A contributor to The Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 governance plan intended to attend a white nationalist’s wedding, according to publicly accessible information the Data Lab reviewed.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of three articles examining how disinformation, and those peddling it, are impacting the election process.
Hatewatch has identified a previously pseudonymous author and ideologue whose writings in the 2000s and early 2010s heavily influenced the “manosphere,” a loose network of blogs, forums, websites and influencers who support rolling back women’s rights, reject feminism and advocate for rigid gender roles.
After Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in late May 2020, the U.S. and the world were on the precipice of a cultural reckoning on racial injustice, marked by mass protests that swept the world. The day after the murder, as video of the violence hit the news and tensions were about to ignite, Bedford County, Virginia, passed a resolution in support of “the militia.” A similar resolution had passed in Campbell County, Virginia, earlier that year.
Anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is engaged in an ongoing crusade to force private businesses to adhere to conservative Christian theology, in part by spreading the false narrative that private sector banks have been dropping conservative religious clients since the Obama administration. The conspiratorial claim, which ADF calls “debanking,” has arisen out of an ongoing effort from ADF to ban or disrupt private sector investments in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental sustainability.
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