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🔴 HANGINGS, GUILLOTINES AND GITMO: GOING BEHIND REAL RAW NEWS' SENSATIONAL (AND FABRICATED) HEADLINES
Must be a disinfo article of course, a kind of smoke and mirrors thing where with RRN the smoke's blown up the reader's ar*e and the mirror's there to reflect that they're so special in being privy to such classified intel.
Flat earthers could tell you more I'm sure, and God knows what a well informed bunch they are.
Not.
Still, each to his/her own.
Keep it to yourself though.
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This illustration shows a screenshot of the homepage of Real Raw News as it appeared on July 12, 2021, with edits added to emphasize the false nature of the headlines.
After the Pentagon mandated the COVID-19 vaccines for the U.S. military in late August, a viral story describing an intense backlash among service members exploded online.
"27 U.S. Air Force Pilots Resign Over Covid-19 Vaccination Mandate," said the headline on the Sept. 1 article. The story spread widely, shared by the likes of journalist Lara Logan of Fox Nation, Fox News’ streaming service, and George Papadopoulos, an aide to former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The story of mass Air Force pilot resignations was fabricated, however. It originated on a website that publishes fantastical, demonstrably false stories of arrests, trials, hangings and executions, with headlines such as "James Comey Loses His Head to Guillotine," "Hillary Clinton Hanged at Gitmo" and "Military Executes Tom Hanks." The site is one of several conspiracy-oriented pages set up in recent years by a person who goes by the pseudonym "Michael Baxter," a PolitiFact investigation found.
The website is called Real Raw News, and it bills itself as an "independent publisher" that "explores content often avoided by the mainstream media." Since the site started publishing in late December 2020, it has posted over 150 articles, spinning a narrative of military arrests and executions that reads like a wish list for diehard believers of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The articles routinely rack up thousands of likes, shares and other engagements across social media, according to BuzzSumo, an audience metrics tool.
A Sept. 1, 2021, story from Real Raw News made a Pants on Fire false claim about Air Force pilot resignations.
Written in the style of authentic news stories, Real Raw News articles often come in several installments, like the five-part series detailing an alleged military tribunal held for Hillary Clinton.
Site author "Michael Baxter" portrays himself as a reporter with access to privileged information. He cites unnamed sources who he claims are in day-to-day contact with Trump, and others who he claims are at Guantanamo Bay. He promises to check back with them regularly. He attributes direct quotes to named people. He issues corrections when he makes spelling errors or gets someone’s title wrong. A disclaimer added to its "About Us" page in April says the website contains "humor, parody and satire," yet Baxter has defended the accuracy of his writings dozens of times in the comments sections on various articles.
"We don’t publish fake news," he wrote in one such comment.
"The headlines can read like pretty straight news reporting, if you’re at all kind of susceptible to believing that this is really happening," said John Gregory, a senior analyst at NewsGuard, a service that reviews and rates websites according to various journalistic criteria. "It doesn’t have some of the telltale signs of hoaxes or misinformation that we might see on other sites."
In the alternative universe of Real Raw News, former Vice President Mike Pence has been on the run for months in an escape that saw him seek asylum in Qatar and take a bullet to the chest. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, hasn’t gotten his COVID-19 vaccine. The military has arrested dozens of public figures — including Hunter Biden, former Attorney General William Barr, and billionaire Bill Gates — and several of them have been hanged, sent to the guillotine, shot by a firing squad or otherwise executed.
Of course, none of that is true. But these headlines haven’t stopped the site from building a following. Though the website has been publishing for less than 10 months, mentions of Real Raw News, realrawnews.com and related hashtags have more than doubled across social media, broadcast and traditional media, and online sites within the last two months, according to an analysis from Zignal Labs Inc., a media intelligence firm. Several stories from that time frame got thousands of shares on Twitter and Facebook.
"We have this assumption that most people can spot that this is a fake news site, and therefore it’s not impactful," said Rachel Moran, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. "But I just don’t think that’s the case anymore."
After debunking more than a dozen claims in 2021 that originated on Real Raw News, PolitiFact decided to investigate the website and who was behind it.
We found that the "Michael Baxter" behind Real Raw News previously ran at least three other websites and associated YouTube channels that, while now mostly purged from the internet, also promoted far-fetched conspiracy theories — about everything from the mythical planet "Nibiru" to alien visitations.
Public records and other publicly available information show the author’s real name is Michael Tuffin, 53, who lived in Texas as recently as July and has also lived in New York.
PolitiFact asked Facebook why the Real Raw News page was permitted to post misinformation and conspiratorial content on the platform. In response, Facebook notified us that it had removed the page from its platform for violating the company’s COVID-19 policies. Google also banned ads from at least two Real Raw News stories that promoted coronavirus and vaccine misinformation after PolitiFact inquired about them. Real Raw News reacted on Twitter, telling readers to follow its account on Telegram.
"Happy doxxing, and thank you for the publicity," Tuffin added in his only email response to PolitiFact.
PolitiFact used open-source intelligence leads — including details from public records, archived webpages, social media postings, and the comments sections on Real Raw News — to stitch together the backstory behind this growing source of online misinformation.
A trail of 'twisted truth'
Real Raw News was created in April 2020, according to domain registration records. It started publishing in late December, with stories alleging that FEMA had purchased assault rifles from China, and that Trump had indicted Fauci.
The website first came onto PolitiFact’s radar in January, when it falsely claimed that the Marine Corps had rejected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s request for inauguration security. Around the same time, Real Raw News also caught the attention of NewsGuard.
As part of its review of Real Raw News, NewsGuard reached out to the email address that was connected to a PayPal account on the website. (The PayPal link is no longer listed on the site.) NewsGuard received a reply from an email account named "Twisted Truth."
"It's a satire site, exposing the insanity of rabid Trumpists (who lack the mental wherewithal to distinguish fact from fiction)," the email from Twisted Truth said, according to NewsGuard.
Searching the internet for "Twisted Truth" and "Michael Baxter," PolitiFact discovered a website called twistedtruth.net, as well as a corresponding YouTube page. At least one since-deleted article from Real Raw News, about the mythical planet Nibiru, was copied word-for-word from a previous article on Twisted Truth. The article’s headline on both sites: "France to Nuke Nibiru."
The author of Twisted Truth, which has not posted an article since February 2020, also goes by "Michael Baxter." And his biography on Twisted Truth matches what he wrote on Real Raw News. The "About Us" page for Twisted Truth says the "Michael Baxter" on its bylines is "a former mainstream journalist" who worked for the New York Post, the Village Voice, and the Dallas Morning News, and that he "is also a former English teacher." The "About Us" page for Real Raw News says Baxter is "a former mainstream journalist and former English teacher."
We could not confirm Baxter’s employment history or journalism credentials. The New York Post declined to comment, and PolitiFact’s inquiries to the Village Voice and the Dallas Morning News went unanswered.
Our research into the Twisted Truth website led us to a 2017 YouTube video that showed an interview with a "Michael Baxter" associated with yet another website and YouTube channel.
A June 30, 2017, YouTube video shows a live discussion between David Greig and "Michael Baxter" (YouTube/dazzathecameraman).
The video of Baxter was on a YouTube channel belonging to David Greig, a New Zealand man who uses his account to debunk online claims. In an interview with PolitiFact, Greig said that he was inspired to begin his own online fact-checking in 2011, after New Zealand had a deadly earthquake, prompting the spread of numerous fear-mongering claims.
Among the claims Greig checked were several relating to conspiracy theories about the hypothetical planet Nibiru. Sometimes called Planet X, Nibiru is a supposedly undiscovered doomsday planet that was going to catastrophically crash into Earth at the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012.
In 2017, Greig learned that Baxter, wearing a camouflage face covering, had made a video challenging him to a live debate about Nibiru and other related topics. At the time, Baxter was running a website called someonesbones.com, along with a YouTube channel called "Nibiru News." One article that Real Raw News published in January — "Delta Force Raids Biden Compound in Ukraine" — very closely resembled a similar story posted on someonesbones.com in 2017, which PolitiFact rated Pants on Fire.
