QAnon celebrates Musk takeover, pseudoscience at the Bundestag, and Chevron greenwashing

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Germany’s right-wing populist party, AfD, is putting pseudo-experts on display in official settings, giving credibility to scientific disinformation. The party has given these “experts” a platform during German parliament committee meetings to deny climate change and spread covid misinformation. Parliamentary party groups get to determine who they consider to be experts. “The problem is always that people who don’t come from the field at all and don’t even work scientifically in the field get a voice. And they are then put on an equal footing with real experts,” climate researcher Mojib Latif told Tagesschau.

QAnon conspiracy theorists are very excited about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. “They think they will be unbanned and can reach normies again with their theories,” journalist Stuart A. Thompson tweeted. “We cannot disregard the importance of Elon getting control BEFORE the midterms,” one QAnon influencer wrote, hailing the prospect of being reinstated on Twitter. “The timing is simply too perfect to be an accident.” I took a look at the Telegram “truth pills” conspiracy group I follow — the sentiment was the same. “We have literally been digitally herded into a sheep pen, an echo chamber and censored into obscurity,” the channel’s owner wrote, while others readied themselves for a return to the bird website. 

Anti-trans activists strike again, and this time they’ve targeted Latino voters in Colorado. Spanish-language pamphlets with anti-trans messages are arriving in the mailboxes of voters ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. The mailers allegedly come from the America First Legal Foundation, which is run by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, architect of some of the previous administration’s most draconian immigration policies. Typical anti-trans messages in the flyers include references to the removal of healthy genitals and deliberate falsehoods. “Joe Biden and progressive politicians and their leftist allies in government are promoting radical and irreversible gender experiments on children,” the flyers assert.

“We knew this was disgusting propaganda," a Colorado voter who received the mailer told reporters, suggesting it was sent to her and her husband “because we both have Hispanic last names.” These targeted messages appear to be part of a larger trend of Spanish-language misinformation in the U.S., particularly on social media where significantly fewer resources are devoted to combating misinformation in languages other than English.