“Cleaning out the barn?” WTF kind of statement is THAT?
Oh, yeah, one made by a right-winger, and probably one who calls himself pro-life.
:smack:
I knew before I opened the thread that it had to be Wohl and Burkman. Literally 2 of the dumbest ‘political operatives’ around. At some point they are going to piss off the wrong people and pay a heavy price - that day can’t come soon enough.
Apparently not, considering how difficult it is to find a news report about her claim. Could you link to an article about the original claim? I must have completely missed it. The only thing I can find now are articles about the woman retracting her claim, but I can’t find anything about the claim itself.
I found one! Literally. Just one. I ran a date limited search that filtered out results dated after May 1st.
This news outlet received a press release containing the details of the allegation around April 20th. They were clear that the accusation had absolutely no credibility and the people and companies referenced “didn’t seem to exist”. The gist of the blurb they ran on April 20th was “Someone is trying to run a smear campaign against Fauci”, not “Fauci accused of assault”
I guess the thousands of other news outlets that received that press release just completely ignored it. They must get lots of crap like this that they have to weed through.
Honest question:
Is there a law that was actually broken? She didn’t report it to the authorities so you can’t file it under making a fake report. If it was illegal to pay someone to make false statements, half of the right wing media would be in jail. This may fall into that annoying category of “that’s gotta be illegal” without actually being so.
Yeah, because these are the same people who, the next time some allegations come forth against somebody on their side, are going to try deflecting it by basically insinuating that, well, people get paid to say stuff like this all the time, so can we really believe that… It’s a near perfect lowlife tactic: either you get your mud to stick—that’s a win. Or, you create a precedent for this sort of mud-slinging you can use to discredit legitimate claims in the future.
Dr. Fauci is probably regretting being so public a face of the scientific effort to counteract Covid-19, seeing as how so many nefarious characters and loons are coming out of the woodwork in an attempt to discredit him.
The worst example is Judy Mikovits, a disgraced former researcher, who’s promoting bizarre accusations against Fauci as well as nutty claims about coronavirus (didja know that wearing a mask makes it more likely that you’ll be infected? You didn’t? Sheeple!!).
*"In “Plandemic,” Mikovits (claims) that the coronavirus was somehow cooked up in collusion between United States government labs and Chinese researchers. A narrator voice-over suggests Fauci was somehow involved in the scheme.
A Health and Human Services spokesman who represents Fauci declined to comment to The Daily Beast. But in 2018, Fauci addressed Mikovits’s claims in an email to debunking website Snopes, denying her accusations and saying he had found no proof of the supposed email where he threatened to have her arrested.
“I have no idea what she is talking about,” Fauci wrote.
Still, Mikovits’s grudge against Fauci has been embraced in the coronavirus era by Trump fans and coronavirus truthers, who reject the doctor’s dire pronouncements about the virus."*
The Mikovits “documentary” which has become wildly popular on social media (until They suppressed it) emerged at the same time as publication of her latest book, which supposedly is selling like hotcakes on Amazon.
More info here (the comments alone will make you despair of humanity).
Well, I was sorta looking for an excuse to drink heavily tonight… So, that’ll do.
Right after you have a vat of Malmsey. If this thread isn’t for you, have you asked yourself why you should be hear throwing up all over it? Is this some kind of Boof?
Ho-lee shit.
Are there actual Dopers who thought bobot’s post was serious (in the sense of prioritizing a need for Diana Andrade to return the money to Wohl and Burkman)?
I need a drink. :dubious:
This thread was what I expected until madmonk pulled a trident out of his jacket and killed a guy.
It’s okay, man. I had one for him. And then one for you. We’re all good here, I think. Now, I’m gonna have one for me.
Exactly right. I’ve always thought there should be a corollary to Gresham’s Law, which is bad money drives out good. I’ve seen Gresham’s Law in action during my own lifetime, when the coins in the US switched from mostly silver to mostly copper. Silver coins disappeared like Keyser Soze.
Bad information drives out good. They spew so much nonsense and disinformation and outright lies out there that people throw up their hands and don’t know what to believe, so they believe nothing. The signal to noise ratio is all skewed to the noise side. That’s the whole aim of the plan, to convince people that nothing can be trusted, nothing can be relied upon.
It works pretty well, the depressed voting rates demonstrates that.
So is extortion of the President of a foreign country that is desperate for military aid.
You missed the best part. The reporter clearly thought this sounded like some Jacob Wohl BS, and actually got him on record denying he had anything to do with it.
And, believe it or not, the narrative gets even better after that. Everyone should read this article!
Yeah, I was going to go back and edit the post to add that, but the board timed out. By the time I could get back in the edit window was long closed and I had moved on to other things.
Thanks. The article really is a hoot. Date limited searches are the best, they are great for finding background on current events,
Dehydration is nothing to joke about. Have that drink, then another to wash down the first.
Depends what you mean by “reporting.”
Making a false police report is indeed a crime. Did the woman in question actually make a report to the police? Did the two assholes in question conspire or pay her to do that? None of the stories I’ve read suggest that a police report was filed accusing Fauci of sexual assault.
So far, it seems that this is just a public accusation. False reporting, in this sense, is not a crime. if it’s defamatory, it can be a tort, but is generally not a criminal offense.