This is the first of a series of visits I’ve made to Facebook pages that at least nominally support Dr. Jill Stein. I am visiting these sites to get a sense of the rank and file supporters of the Jill Stein campaign. If you believe I am being unfair, or writing a “hit piece,” pay a visit to these sites and see for yourself.
The first such page I visited is How Hillary Stole the Nomination. It was founded around February 2015, documenting what it considered to be Clinton interference in the primaries. Its notes started with two or three active followers (repostings or comments or likes), but this rapidly soared to hundreds and then the lower thousands within a month, but quickly settling into the lower hundreds and even tens in the following months.
The group’s cover photo starts off with an undocumented assertion about the vote totals. In fact, a detailed tally gives a return of 55% to 43%.
In early cases, although the group’s members willingly suspended their critical faculties, a number of members did their own research and challenged the group’s leader. See this post. But this was in July 27, 2016, when there were still some people willing to raise questions.
I challenged some recent acts of disinformation in which the group’s host engaged. He did not bother responding to my criticisms. I further challenged him about resorting to right wing disinformation sites. The response is illuminating. What also struck me is how little the site members seemed to care to challenge my evidence.
Here is where I challenged the group’s leader. He posted a meme circulated widely on right-wing sites, supposedly of a rally in Pennsylvania on July 30.
There follows the “dialogue”. Let the reader judge.
What strikes me the most about this “exchange” is how impervious the group’s proprietor and participants are to the demonstrably fraudulent character of their claims and their high level of group think and conformism.
A few random shots to illustrate the mentality of the group’s host’s conspiratorial world view. Consider this comment:
Note the poster’s comment about “Russia, China and the rest of the free world.” And the accusation that “Hillbots” are “wearing tin foil hats.” And, of course, note the way the group’s leader chimes in to confirm this member of his constituency.
Here is a popular meme among the Bernie or Bust crowd. The alleged New York Times quote does not show up under a Lexis Nexis search.
The group’s leader obtained this quote from the Twitter feed of Martha J. Fort (@marthajfort), who published it in June 27, 2016. A Google search for the text of the meme shows the earliest appearance of the meme was June 7, 2016:
The anonymous host of this group spends almost no space on the Jill Stein campaign. Nor is there any indication that he is interested in social issues such as ecology, anti-racism, women’s rights, student debt, etc. The one exception is the issue of war and peace. There is almost no mention of Donald Trump, and even when he is mentioned, it is simply to depict him as a tool of Hillary to get the people to vote for her. His truly dangerous and frightening positions are scarcely mentioned at all. On the whole, the host relies mostly on leftist, even if fringe, sources, though most his posts are memes or whatever thoughts come into his head. He does not chiefly rely on rightist sources.
The overall sense one gets from this group is a closed circle of people of hardened Hillary haters with a strong tendency to believing in conspiracy theories or just plain absurd and blatantly false claims as long as they confirm their shared belief. In this regard, the best that can be said is that fact checkers are a rarity there. This group is fairly sizeable–over 30,000 and climbing as of August 31, 2016, although its rate of increase is sharply declining.
I had a fruitful conversation with a Jill Stein activist. In the course of it, it became clear to me that the Jill Stein campaign is a different phenomenon than the Bernie or Bust movement. I therefore changed the title of this piece accordingly.