Roger Stone protege Jack Posobiec has spread horrific lies and normalized antisemitism. He has 1.5 million Twitter followers.
By Jennifer Cohn, 11/27/21
One of MAGA’s most prolific influencers is a former naval intelligence officer-turned-far-right-agitator named Jack Posobiec. For those who are unaware, Posobiec is a protege of Roger Stone and a former correspondent” for One America News Network (OANN). He recently left OANN to partner with Turning Point USA, a non profit run by another far right agitator named Charlie Kirk. TPUSA targets kids (kindergarten through college) for far right brainwashing.
Alarmingly, Posobiec remains influential in right wing circles. He is a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast and has maintained 1.5 million Twitter followers despite having deceived right wing voters for years. On the off chance that some of these voters are unaware of Posobiec’s history of deception, I decided to prepare this compilation.
In 2016, Posobiec helped spread the lie that Hillary Clinton and other high profile Democrats were imprisoning and torturing children as part of a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizzeria whose owner, James Alefantis, was a large Democratic donor. The far right used the #Pizzagate hashtag to spread this lie on Twitter. On November 16, 2016, Posobiec broadcast a video of himself purporting to “infiltrate” the pizzeria to look for the staircase to the non-existent basement. After crashing a child’s birthday party in the back of the restaurant, staff ejected him. As reported by the Southern Poverty law Center, Posobiec’s twitter profile at the time falsely stated that he had previously worked for CBS News.
According Rolling Stone, “[t]he Twittersphere went wild” after Posobiec posted his video. “The previous day, our sample indicates there were roughly 6,000 tweets about Pizzagate. Now, it was closer to 55,000.” Alefantis, who began receiving death threats, “tried and failed to get Facebook and Twitter to remove the posts.”
A few weeks after Posobiec posted his video, a father of two who had been duped by the Pizzagate hoax, traveled to and entered Alefantis’s pizzeria with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and shotgun and fired several rounds into a locked closet containing computer equipment in an effort to “save” the non-existent child prisoners. Miraculously, no one was hurt. As reported by Mediaite and Salon, Posobiec later “tweeted out a false quote from D.C.’s police chief claiming that #Pizzagate had nothing to do with the attempted shooting.” Posobiec tried to claim that he had attempted to debunk Pizzagate, but his own viral video and subsequent statements show the opposite.
Ironically, in November 2017, Posobiec doxxed a woman who said that Republican senatorial candidate Roy Moore had sexually assaulted her when she was fourteen years old.
Posobiec has since partnered with a far right youth group called Turning Point USA, which has never bothered to comment on Adam Hageman, the credibly accused pedophile — and alleged member of an 18-person child pornography ring — who it employed as a full time event administrator from August 2019 through January 2020, per Hageman’s LinkedIn profile. (A Facebook post indicates that Turning Point USA also employed Hageman in 2018, presumably on a part time basis.) Hageman, who graduated college in 2018, somehow scored a job at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington D.C. in May 2020. He was indicted on November 17, 2020. The charges against him are horrifying. The Twitter account @mrspanstreppon has been following his case.
Hageman allegedly belonged to the same child pornography ring as Ruben Verastigui, a former Republican National Conference aide and GOP staffer who worked on Trump’s reelection campaign and “made incriminating online comments and shared pornographic images of children as young as infants.”
Meanwhile, it seems that Posobiec has learned nothing from his experience spreading Pizzagate, which was a hoax, unlike the situation with Hageman and Verastigui.
Posobiec has also:
- Falsely claimed that pipe bombs were planted during a protest of George Floyd’s murder [lie exposed by Will Sommer of the Daily Beast]
- Promoted the false claim that “Antifa” had derailed an Amtrak train [as reported by Michael E. Hayden, writing for Newsweek]
- Falsely claimed that Bernie Sanders had asked his supporters to “take down Trump” and that Loretta Lynch had called for “blood in the streets” (after Representative Steve Scalise was shot) [as reported by Ali Breland, reporting for Mother Jones]
- Falsely claimed that Comey had “said under oath that Trump did not ask him to halt any investigation.” [as reported by Jeremy Peters, writing for the New York Times]
- Planted a “Rape Melania” sign at a Trump protest (to make protesters look bad) [as reported by Joseph Bernstein, writing for Buzzfeed]
- Stated in a text message that he had chanted “assassinate Trump” at the same protest in an effort to goad protesters into copying him so he could film them. Posobiec later posted a video of a protester doing just that. [as reported by Joseph Bernstein, writing for Buzzfeed]
Posobiec has also been known to post photos of events and attach false narratives to them. Here’s one example posted by Erin Gallagher on Twitter.
Here’s another example posted by Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D. on Twitter.
Moreover, as reported by journalist Luke O’Brien, a “HuffPost investigation in 2017 revealed that @TEN_GOP, a pro-Trump Twitter account run by the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency, retweeted Posobiec more than any account in a large data set of significant conservative accounts. More than Hannity. More than Trump.”
Posobiec was also conveniently situated in Philadelphia during the 2016 Democratic National Convention protest, which was triggered by Wikileaks’ publication of hacked DNC emails. After one Wikileaks DNC email dump, Bannon’s publicist (Alexandra Preate) infamously texted Stone “well done.”
Posobiec was also “the first real amplifier of forged documents about [French President] Macron,” as further reported by O’Brien. He used the hashtag #MacronLeaks to amplify the forged documents, as well as real documents that had been hacked from Macron’s campaign. Six Russian hackers were eventually indicted for hacking Macron’s campaign. The same hackers were indicted in connection with attacks on Ukraine’s power grid.
Writing for the National Observer, journalist Sandy Gorissono, reported that the #MacronLeaks hashtag, from the moment Posobiec tweeted it, was the primary social media propellant of the hacked Macron data, according to cyber-intelligence analysts...” These analysts “also concluded that bots played a significant role from the outset. Some 40 minutes later, Wikileaks tweeted the link with Posobiec’s hashtag, and the Internet erupted.” (emphasis added)
Gorossino noted that, “[t]he appearance of bot activity, observed independently by both the DFRL and Belgian academic Nicolas Vanderbiest, from the first minutes after Posobiec’s tweet, strongly suggests a planned and coordinated campaign.” (emphasis added)
According to Gorossino, “[o]thers online also spotted anomalous activity patterns in two Macron hashtags used by Posobiec,” but she acknowledged that “[n]o evidence directly connects Posobiec to observed bot activity, and he denies using them.” (emphasis added)
Journalist Michael Edison Hayden, who writes for the Southern Poverty Law Center, has also chronicled Posobiec’s many shady activities. In April this year, Hayden reported that, the U.S. had “named an obscure website called ‘SouthFront as being the product of Russian military intelligence. Jack Posobiec linked to it 28 times in 10 months during the runup to the election, serving as a central source of its spread to Americans.” (emphasis added)
Posobiec has also “promoted ‘Foundations of Geopolitics,’ a book by the Russian neofascist Aleksandr Dugin that explains how to undermine American democracy by inflaming racial tension & chaos thru political sabotage & disinformation,” as reported by O’Brien.
Moreover, as Twitter user Jay MacKenzie pieced together in August 2020, Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian military intelligence officer, retweeted Posobiec “to advance the false narrative that ‘Ukraine not Russia’ [had] colluded in the 2016 election.” Kilimnik is the Russian military officer who received detailed polling data from Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort in 2016, as initially revealed in an improperly redacted court filing and later confirmed by special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
Posobiec has also used his online presence to spread antisemitic messaging. According to a report by Hayden, Posobiec has tweeted 1488 more than once (a symbol among white supremacists, which means “Heil Hitler”), as well as the “echo” symbol (triple parentheses), which is used to target Jews.
In April 2017, Posobiec also “amplified for his Twitter followers an event staged by the Polish neo-fascist political movement called Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny (ONR). ONR has a long history of promoting and emulating Nazism,” as reported by Hayden. ONR is shown in the image below. (Posobiec is not in the image.)
Here’s a photo of Jack Posobiec with former “alt right” leader Richard Spencer from 2016.
Moreover, as reported by journalist Michael E. Hayden, “[i]n April 2017, Posobiec interviewed Edward and Jeffrey Clark, two brothers with extensive neo-Nazi ties, at a rally thrown to support Steve Bannon and his position in the White House. A month later, he collaborated with the Clark brothers on a video project about the Seth Rich conspiracy theory for Canadian far-right propaganda outlet Rebel Media.”
As further reported by Hayden, “Posobiec’s neo-Nazi collaborators gained national attention following the Tree of Life terror attack in October 2018: Edward Clark committed suicide on the day of the attack, after an associate of his on the website Gab was accused of murdering the 11 Jewish victims at that Pittsburgh synagogue.”
The other Clark brother, Jeffrey, was soon arrested on “two charges of illegally possessing weapons after his relatives notified police about … his praise for suspected Pittsburgh [synagogue] shooter Robert Bowers,” as reported by Allegra Kirkland for Talking Points Memo. In a search of Jeffrey’s home, authorities found a “flyer from the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization linked to the suspects in five murders across the U.S. .. Atomwaffen believes that Jewish oligarchies and globalist bankers are bent on displacing the white race, and train its adherents to prepare for a coming race war. The group idolizes serial killer Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.”
Here are photos of Jeffrey Clark’s room. Yike.
Clark, who also attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (where protesters chanted “Jews will not replace us”) reportedly said that the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting “deserved exactly what happened to them and so much worse” and has called himself a “Nazi.”
There is much more to report about Posobiec, including his:
* promotion of the “Stop the Steal” hashtag beginning in September 2020,
* involvement in the MAGA3X “irregular warfare” campaign (led by Michael Flynn), and
* close relationships with Roger Stone (who mentored him in 2016 and 2017), Steve Bannon (on whose show Posobiec frequently appears), and Turning Point USA (which targets children from kindergarten through college for right wing indoctrination).
I hope to delve into some of these and other issues soon. Here is a preview.
Here are some fantastic articles on Posobiec, many of which provided the basis for this report:
- https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/07/08/twitter-gave-free-rein-jack-posobiec-publish-antisemitic-hate-and-disinformation, by Michael E. Hayden,
- https://www.splcenter.org/splc-investigation-far-right-oann-anchor-jack-posobiecs-rise-tied-white-supremacist-movement, by Michael E. Hayden,
- https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/08/24/donald-trump-jr-pictured-we-build-wall-event-neo-nazi-collaborator-jack-posobiec, by Michael E. Hayden,
- https://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/05/09/opinion/french-election-scandal-traced-canadas-rebel-media
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jeffrey-clark-dc-neo-nazi-arrested_n_5beb99ffe4b0caeec2bf24e5, by Luke O’Brien, @lukeobrien
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-vast-far-right-web-behind-the-hunter-biden-story_n_5fa0c7c7c5b63dc9a5bfffb9, by Luke O’Brien, @lukeobrien
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republicans-twitter-ali-alexander-stop-the-steal_n_6026fb26c5b6f88289fbab57, by Luke O’Brien, @lukeobrien
- https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/one-america-news-network-staff/, by Ali Breland, @alibreland
- https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/inside-the-alt-rights-campaign-to-smear-trump-protesters-as, by Jeremy W. Peters
- https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/federal-prosecutors-request-pretrial-detention-jeffrey-clark-neo-nazi, by Allegra Kirkland
Updates
12/7/21 — I supplemented this article to discuss how Posobiec helped spread the Pizzagate hoax.
