Smear Shows How Unfounded Right-Wing Claims Go Mainstream

the unsubstantiated rumor that went from an anonymous post to the president’s lips in just three years.

Trump gave credence to a smear against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) when he told reporters that there was “a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother,” and that he was “sure that somebody will be looking at that.”

It was almost only a matter of time before the smear, an unfounded accusation which started in fringe corners of the internet, earned the ultimate far-right cosign of being mentioned by Trump.

The rumor appears to have started three years ago, but begun catching more serious online attention in recent months as Omar came under increasing right-wing attacks. According to an analysis of tweets by Zach Verdin, a partner at the pro-democracy independent research collective Guardians.ai, messages including the words “Ilhan Omar,” “brother,” and “marriage” had significant spikes in the spring. On April 16, after an article purporting to substantiate the claim was circulated by OANN host Jack Posobiec, it was mentioned in 7,880 tweets.

Last summer, on August 8, 2018, Alpha News and PJ Media published a story about the smear. Days later, a right-wing troll and former Project Veritas staffer crashed a campaign event supporting Omar before her election to Congress, accosting people there over the candidate’s supposed marriage to her brother.

August 13, 2018, there were 242 posts mentioning the smear. That same day, conservative outlets with a track record of spreading misinformation, including PJ Media again, published stories relaying the claim.

The next spike of over 2,250 tweets came on October 29 when a PJ Media story from August claiming to have school records substantiating the theory recirculated on Twitter. PJ Media followed up the next day by publishing a new story. And again, on October 27, Alpha News published another story pushing the smear. Another spike came on Feb. 14, after Posobiec tweeted about the claim, garnering over 2,000 retweets.

A jumping-off point for most of the Omar marriage claims appears to have been an August 13, 2016 post by Alpha News, a hyper-partisan Minnesota-based website that, according to the Star Tribune, has connections to the state’s Republican and tea-party groups.

The Daily Beast reported that it had found a slightly earlier instance of the claim being pushed from an anonymous poster with a history of false posts on Somali Spot, an immigrant diaspora forum. The poster, “AbdiJohnson” wrote a now-deleted thread from August 2016 titled “ILHAN OMAR MARRIAGE FRAUD EXPOSURE.” Despite lacking any evidence, Powerline, a popular right-wing blog based in Minnesota, picked up the claim and cited Somali Spot on August 12, 2016, according to an article examining the rumor published by Snopes in February.

All of this came to a head this week when Rush Limbaugh, who Trump is a professed fan of, said on Monday that Omar “married her brother illegally,” according to the Daily Beast. On Wednesday a reporter from the far-right outlet, OANN, asked Trump about the claim at a gaggle outside of the White House. His response provided an endorsement, and completed the smear’s ascension from an anonymous post on an obscure message board into a mainstream conspiracy theory with the backing of the President of the United States.

Decker says that right-wing sites don’t play by the same rules as mainstream outlets, operating with a completely different regard for what is and isn’t factual: For right-wing hyperpartisan outlets, things don’t have to exist to be reported. There only has to be the question of their existence, he says.

“It offers a lot of space to push out a lot of partisan theories. You can ask them as a question. ‘Did Ilhan Omar marry her brother?’ without the standard of having to prove that she did,” Decker said. “It purports itself as a noble truth-finding thing, but it’s actually a veil around Islamophobia and other bigotry.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/07/ilhan-omar-brother-marriage-smear/