( Fire officials debunked those rumors, and the Green Party actually supported controlled fires, which remain legal.) They accused the Green Party, a left-leaning party with relatively little electoral power, of causing the fires by campaigning against back burning, a practice of starting controlled fires to reduce the damage of large wildfires. Years of fear-mongering about climate protections leading to the loss of working-class jobs had left some communities primed to view the environmentalist left as a villain. Some of it was steeped in climate-denialism, the Guardian noted. a preview of the west coast’s current red skies, wildfire misinformation was endemic. In Australia, where disastrous fires early this year gave the U.S. One might be forgiven for thinking it was just another uniquely American moment of delusion in a year defined by death, destruction, and lies. One of the journalists said three men pointed guns at them, and that she suspected the men bought into the antifa-fire hoax. One group of Portland-based journalists said they were stopped on the road by an armed militia, which had self-deputized and set up a checkpoint. Several independent journalists reported that, when they traveled to document the fires, people tagged them as anti-fascist arsonists, and variously called 911 on them or threatened on social media to shoot them. Elsewhere across the conspiracy space, truthers have been skeptical of climate science, with chemtrails believers targeting underage climate activists with hoaxes and Flat Earthers suggesting rising temperatures to be the result of Hell moving closer to the planet’s surface.ĭespite their debunking by law enforcement, the antifa rumors resulted in multiple potentially life-threatening situations. Some of the antifa rumors, like a popular Twitter thread by a representative for the right-wing group Turning Point USA, explicitly denied that the fires were the result of climate change.
#Twisted insane pick your poison professional
"Rumors spread just like wildfire," they wrote on Facebook, "and now our 9-1-1 dispatchers and professional staff are being overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an UNTRUE rumor that 6 Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires in DOUGLAS COUNTY, OREGON." The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, which Romero claimed had arrested anti-fascists, debunked the rumor publicly.
![twisted insane pick your poison twisted insane pick your poison](http://2bonthewater.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/wp_cr_valentines_day_008.10254454_std.jpg)
Nevermind that even real law enforcement said the claims were bogus. The publication Law Enforcement Today, which bills itself as the largest law enforcement news source, published an article promoting the conspiracy theory, and quickly racked up tens of thousands of social media shares, according to the Guardian. Other sources also baselessly promoted hoaxes about anti-fascists starting the fires. The conspiracy theory had at least 3 million followers in Facebook groups as of this summer, according to an internal Facebook report, and recently enjoyed a tacit embrace in the White House, courtesy of the president of the United States himself. The post was later linked to the anonymous internet personality “Q,” who is the figurehead of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely accuses President Donald Trump’s foes of Satanic pedophilia and cannibalism.
![twisted insane pick your poison twisted insane pick your poison](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5uYu-gGbAa0/maxresdefault.jpg)
Obviously there are more to track down and arrest. “Douglas County Sheriff has 6 ANTIFA arsonists in custody,” Romero tweeted on Wednesday. As fires broke out across the state, social media users, like failed Oregon congressional candidate Paul Romero Jr., issued completely false statements. Those rumors sprang up in a heated political climate, in which President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused antifa, the decentralized anti-fascist movement, of unspecified destructive plots. In Oregon, where more than 500,000 people are under evacuation orders, law enforcement took to social media on Thursday to implore people to stop sharing hoaxes about the fires’ origins. But officials had to battle more than the blazes. in recent weeks, first in California and now in parts of Oregon and Washington. Fires have engulfed the west coast of the U.S.