Social media users and far-right figures online have spread a baseless conspiracy theory from a supposed whistleblower claiming that Democra
Alex Kaplan at MMFA:
Social media users and far-right figures online have spread a baseless conspiracy theory from a supposed whistleblower claiming that Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was involved in the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, last July.
Even though prosecutors previously dismissed the alleged whistleblower’s claims and have said her claims were not credible and “read more like a novel,” far-right figures have claimed the conspiracy theory is “probably a pretty good theory,” a “credible accusation,” and meant Shapiro was “going to prison.”
The conspiracy theory has also earned tens of thousands of reposts and hundreds of thousands of views on social media, according to a Media Matters review.
The complaint, reportedly filed on February 7, “details unfounded assertions that Shapiro conspired with other officials to orchestrate the attack as part of a political scheme” and mirrors a similar complaint the supposed whistleblower filed in July. As the Daily Dot notes, the complaint to the Butler County district attorney from the supposed whistleblower, Hadassah Feinberg, “alleged that Shapiro ‘facilitated, organized and carried out his plan’ to assassinate Trump.” Last July, Feinberg “filed a similar complaint that the local district attorney tossed, citing the myriad investigations into the assassination attempt.” [Daily Dot, 2/10/25; Semafor, 2/11/25]
Far-right pundits concoct a baseless conspiracy theory that Pennsylvania Governor and potential 2028 Democratic Presidential contender Josh Shapiro was involved in the assassination attempt against Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, PA in July 2024.
People have moved from 2,000+ miles away just to attend Greg Lockes cult tent.
How do I know?
I live in the area.
From Arizona to Tennessee. Left their jobs. Their family. Tore their children from their schools. Left everything they’ve known. Just to attend his cult tent. And subject their children to it.
“Why’d you move out here?”
“God told me to.”
No. Locke did. Locke is a cult leader. And a poor one at best.
People have uprooted their entire lives just to hear rage rants in person very week.
To hear how autistic people are possessed. How books need to be burned. How witches need to be hunted. How women need to be property. And how Christian’s are apparently somehow oppressed.
This is what people are uprooting their entire lives for. But we’re the hateful ones? We’re the ones who need to stop? We’re the ones oppressing??? RIGHT. LOGICAL. Not a manipulated mindset AT ALL. Cool.
We’re the misguided ones yet they’re literally moving their whole lives across the country just to commit idolatry & then tell everyone else they’re going to hell for committing idolatry because most people just so happen to live in the real world.
Wild. Fkn. Wild.
We’re misguided for being educated. For demanding accommodation. For demanding the world starts allowing autistic people to live comfortably & unapologetically. For demanding religious coexistence and perspective. For demanding women be treated as humans. And for demanding the actual T R U T H.
We’re misguided for wanting humans to progress as a species? To stop destroying each other? Wtf???
I understand many things to a fault. It’s a gift and a curse to understand so much without judgement. This though. This one. This is one I will not accept and I will judge it indefinitely.
Yet that’s not helpful. Cult leaders keep cult members by instilling fear of the outside world.
The outside world needs to show cult members there’s kindness outside of their organization. The outside world isn’t as scary as they’ve been misguided to believe.
I can’t stand these people. But I can’t help but understand them either. I can’t help but know I need to show them kindness if I ever want to see a future where this kind of hate doesn’t exist in such a vast population.
I can’t stand that I understand them & I can’t morally stand that I need to be nice to them. I can’t stand that I need to be the change I want to see in this regard.
And I really can’t stand that human nature has allowed for such a comforting, spirit lifting idea such as spiritual thought to turn into something so hateful, oppressive, murd3r0us, and malicious.
Religion will be the foundation that built the self destruct button of the human race — if we can’t find compromise and perspective of & for one another.
Nobody needs saving in this context. We need to save each other.
Before Election Day has even arrived, the “Stop the Steal” movement has reemerged in force, with some of the same activists who tried to ove
Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, and Donie O'Sullivan at CNN:
Before Election Day has even arrived, the “Stop the Steal” movement has reemerged in force, with some of the same activists who tried to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss outlining a step-by-step guide to undermine the results if he falls short again.
For months, those activists – who have been priming Trump supporters to believe the only way the former president can lose in 2024 is through fraud – have laid out proposals to thwart a potential Kamala Harris victory. Their plans include challenging results in court, pressuring lawmakers to block election certification, and encouraging protests – culminating on January 6, 2025, the day Congress will once again certify the results.
“I have a plan and strategy,” Ivan Raiklin, a former Green Beret and political operative who has close ties to associates of Trump, told a group of Pennsylvania activists earlier this month. “And then January 6th is going to be pretty fun.”
Trump’s allies – and the former president himself – are increasingly pushing debunked claims of voter fraud, spreading their rhetoric through podcasts with massive audiences, megachurch sermons and political rallies in key states. Some Trump backers, including pastors associated with Christian nationalist ideas, have described the election as a fight between good and evil, describing Harris as the antichrist or suggesting that God has anointed Trump as the victor.
Four years ago, Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden didn’t truly materialize until after the election. They were largely improvised and ad hoc, with a flurry of hastily filed lawsuits that went nowhere and efforts to convince state legislators to block certification that fell short.
But this time around, MAGA activists have been planning to undermine a potential Harris victory well in advance of the election, with some even arguing that state legislators should simply ignore the election results and award electoral votes to Trump by default.
Congress passed a measure in 2022 that makes it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, and with Trump now out of office, he and his allies cannot wield levers of the executive branch to try to influence the election. But experts say that the people involved in these conspiracy theory-driven efforts appear to be better organized, more determined and, in some cases, more extreme than four years ago.
Federal law enforcement officials are also ringing alarm bells. A bulletin put out earlier this month by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence warned that extremist rhetoric about the election could motivate people to “engage in violence, as we saw during the 2020 election cycle.”
Marc Harris, a former investigator for the House select committee that investigated January 6, 2021, told CNN he’s concerned that the tactics to undermine the election have evolved since 2020, even with the safeguards put into place since then.
“Those looking to overturn the election are way ahead of where they were in 2020,” said Harris. “But on the flip side, the pro-democracy defenders are also more prepared. How that shakes out is not clear to me.”
Baseless fears of a ‘steal’
Unfounded claims about malign forces conspiring to cheat Trump out of an otherwise inevitable election win have been increasing in recent weeks from influential members of the MAGA movement.
“Yes, the steal is happening again,” Emerald Robinson, a right-wing broadcaster with nearly 800,000 followers on X, declared in a blog post earlier this month, criticizing the fact that votes may take days to count in some states. “It doesn’t take days to get election results. It takes days to cheat.”
Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who donated millions of dollars to efforts investigating the 2020 election, warned on Telegram this week of a cyberattack that would rig the election and lead to imminent “death and cannibalism” unless Americans stand together.
And Greg Locke, a prominent Tennessee pastor who spoke near the Capitol the day before the January 6 riot, told his followers in a sermon earlier this month that the US would be hit with “a catastrophic storm that is going to be man-made” in the days before the election, as an apparent method of stealing the vote.
“If Kamala wins this election, hear me when I tell you, we will never have another one,” Locke predicted.
Some of the debunked ideas that surfaced after the 2020 election and sought to explain how Trump lost remain rampant, such as the notion that voting machines are flipping votes to favor Democrats or that election officials in swing states have been complicit in widespread voter fraud.
“The same systems are being used. Many of the same players are in place,” Joe Hoft, who has contributed to the conspiracy-theory-peddling website The Gateway Pundit, told CNN when asked about the 2024 election. “I don’t trust the process. The process is broken.”
In recent episodes of “War Room,” a prominent program airing election conspiracy theories started by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, guests have repeatedly suggested that Democratic governors in swing states or Democratic members of Congress could block certification of a legitimate Trump victory.
They’ve cited comments like Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin telling Axios earlier this month that he didn’t assume Trump would use “free, fair and honest” means to win – even though Raskin said he would “obviously accept” a Trump victory if it was honest.
“They call us election deniers all the time,” GOP Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on a “War Room” episode last week, in which she raised concerns about overseas military voting. “But it looks, it appears to be that there is a big fight being set up over the certification of the election and the outcome of the election.”
Greene has also floated a conspiracy theory that recent US Capitol Police training exercises are connected to a plan by congressional Democrats to keep Trump out of power even if he wins.
Trump himself has echoed some of the conspiracy theories pushed by his supporters, suggesting that election fraud is rampant in 2024. But party officials have struck a different tone.
[...]
Plans to block a Harris win
While some groups have been gathering supposed examples of election fraud for lawsuits to challenge a potential Harris win, other pro-Trump activists have coalesced around a plan to ensure Trump returns to the White House: state legislators can simply allocate their state’s electors for Trump regardless of vote counts.
The strategy generated headlines last week after Rep. Andy Harris, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, said it “makes a lot of sense” to allocate electors that way in North Carolina, where he suggested damage from Hurricane Helene may disenfranchise some voters.
Harris, who later walked back his comments, initially voiced support for the proposal after hearing a presentation from Raiklin, who’s known for having posted a memo that argued then-Vice President Mike Pence could have blocked certification of the 2020 election results.
Raiklin has been espousing the plan for legislators to seize control of awarding electoral votes in various states in recent weeks and receiving support from other far-right figures. Mark Finchem, a Republican candidate for state senate in Arizona, wrote on X that the “extraordinary circumstances” in North Carolina – a reference to the hurricane damage – “provide a justifiable pathway for the legislature to take action.”
Noel Fritsch, publisher of the far-right online publication National File, has argued that the US Constitution gives all state legislatures the power to choose electoral college members, which he told CNN he believes could create more national stability.
[...]
Concerns about violence
Incidents of political violence and threats have already occurred this year, including two apparent attempts to assassinate Trump, shootings involving a DNC office and suspicious packages mailed to election offices.
In the weeks ahead of the election, some pro-Trump activists have been openly alluding to more violent chaos that they say is on the horizon.
Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn said on a program last week that he thought Trump would win all 50 states if there’s a fair election but offered a grim prediction if the winner remains unknown for days.
“I feel like people are going to go to those locations where there’s counting and there could actually be violence because people are going to be, people are so upset after 2020,” said Flynn, who four years ago drew comparisons to Civil War battlefields in a speech the day before the Capitol riot.
This CNN article is a must-read on how right-wing election deniers seek to launch January 6th 2.0 if Donald Trump loses.
See Also:
Daily Kos: MAGA zealots are reportedly planning Jan. 6 chaos—again
MMFA: Here’s the familiar playbook Trumpists will use to try and overturn the election if he loses
The Trump-backed ReAwaken America tour is holding an event in Michigan this week that will feature numerous speakers with histories of anti-Muslim rhetoric. Those commentators have said that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” bragged about helping Trump with his “Muslim ban,” and claimed that “Muslims are stockpiling weapons in Islamic centers.” They have claimed that “Islam is a terrorist organization,” that “Islam has been and remains the GREATEST threat to the Western Civilization,” and that ”Islam IS NOT our friend."
The ReAwaken America tour will be held in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on June 7 and 8. An online itinerary states that numerous Trump allies will speak at the event, including son Eric Trump; former Trump Defense Department official Kash Patel; former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; RNC attorney Christina Bobb; Trump attorney Alina Habba; and longtime ally Roger Stone.
Tour host Clay Clark has specifically touted his events as closely tied to Trump, stating that “Eric Trump is a good friend of mine” and “it's exciting … that Trump's inner circle is now going, they're all reaching out to our tour, to the ReAwaken America tour, to Gen. Flynn, to myself, to Kash Patel. And they're all saying, hey, can we come to the tour?” During a promotional appearance last month, Clark said “Trump’s entire inner circle will be there” at the Michigan event.
The pro-Trump and Christian Nationalist ReAwaken America Tour is visiting Michigan this weekend, and several speakers-- including Greg Locke, Michael Flynn, and Jackson Lahmeyer-- have had a history of pushing Islamophobic attacks against Islam.
