included his father, Prescott Bush, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, CIA Director Allen Dulles, Cuban and Russian exiles and emigrants, and various Texas oilmen.[1] It asserts that Bob Woodward of The Washington Post was an intelligence agent who conspired with John Dean to remove President Richard Nixon from office for opposing the oil depletion allowance.[1]
And that’s not even the worst work this clown has done:
Baker has raised questions about the Boston Marathon bombings, and "is not willing to rule out the possibility that the bombings were a false-flag operation conducted or permitted by elements of the American government in order to justify the Homeland Security complex.” He argues that FBI recruited the Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an agent or informant, which is the FBI has categorically denied.[
So this guy is the source of the Anthony Weiner story cited by The Hill and brought here by teacherken — with a question mark in the title, so it’s all okay, right?
Everyone here should read this great piece by Zack Beauchamp at Vox:
Why liberal conspiracy theories are flourishing in the age of Trump.
President Donald Trump is about to resign as a result of the Russia scandal. Bernie Sanders and Sean Hannity are Russian agents. The Russians have paid off House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz to the tune of $10 million, using Trump as a go-between. Paul Ryan is a traitor for refusing to investigate Trump’s Russia ties. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand was a secret Russian agent charged with discrediting the American conservative movement.
These are all claims you can find made on a new and growing sector of the internet that functions as a fake news bubble for liberals, something I’ve dubbed the Russiasphere. The mirror image of Breitbart and InfoWars on the right, it focuses nearly exclusively on real and imagined connections between Trump and Russia. The tone is breathless: full of unnamed intelligence sources, certainty that Trump will soon be imprisoned, and fever dream factual assertions that no reputable media outlet has managed to confirm.
Beauchamp cites the Circle Jerk of AttributionTM team of Louise Mensch, Claude Taylor and the Palmer Report as indicative of this new wave of leftist conspiracy-mongering that threatens to infect the left with the injection of our very own “fake news” stream. And that’s not a good thing:
Experts on political misinformation see things differently. They worry that the unfounded speculation and paranoia that infect the Russiasphere risk pushing liberals into the same black hole of conspiracy-mongering and fact-free insinuation that conservatives fell into during the Obama years.
The fear is that this pollutes the party itself, derailing and discrediting the legitimate investigation into Russia investigation. It also risks degrading the Democratic Party — helping elevate shameless hucksters who know nothing about policy but are willing to spread misinformation in the service of gaining power. We’ve already seen this story play out on the right, a story that ended in Trump’s election.
“One of the failures of the Republican Party is the way they let the birther movement metastasize — and that ultimately helped Donald Trump make it to the White House,” says Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth who studies the spread of false political beliefs. “We should worry about kind of pattern being repeated.”
And guess what conspiracy theory Mensch was pushing?
She’s also suggested that Anthony Weiner was brought down as part of a Russian plot to put the Clinton emails back in the news:
I can exclusively report that there is ample evidence that suggests that Weiner was sexting not with a 15 year old girl but with a hacker, working for Russia, part of the North Carolina hacking group ‘Crackas With Attitude’, who hacked the head of the CIA, and a great many FBI agents, police officers, and other law enforcement officials.
Gee, what are the odds? Is Russ Baker’s WhoWhatWhy any more credible than certified lunatic fringe conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch? No! They’re cut from the same cloth.
I urge everyone here to read Beauchamp’s entire piece. It’s a systematic takedown of the Mensch-Taylor-Palmer Report fake news death spiral.
We need to be better than this.
Just because you want to believe something doesn’t mean it’s true. Spend a minute or two and check the source. Ken should have checked before breathlessly promoting that trash from WhoWhatWhy via The Hill, and people here should know better than to rec that crap.
We are becoming the very things we mock and we hate: the shallow-thinking, pablum-swallowing idiots of the right.
Think before you post. It can go a long way toward stopping the spread of fake news while putting the brakes on the undermining of our own credibility and that of legitimate news. We don’t need to be doing the work of Steve Bannon for him.
P.S. Anthony Weiner is a scumbag.