I think by now we are familiar with the #PizzaGate conspiracy theory. Briefly, it was a theory that jumbled Wikileaks posts with anti-Clinton conspiracy theories in the blender of far-right Trump sites to come up with the claim that a pizza shop was running a Democratic Party pedophile ring in its basement. (General Flynn, Trump’s choice for national security advisor, and his son, who himself was a member of the Trump transition team, had a hand in spreading this fake news, including one post from the well-known false flag conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen, the man who started rumors about President Obama being a homosexual.)
Not surprisingly, this conspiracy theory quickly made the leap from the far right to the left, including the Green Party. The Facebook Page Jill Stein Activists, of 17,442 members featured a post on it. This in itself is not terribly significant. What is shocking is that only one person called the poster out on it. The content of most of the posts, interestingly, were not explicitly anti-Clinton conspiratorial; they simply reflected a conspiratorial and delusional mind-set. What follows are the posts as of 10 p.m., December 7, 2016.
The fact that such a shameful post not only remains in this group, but is only once directly challenged, and is widely shared and “liked” by so many Jill Stein Activist group members says a lot about the state of political thought in the Jill Stein movement.
A fellow-Green Party watcher, Michael Pugliesi (@Menshevik), sent me valuable information for this article.