MSNBC host Ali Velshi called out Fox News personality Sean Hannity on Tuesday for pushing a conspiracy theory created by a Russian troll farm, the weekend before the 2016 presidential election.
NBC News discovered how the Russians were able take advantage of America’s existing right-wing echo chamber to smear Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton with charges of satanism in the home stretch of the campaign. The reporting was based on 202,000 tweets were recovered from 2,752 Twitter accounts the House Intelligence Committee confirmed as Russian trolls.
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“I want to dig in a little more and show you exactly how the Internet Research Agency, this troll farm for Twitter was so influential,” Velshi explained.
“Take a look at these popular people that falsely accused Hillary Clinton and her campaign chair of being involved in a satanic ritual called spirit cooking,” he reported. “These lies spread so far, it showed up on the Drudge Report and in Sean Hannity’s account.”
MSNBC correspondent Ben Popken explained how Hannity’s actions were exactly what the Kremlin wanted.
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“You don’t know who to believe or what to believe. That’s one of the primary goals,” Popken explained. “You don’t know what’s real or what’s not. Don’t trust anyone, return to your tribal groups, stop communicating, and just break down and weaken the American conversation.”
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Ten people were reportedly arrested Sunday afternoon during an anti-Trump protest near High Line Park in Chelsea. Nearby, a pro-Trump caravan -- or "Trump Train" as it's become known -- "blocked traffic on the Whitestone Bridge "and were allowed to move on virtually unscathed, with no evidence of any enforcement action taken," AM New York reported.
The Trump Train also blocked the Governor Mario Cuomo Bridge.
When the caravan got to the Whitestone Bridge, the rally came to a stop on the bridge, with some demonstrators getting out of their cars and stopping traffic, despite having a police department escort.
The Washington Post deputy editorial page director Ruth Marcus remembers four years ago like it was yesterday; on the brink of the United States' voting in its first female president, something else happened.
"On Election Day four years ago, I wrote a column I assumed would never run. It was, as you have easily guessed, about the election of Donald Trump, and it was the back-up plan," Marcus wrote Sunday. "The column is painful to reread. I never imagined how terrible the next four years would be. My tone was alarmed, but, it turns out, not alarmed enough. The column underestimated not only how appallingly Trump would behave and how poorly he would perform, but also how consistently spineless the leaders of his party, in particular the elected leaders, would respond in the face of his cruel excesses and deadly incompetence."
President Donald Trump is headed to North Carolina Sunday, where his supporters were already cramming together for another campaign rally without social distancing.
While Kaitlan Collins reported from the site for CNN, the song "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic was playing on a loudspeaker for supporters to join.
"I do believe I hear the theme song to Titanic playing behind you," noted CNN host Brianna Keilar. "Sort of a weird moment going on as we discuss the politics of the home-stretch here."
For months, political analysts have used the comparison of the "unsinkable" Titanic to Trump and his 2020 reelection. There have been attempts to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic of the Trump reelection to no avail. And in the final days of the race, Trump's team has been compared to the quintet that continued to play music as the Titanic sank.