CIA did not buy Erdoğan government’s story on 2016 coup attempt

July 15, 2024

US Vice President Mike Pence and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Turkey on October 17, 2019, to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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Abdullah Bozkurt/Stockholm

Two inside sources from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have cast doubt on the Turkish government’s narrative regarding a coup attempt in 2016, which many believe was a false flag operation designed to consolidate the power of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

In his book titled “Never Give an Inch,” released last year, Mike Pompeo, who served as CIA director and secretary of state in the Trump administration, described the events of July 15, 2016 as a “purported ‘coup,'” casting doubt on the accuracy of the Erdoğan government’s narrative.

“Turkey has every incentive to align firmly with the West as well as a population that welcome it and benefit from it. Yet ever since a purported ‘coup’ in 2016, President Erdoğan had gone full Islamist-authoritarian. I spent countless hours with him and his national security advisor, Ibrahim Kalin, and intel chief, Hakan Fidan,” Pompeo wrote in his book.

When he visited Turkey for the first time as CIA director in 2017, he said he was subjected to a lengthy video of the coup events, apparently prepared by the Erdoğan government as a propaganda piece to convince foreign visitors of its narrative regarding the events of July 15.

He made another visit to Turkey in 2018 as secretary of state and then again in 2019, accompanying Vice President Mike Pence to persuade President Erdoğan to halt military intervention in Syria. During the visit Erdoğan asked for a few minutes alone with Pence, but the meeting lasted much longer than expected.

He described the trip as challenging and provided details in his book: “When we arrived at Erdoğan’s palace, he asked for a one-on-one meeting with the vice president for “a few minutes”. After about half an hour, I told our hosts that I needed to see the vice president, No dice. About twenty minutes went by, and now I was determined. Without permission, I walked down the hall and tried to push open the door of the room that Erdoğan and vice president were meeting in. It was locked. I then told my counterpart that we were going to break through the door- I was worried that Vice President Pence was being subjected to the same three-hour video of the 2016 coup that I had been forced to watch on my first visit to Turkey as CIA Director in 2017. The video was so long and obnoxious that I considered it a mental health issue!”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Turkey on October 17, 2018 to meet with Turkish President Erdoğan as well as his then-intelligence chief Hakan Fidan and national security advisor Ibrahim Kalin.

Another challenge to the Turkish government’s narrative came from a CIA operations officer who was in Turkey during the events of July 15. The interview, conducted anonymously, was published in April 2024 on the Homeland Security Today website, a nonprofit association operating under the Government Technology & Services Coalition. The interview was conducted by Mahmut Cengiz, an associate professor and research faculty with the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

“The Turkish military is well-trained, well-experienced in coups, and has advanced weapons. It would not have closed just one way of the Bosphorus Bridge and done a coup,” said the CIA officer, referring to the closure of one side of the bridge on the night of July 15. Court testimony from troops during coup trials revealed that soldiers were ordered to close one side of the bridge in response to a reported terrorist attack.

In April 2021 Nordic Monitor published classified intelligence reports filed by Turkish intelligence agency MIT and shared with the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) in the weeks and days preceding the coup attempt. The reports frequently highlighted the risks of imminent terrorist attacks on civilian and military targets in Istanbul and Ankara in late June and early July 2016. This context explains why many soldiers accused of involvement in the failed coup on July 15 believed they were responding to terror threats rather than participating in a coup attempt.

The intelligence messages published before July 15 vividly depict the operational environment of the Turkish military. These alerts, sent to every military unit across the country, indicated a heightened awareness that a terrorist attack could occur at any moment. The anxiety over potential attacks was compounded by a series of deadly terror incidents in the heart of the Turkish capital in 2015 and early 2016, including one at military housing units in Ankara, which deeply unsettled the security establishment.

“Initial assessment that it may have been a terrorist attack or a response to a terrorist attack, which may have included members of the Turkish military. During that time, there were multiple terrorist attacks throughout the country, carried out by ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] and others by PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party],” said the CIA officer, who was stationed in Turkey at the time.

US Vice President Mike Pence visited Turkey on October 17, 2019 to convince President Erdoğan to halt military operations in Syria.

The CIA officer also found it perplexing to witness the Turkish government’s swift removal of over 10,000 alleged members of the Gülen movement from various government institutions within just 12 hours of the alleged coup. ” … they [Turkish officials] must explain how they could produce a long list of suspects” in such a short period of time, he said.

Although the Turkish military itself said the military mobilization on July 15 was very limited and involved less than 1 percent of the troops, the Erdoğan government was quick to conduct mass purges of senior officers from NATO’s second largest army in terms of manpower. A total of 23,971 personnel, primarily in the officer ranks, were purged from the Turkish army without any military, administrative or criminal investigations.

The purge primarily targeted pro-NATO officers or individuals who had served in NATO assignments, at NATO headquarters in Brussels or at NATO-affiliated bases in the US, Norway, Germany, Italy and Spain. Evidence presented in coup trials revealed that the profiling of those to be purged was quietly carried out between 2014 and 2016 by Turkish intelligence agency MIT and its extensive network of informants.

The purge took a real toll on staff officers who were the backbone in the operational and planning capabilities of the army. Out of 1,886 staff officers, 1,524 were purged, which amounted to 81 percent of all staff officers. Overall, 10,468 officers or one-third of the entire officer ranks were removed from the Turkish military. What is more, two-thirds of all generals and admirals were summarily and abruptly purged or forced to retire.

Many senior officers were either on vacation or had nothing to do with the mobilization on July 15, yet they were arrested and imprisoned because their military background indicated they had served at NATO bases in the US, Italy, Spain, Germany or Norway in the past.

Pro-Erdoğan supporters rally at the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul on July 21, 2016. (Photo by YASIN AKGUL / AFP)

The purge following the alleged coup was not confined to the military but extended to the judiciary, police, intelligence agencies, academic institutions and others. More than 4,000 judges and prosecutors, including senior figures from the top appeals and constitutional courts, were immediately dismissed. This underscored the Erdoğan government’s intent to influence the narrative in coup trials, transform the Turkish judiciary into a political tool under Erdoğan’s control and suppress opposition and dissent.

Nearly 200 media outlets were shuttered, hundreds of journalists were arrested or forced into exile, thousands of NGOs were closed, and the wealth and assets of many businesses, totaling tens of billions of dollars, were seized and redistributed to Erdoğan’s associates and supporters.

According to a statement by Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç to the state-run Anadolu news agency on July 12, 2024, a total of 705,172 people have faced legal action, primarily through detention and arrest, since July 2016. Among them, 125,456 were convicted on bogus charges related to terrorism and/or the coup attempt.

The CIA officer noted that the Erdoğan government’s attribution of the coup to the Gülen movement served multiple purposes, including discrediting Fethullah Gülen, who has distanced himself from the Erdoğan government and opposed its use of Islam for political objectives.

Regarding the failure of the Erdoğan government to secure the extradition of Gülen, who has been in self-exile in the US since 1999, the CIA officer said, “From a legal standpoint, the Turkish government did not present the United States with any shred of legal evidence that proves Gulen was involved in the alleged coup attempt. Most of the documents presented would not stand a chance in any court of law. The documents were filled with emotional tirades and assumptions, which would not have been enough to indict Gulen, let alone extradited to Turkiye.”

Fethullah Gülen is seen visiting a hospital in Philadelphia for a checkup.

The officer confirmed the stance taken by the US Department of Justice regarding the extradition of Gülen. Despite repeated extradition requests and efforts by the Erdoğan government to secure Gülen’s temporary detention in the US, American officials resisted these demands. The Justice Department concluded that the Turkish requests did not meet the legal standards for extradition set by the US-Turkey extradition treaty and US law. Therefore, extradition could not proceed without additional evidence substantiating the allegations against Gülen.

Similar skepticism was also expressed by Turkey’s other NATO allies. The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was unconvinced that Gülen was behind the failed coup in Turkey. “Turkey has tried to convince us of that at every level but so far it has not succeeded,” Bruno Kahl, the head of the BND, said in an interview with Der Spiegel published in March 2017.

In April 2017 German intelligence expert and author Erich Schmidt-Eenboom asserted that Erdoğan, not the Gülen movement, was behind the failed coup in Turkey, citing intelligence reports from the CIA and BND. Speaking during a program on German public broadcaster ZDF, Schmidt-Eenboom said: “According to CIA analyses, the so-called coup attempt was staged by Erdogan to prevent a real coup. The BND, CIA, and other Western intelligence services do not see the slightest evidence implicating Gülen in instigating the coup attempt.”

The role of Turkish intelligence in coordinating what turned out to be a false flag coup attempt was indeed exposed during the coup trials, despite efforts by judges to suppress evidence, reject nearly all motions filed by the defense and refuse to summon intelligence and military chiefs for cross-examination. Multiple pieces of evidence surfaced pointing to the spy agency, revealing its involvement in the events.

In a highly unusual occurrence, MIT agents paid a visit and toured Akıncı Air Base, months before the July 15 events. The base was later alleged by the government to be the putschists’ headquarters.

Maj. Adnan Arıkan testified in court on January 14, 2019 that a team of MIT agents had visited Akıncı Air Base in May 2016, two months before the coup attempt, describing the visit as unprecedented and aimed at scouting the base for the purposes of the false flag.

Turkish F-16 fighter jets

The base command initially denied MIT’s request to visit the base, explaining that it was busy with some 100 F-16 combat pilots who were in training at the time. The MIT agents could have paid a visit to other air bases that were less busy in Ankara or other cities, but MIT’S insistence on visiting Akıncı was found quite strange, Arıkan said.

In the end Air Force Commander Gen. Abidin Ünal, a close confidant of President Erdoğan, with whom he met secretly outside the chain of command several times, allowed the visit, overruling the base command, and MIT sent a team of 70 agents to look around and scout the base. “What benefit did such a large delegation get from this trip? What were the duties of the people in this delegation and what were their activities on July 15, 2016?“ Arıkan asked.

“The MIT delegation toured almost every place on the base including the flight tower and locations where the 141st, 142nd and 143rd squadrons were deployed as well as hangars and ammunition depots. From a military point of view, this was really a reconnaissance. Those who understand a little bit about intelligence, those who know a little bit about the principles of unconventional warfare, understand the purpose of this activity very well,” Arıkan said.

During the coup trials, it was revealed that MIT had been secretly working with a lieutenant colonel in the air force to direct warplanes to buzz the capital city of Ankara in order to bolster the perception that a false flag was a real coup attempt by the Turkish Armed Forces.

Several senior military commanders testified during the trial that MIT agent Korkut Gül coordinated the activity in the tower at Akıncı Air Base manned by Lt. Col. Nihat Altıntop, the airfield operations commander. Altıntop was in the tower and was frequently on the phone with the MIT agent.

It was also revealed that Intelligence chief Hakan Fidan had lengthy talks with then-chief of general staff Hulusi Akar in the days leading up to the coup attempt, with their final meeting on July 14 lasting for hours. These encounters were described as highly unusual by Akar’s aides, who were instructed not to record his entry to military bases. Court evidence further revealed that the coup plan was executed by two senior intelligence officers, Sadık Üstün and Kemal Eskintan, both with military backgrounds who had been recruited by MIT long before the events unfolded.

Hulusi Akar (left) and Hakan Fidan

Üstün’s role in the false military bid to purportedly oust Erdoğan was exposed when he made one major mistake in timing. He prematurely identified the alleged leader of the putschists, triggering closer scrutiny of his role in the July 15 events.

During the court hearings of suspected putschists who knew him well, many came forward revealing further details of his role in the false flag operation. Immediately after the coup events, the Erdoğan government sent him off to Australia as a diplomatic attaché, out of the reach of defense attorneys who wanted to put him on the stand and cross-examine him. He never testified in court despite repeated motions filed by defense lawyers in multiple court cases and was not summoned to testify before the parliamentary commission set up to investigate the failed coup.

In a major blunder, Üstün prematurely named a decorated general, senior member of the Supreme Military Council (YAŞ) and former Air Forces Commander Akın Öztürk as the leader of the putschists when the general was still at his daughter’s home, located some four or five kilometers from Akıncı Air Base, the alleged headquarters of the putschists. Öztürk, who had no affiliation with the Gülen movement, was completely unaware of the plot unfolding around him and was playing with his grandchildren on the night of the coup attempt.

Eskintan, who oversaw armed jihadist groups in Syria on behalf of MIT, facilitated the clandestine transportation of unregistered firearms, ammunition and jihadist fighters from Syria prior to the events of July 15, 2016. The aim of this operation was to provoke a state of chaos, leading to tragic civilian and military casualties due to the ensuing violence.

In fact, bullets extracted from the bodies of civilians killed on the night of July 15 were found not to be registered in the Turkish military arsenal. Despite motions by defense lawyers representing alleged putschists, the government refused to conduct thorough autopsies, ballistic examinations or hand swabs to determine if a person had fired a gun from powder residue imprints in the palm.

Eskintan, who served as head of special operations within the agency, is known by the nom de guerre “Abu Furkan” in Syria. He has been extensively involved in collaborating with jihadist groups in both Syria and Libya, using them as proxies to advance the political objectives of the Erdoğan government.

It was also revealed that key statements extracted from suspects who endured lengthy torture sessions, threats of rape and harm to their loved ones were prepared in advance and fabricated. The foundational document used by a public prosecutor to initiate coup investigations and referenced in all coup trials was also scripted. This document listed events that had not yet occurred or did not happen at all, suggesting that the government had prepared the sequence of events well in advance to portray the limited military mobilization as a coup attempt.

Kemal Eskintan, Turkish intelligence agent who coordinated jihadist groups in Syria and Libya.

No evidence has surfaced showing that a commission named the Council of Peace in the Homeland (Yurtta Sulh Konseyi), which purportedly plotted the coup, was actually formed. Additionally, the members of this supposed council have never been identified.

There was no military plan to execute a coup on July 15, unlike past successful coups where detailed planning with numerous contingencies was typical. Prosecutors singled out F-16 fighter jets allegedly used to bomb parliament and other locations, but it was later revealed that these planes had not flown on July 15. Despite requests from the defense during coup trials, the government refused to share the jets’ flight data or the recorded video footage from the airbase.

There was only one directive transmitted through MEDAS, the Turkish military’s secure communications channel, that involved reassignments as part of the coup attempt. The message was approved by a brigadier general, which was unusual because such directives typically involved officers at higher ranks, such as full generals or admirals.

In other words the directive written by the lower-ranking officer, assigning duties to higher-ranking officers, violated the chain of command. It was later discovered that some of the ranks listed on the assignment sheet were recorded incorrectly, indicating that the document was prepared outside of General Staff headquarters and based on outdated data.

Many commanders in the field found the message suspicious, being outside the chain of command, and did not participate in the coup or the military mobilization, which was limited to only 1 percent of the Turkish military. The operation, designed to fail from the start according to experts, was contained easily and quickly.

Sadık Üstün, an agent of Turkey’s intelligence agency MIT, who runs secret ops in Libya. He is seen here giving a speech in Brussels in 2013.

A case involving the bombing of the Turkish parliament, allegedly by coup plotters according to the government narrative, collapsed in court when the defendants took the stand and refuted the prosecutor’s allegations.

The bombing of the nation’s parliament building, an unprecedented move that made no sense and lacked a motive, appears to have been staged by elements of intelligence as part of a plot to sideline legislative and judicial oversight and transform Turkey into an authoritarian regime run by one man and his inner circle.

Some likened parliament’s bombing to the Reichstag fire, an arson attack on the German parliament in 1933 that helped the Nazis consolidate their grip on the government and paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Conflicting expert reports, inconsistency in the timeline of events, ambiguous flight information data, missing crucial recordings, hastily conducted trial proceedings, suppression of evidence sought by the defense and an obvious mismatch between damage to the impact site and the type of bombs allegedly used all pointed in the direction of a false flag plot orchestrated by the Turkish government.

As a result of the false flag operation, Erdoğan further consolidated his power, transitioning the Turkish parliamentary democracy into an imperial-style presidential rule with no checks and balances. He exerted significant control over the legislative and judicial branches, appointing Islamists and nationalist/neonationalist allies to key government positions.

In the words of the CIA operations officer, who evidently has a deep understanding of Turkey, Erdoğan benefited personally from the coup events but inflicted serious harm on Turkey as a whole.

“The impact of the alleged coup attempt devastated Turkey’s chances of meaningful collaboration with the European Union and solidified all negative impressions or assumptions about Erdogan and his regime. Erdogan may have benefited in the short term but hurt Turkiye in the long term. Turkish people are less free and more afraid, their future looks more uncertain, and the firing of judges only weakens the judicial system and the world’s confidence in the Turkish government to afford its people any fair trials.”

EMOTIONAL PLAGUE

Schools across US hit with dozens of false shooting, bomb threats. Experts say it's a 'cruel hoax'




Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY
Sun, September 18, 2022 at 4:00 AM·6 min read

Across the country, dozens of schools went on lockdown. Students and teachers hid in classrooms. Police searched campuses. Parents panicked.

Each time, there was no threat. Officials say there's been a wave of false reports of school shootings and threats of violence over the last several days. USA TODAY found at least 30 active shooter false alarms and threats made at schools last week.

Authorities haven't publicly said the incidents are related, but experts say these intentional false reports have similarities. Their origins can be difficult or impossible to trace, but waves of false alarms are often the work of disgruntled pranksters trying to disrupt school or malicious bad actors trying to sow fear. And such hoaxes seem to increase around this time of year with students returning to classrooms.

"A red flag... is when you start seeing a chunk of these very similar threats in multiple cities in one area or region or state, and then others in another state. It's usually a red flag for what they call swatting," said Kenneth Trump, a school safety expert.

"Swatting" is making a hoax call to law enforcement to deliberately cause a large police or SWAT team response. Sometimes, an individual does it to single out someone specific, but the calls can also be done in waves as a trend to seemingly random targets.

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False school shooting reports in Florida, California and more

In Texas on Tuesday, Houston authorities received a call that said two shooters were rampaging Heights High School and 10 students had been shot. Police did a room-by-room search of the school. They found no trace of a shooting.

Similar false reports happened at several other schools in Texas and California that day.

On Wednesday, threats made on social media temporarily shuttered schools in the Thorndale Independent School District in central Texas, Eisenhower High School outside of Houston and a false shooting report put a Fresno, California high school on lockdown.

The same thing happened Thursday in Santa Barbara, California where another false shooting report was phoned in, and in Northampton, Massachusetts, where a school received a bomb threat on social media.

False shooting reports were also called in about schools in Florida, Arkansas, Oregon, Illinois, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Fear among students, parents during hoaxes

Seventeen-year-old Ray High School junior Amaris Sanchez talks on the phone outside the school after police responded to a false report of an active shooter on Friday, Sept. 16, 2022. The report prompted a lockdown before police determined it was false, and students were released early.

Amaris Sanchez, 17, was in English class at W.B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Friday when the school went on lockdown after police got a call about an active shooter on campus. It turned out to be false.

“I was mentally preparing myself, you know, whatever happens,” Sanchez told the Corpus Christi Caller Times, part of the USA TODAY Network. “It was a very scary moment because you don’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know at the moment if I was going to be OK.”

Belen Alaniz, a parent of two children at South Fort Myers High School in Florida where a false shooting report was made Friday, told the Fort Myers News-Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, she left work immediately when she heard about a shooting on campus.

"The first thought was leaving work and I didn't care," Alaniz said. "I told my manager, 'I'm leaving,' and I ran out the door. I didn't even clock out because that's how afraid I was."
FBI probing possible connections in slew of threats

Local FBI field offices in a few states are working with police to determine whether there is a connection between some of the threats.

“We’re working with local authorities and our field offices nationwide to determine if there is a link. Obviously, any hoax threat to a school can have serious consequences for students, teachers and others, as well as first responders, and can be prosecuted as a crime," said Laura Eimiller, a spokesperson for the FBI's Los Angeles field office.

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In the wake of the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 fourth-graders and their two teachers, schools and families across the country are on high alert and in a constant state of anxiety over school safety, Trump said. "People are on edge," he said.

Many of the recent false alarms have fallen into two categories, said Trump, who said he has no relation to the former president and heads the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services.

In some cases, threats are made by members of the local community, oftentimes teenagers or young adults who are disgruntled with the school or who might be trying to pull a prank or get out of a test.

"They're not realizing that once you press send, you can't put the threat back into the smartphone," Trump said. "And then when the ton of bricks hits, as happens in many other teen bad decisions, in this case, you're getting significant consequences."

Those consequences can include suspension, expulsion, criminal prosecution and serious fines. Just last week, authorities say teens were charged in Michigan and Florida for making school shooting threats.

The other category of swatting threats comes from malicious outside parties that often have no connection to the schools or the local communities. They can be generated from anywhere in the country or even internationally.

"The FBI is aware of the numerous swatting incidents wherein a report of an active shooter at a school is made. The FBI takes swatting very seriously because it puts innocent people at risk," the FBI said in a statement to USA TODAY.

Hoax threats drain resources, traumatize students and staff

Students and parents reunite at South Fort Myers High School after a threat of a gun was called in Friday afternoon. Lee County Sheriff's Office declared that there was no active shooter after officers searched the school. It was declared a "swatting" incident.

The false reports of active shootings can traumatize students and staff. They also drain significant resources from schools and local authorities.

"Non-credible school hoaxes are a serious offense that Los Angeles Unified takes seriously. Threats disrupt the educational environment, increase stress levels, and interfere with law enforcement's ability to protect schools from real dangers. It also poses a serious risk to our community, draining resources and occupying the time of critical first responders," the Los Angeles Unified School District said in a statement after a hoax report of shots fired at Hollywood High School last week.

The swatting threats can also pose a serious risk of injury. In 2017, California resident Tyler Barriss made a swatting call reporting a fake hostage situation after arguing with a fellow gamer playing "Call of Duty." He gave an address of an innocent, unrelated person who police ended up fatally shooting during their response. Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

An uptick in these types of calls isn't unusual this time of year, Trump said. There's also a spike in the spring, and a wave of copycat threats in the wake of any mass school shooting. But the last several days have seen a higher number of incidents.

"I don't like to use the word prank," Trump said. "It's not really a prank that we're seeing, it's really a cruel hoax."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Schools hit with fake shooting threats across US; FBI probes possible link

Who believes the most "taboo" conspiracy theories? It might not be who you think

White men with graduate degrees, a new study finds, are highly likely to hold especially noxious beliefs

By PAUL ROSENBERG

SALON

Contributing Writer
PUBLISHED MAY 5, 2024

LONG READ

Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr. (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

Like Henry Ford before him, Elon Musk has emerged as America’s top conspiracy spreader. But he’s hardly alone. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the conspiracy-theory candidate for president, and as Paul Krugman observed last summer, was attracting “support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley”:

Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has endorsed him, while some other prominent tech figures have been holding fund-raisers on his behalf. Elon Musk, who is in the process of destroying what Dorsey built, hosted him for a Twitter Spaces event.

Krugman didn't focus on conspiracy theory as such but on something closely related: distrust of experts and skepticism about widely accepted facts. He described this tendency as the “brain rotting drug” of reflexive contrarianism, quoting economist Adam Ozimek.

That wasn’t exactly scientific, but a new paper entitled “The Status Foundations of Conspiracy Beliefs” by Saverio Roscigno, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, is. Its most eye-catching finding is the discovery of “a cluster of graduate-degree-holding white men who display a penchant for conspiracy beliefs” that are “distinctively taboo.”

Specifically, Roscigno writes, “approximately a quarter of those who hold a graduate degree agree or strongly agree” that school shootings like those at Sandy Hook and Parkland “are false flag attacks perpetrated by the government,” which is “around twice the rate of those without graduate degrees.” Results are similar for the proposition that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust “has been exaggerated on purpose.”

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These findings are striking for many reasons. Most obviously, they go against the common belief — long supported by research — that conspiracist beliefs are more common among lower-income and less-educated individuals. They also challenge the formulation popularized by Joseph Uscinski that "conspiracy theories are for losers," and should be understood as “alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with foreign threat and domestic power centers” that “tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.”

Roscigno’s findings don’t refute previous formulations so much as reframe them by adding greater nuance. For example, he finds that conspiracy beliefs are more common both among the less educated and less affluent, on the one hand, and the more educated and more affluent on the other. Secondly, he identifies the subjective group experience of threat as a key element, rather than objective “loser” status.

Even more important, his paper reveals how much more we have to learn about conspiracy theories from a rigorous social science approach. Conspiracy theory is much more mainstream, varied and ubiquitous than previously assumed, and there’s much more to be learned from studying it as an integral part of the sociological landscape. Like the recently published paper I previously covered here, this model breaks with dualistic approaches that in some sense mirror what we find troubling about conspiracism — that is, painting the world in black-and-white rather than in many shades of gray. I recently spoke with Roscigno by Zoom about his findings and where they might lead. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Your paper has a dramatic finding regarding "a cluster of graduate-degree-holding white men” who tend to embrace conspiracy beliefs that are "distinctly taboo." But that's just the tip of the iceberg, because there's a whole host of questions that raises, including the role of sociology in this research, not just psychology. What led you to do the research behind this paper — what kind of questions, concerns or interests were driving you?

One of the things that motivated me was precisely the observation that sociologists hadn't really been part of the conversation. I've been interested in this topic for a while. I grew up spending a lot of time online, seeing a lot of conspiratorial stuff, having a lot of conversations with my friends about that kind of stuff. In the past couple of years, it seems like a lot of it has hit the mainstream. I remember when QAnon stuff first started fermenting online. I remember seeing posts where people were analyzing and trying to break down these “Q drops,” and sending them to my brother, like “What's what's going on here? This is something totally new.”

When I got to grad school, I thought, well, there's got to be some sociologists doing work on this. I definitely found a cluster of cultural sociologists starting to do some really interesting stuff that inspired me a lot. I also found the work of people like Joseph Uscinski and others in political science who had been doing some work and some theorization that I thought could be pulled into building a sociological approach to this.

What did you think you might learn in doing this study?

The basic question was just which groups of people tend to hold which conspiratorial beliefs. Maybe it seems like an overly basic question, but I was really struggling to find anybody in the literature that had engaged it. There's a lot of talk about who believes conspiracies in general, but there's less attention to how different groups might be sympathetic to different claims. And I had observed in my time online that some conspiracy spaces are older or younger, in some there's more white people or more women, and I wanted to know what the variation was. That was the starting point, and then building a more sociological approach to the topic, looking at inequality and demographic variation, and then moving on to other questions.

So what did you find that confirmed that basic sociological intuition that there were significant differences, and what did you find that surprised you?

The belief "that school shootings like Sandy Hook and Parkland are false-flag attacks ... and that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis has been exaggerated on purpose — these two particular claims are disproportionately held by white graduate-degree-holding men."

The one pattern I really highlight is, as you said, that there's this cluster of graduate-degree-holding white men who are more favorable towards almost all the beliefs that are listed. But there are some that they are much more favorable toward, where there's a larger gap between them and those without graduate degrees. I describe these as "taboo claims." Specifically, that school shootings like those at Sandy Hook and Parkland are false-flag attacks perpetrated by the government, and the other one is that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II has been exaggerated on purpose. These two particular claims are very disproportionately held by white graduate-degree-holding men.

In addition, if you look a little bit deeper into some of the other survey research and even my own data, you can also see a concentration of medical-themed conspiracy beliefs among African-Americans, and among the less educated. Those were the two points of variation that I have been able to highlight. I suspect there are many more. But here the goal of the paper was just to demonstrate that variation exists. It wasn't to capture all of it.

That second variation is unsurprising, given that African Americans have been very ill-treated by the medical establishment. If you told most white people about the Tuskegee experiment 20 or 30 years ago, they'd think that was a conspiracy theory. But the finding about this group of more educated white men was more surprising. What have you speculated the reasons might be?

The most convincing explanation I found is that essentially this is about access dynamics. The typical theoretical focus when it comes to conspiracy beliefs tends to be toward attitudes or dispositions. I think the role of attitudes is relevant here, and I think these attitudes are fueled by a perception of threat among graduate-degree-holding white men. Maybe they see social changes that are going on, they hear how the tone of certain conversations is changing, they see how the job market is changing. So there's a perception of threat. That's where you get the attitudes.

Now the other side is the access. There's a couple of things that could be going on, but it's hard to believe that Sandy Hook was perpetrated by the government unless you've heard that claim made in some level of detail, not just seeing reporting about Alex Jones but hearing somebody really make that claim. It's even hard if you don't know what a false-flag attack is. So I suspect that graduate-degree-holding white men, particularly via online channels, are are more likely to encounter this information, more likely to run into it. We also know from scholarship on rumor that certain rumors tend to be concentrated in certain demographic networks. There's a rumor that will primarily be spread within white networks or Black networks, and that's what's going on here.

I think it's also important to take survey results about something as deep as beliefs with a grain of salt. A question I get a lot when I present this research is, “Oh, they don't really believe that, do they?” That's not really a question that a survey can necessarily answer. At the very least, we know they are checking off a survey box way more often. So if we read it with that interpretation, we can maybe say that this is kind of a transgressive act. They’re saying, “I know that I'm supposed to be checking off the other box, but I'm going to check off this one.” To me, it's demonstrating a kind of transgressive expertise, a special access to what Michael Barkun calls “stigmatized knowledge.”

So that sets off two things for me. One is the question of how you would go about digging deeper into that, testing if that's true. Related to that, it seems that survey research could be improved to ask people whether they have communicated these beliefs to others, are they deeply held beliefs that help them make sense of other things, questions like that. Have you given any thought to that?

"A question I get a lot when I present this research is, 'Oh, they don't really believe that, do they?' That's not a question that a survey can necessarily answer."

Some of those things can be ascertained through survey research. I like the idea of asking, "Have you ever spoken to somebody about this?" or "Is this something you hold privately?" But I'm wary that survey research will give us all the answers we need. If you really want to figure out if somebody really believes something, I think you have to talk to them. You have to learn about how they live their life. You have to learn about their social relationships. It’s just like if we were studying religious beliefs. I think you have to engage at a deeper level to figure out whether that is true belief.

There's a lot of room for improvement on surveys, though. One of the biggest rooms for improvement in surveys is on the issue of prompt selection. It seems that this pattern that I noticed didn't get noticed before because nobody was asking these taboo questions on the surveys. Mostly they ask questions about COVID, and maybe a few other things. But if the prompts substantively change the findings of the survey, and nobody seems to be giving much conscious consideration about which prompts are included, there's definitely room for improvement.

You also found similar, though less dramatic, gaps between the highly educated and less educated for four other unpopular beliefs. So there's seemingly a general predisposition to conspiracy beliefs there. What other factors do you think might be involved?

I've gone back and forth, but I think there’s something I've decided on. There's this question of whether it's that they prefer unpopular [beliefs], or is it a question of, like, these things are taboo? They know these things are transgressive, they know these things violate a deep social norm. I'm pretty sure it's the taboo.

But this can be pretty easily tested. There are beliefs that are very unpopular but are not particularly taboo. If you ran a survey that included something like belief in a flat earth, if I'm right we wouldn't expect white grad-degree men to be high on that. When I say “taboo,” I basically mean that if you said something like this in public you would face some kind of social sanction. If I told my co-workers that I thought the earth was flat, they might laugh at me. If I told my co-workers that I thought the Holocaust was exaggerated, it would be a very different story.

Do you have some thoughts on what research you might be able to do to make more sense of this?

One thing that could be done is looking at a really wide variety of prompts and seeing what kinds of patterns are going on. In this one, I'm working with 15 claims and trying to draw a common thread. If you worked with a much larger set of prompts — I know some of those data sets exist — I think it would let you articulate that a little bit more clearly.
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But that's only one way to approach the issue of typology. You could start at the point of "there's a group of people that tends to hold these beliefs," and try to describe those particular claims. You could also start by looking at the claims and trying to find narrative threads between them. You could also define the claims by the relation to some authority, which is kind of what I'm doing with the taboo stuff. So I'm not quite sure how to address that yet.

You also found roughly equivalent subsets of respondents who held both of those claims [about school shootings and the Holocaust] and who disagreed with both, providing a convenient comparison. They differed in terms of extremism and social media use. So what can you say about those differences and how they interrelated?

I already mentioned the question of access. I think social media use gets at that access question. Those who agree report higher levels of social media use by every platform, particularly by anonymous image boards like 4chan and 8chan. So at the very least, if we think about people stumbling into these beliefs kind of accidentally, if you're on 4chan more often you're a lot more likely to run into one of these. In addition, there's some interesting work being done on information-seeking strategies online, and some sociologists have pointed out that people with different social positions have different strategies that may lead to different results. So a possibility relative to social media is that white men with graduate degrees, when they're doing research, the steps they’re taking may be different from some other groups, so they're more likely to end up at a certain point.

Relative to political extremism, that's a bit more complicated. There's definitely some exciting research that's going on about radical political beliefs and their relationship to conspiracy beliefs. Something I want to point out is that the white grad-degree men who agree are way more on the political edges, which maybe is to be expected. They're identifying as extremely liberal or extremely conservative way more often. We get this U-shape. These two taboo claims, at least according to this measure, are not right-wing phenomena. There is a big cluster of people that identify as very liberal and agree with these things as well. I suspect this measure isn't picking up on everything it could be. In the time that I've spent in politically radical spaces online and within the conspiracy milieu, the way people identify politically — there's a lot of variety to it, and “liberal” and “conservative” descriptors may not resonate with a lot of these people. But at the very least we know that people on the political fringes tend to be more charitable towards these claims.

"White grad-degree men who agree [with 'taboo' claims] are way more on the political edges, which maybe is to be expected. They identify as extremely liberal or extremely conservative way more often. We get this U-shape."

Over time, erosion of social trust seems to be related to a rise in conspiratorial beliefs. It would make sense, just in terms of people who feel skeptical of the existing system, for that to show up more, regardless of whether they are left-wing or right-wing. Do you have any thoughts about that?

This is something else I think that sociologists have to bring to the table: What's with the structural context of these situations? There's some evidence that countries with higher levels of social inequality, higher levels of corruption, tend to demonstrate or report higher rates of these beliefs. We know that it's tied to structural conditions. The collapse of institutional trust is a huge piece of this. If you look at graphs of trust in the federal government over time, or trust in the press over time, they're really at historic lows.

That has to play some role. Because when we talk about conspiracy beliefs, in the simple definition we’re talking about claims of elites doing something in private, but we’re also talking about something that counters the official narrative. So in a situation where historically few people trust the producers of the official narratives — in part the government, in part the press — we would expect people to be more doubtful of those things.

But when we talk about social trust, I don't necessarily think belief in conspiracies means a low level of social trust in general. I think it means a low level of trust in particular institutions. But in order to believe a conspiracy you have to hear it. It's probably from somebody you know, and you have to trust them when they tell you that. There's a rumor scholar, Gary Fine, who says that when trust in institutions is questioned, trust in informal networks is revealed. So there is a social trust that exists. It's much more decentralized. It's not in a particular institution and it’s social trust, rather than institutional.

One thing your paper suggested to me was looking at how beliefs in conspiracy theories co-vary, meaning what beliefs go together or tend to negate each other, and how that might change across status lines. I was specifically interested in those white male graduate-degree holders. Are there any beliefs that they accept less than other people? Do you have enough data to look at that yet?

I think enough data exists that we can probably answer that, but I don't know for sure. In this particular data set, there are none that they were less likely to believe in. For very mainstream beliefs — the idea that “one percent” of economic elites control the government and economy, the idea that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered — these are beliefs held by 50% of the general population and also held by about 50% of white men with graduate degrees. In this data there wasn't a single belief that these white male graduate-degree holders were less interested in. That was stunning to me. I was actually very surprised by that..

But it's possible. We have these two types that I'm describing, the medical ones and the kind of taboo ones. It's possible there may be some medical ones that white men with graduate degrees are less likely to agree with. But it is hard to say, because this data clearly suggests that graduate degree holders are more into all of these claims.

We spoke earlier about “prompt selection” and things that perhaps aren't being asked about. Do you have anything specific in mind?

There's a lot of things that aren't being asked, definitely more than are being asked. At least in this paper, my starting point is the simple definition of the conspiracy belief which is, again, basically that a group of elites are plotting something in private. If that's our conceptualization, then the universe of possible things to ask about is massive.

For instance, if that's our conceptualization, why don't we ever ask about institutionally verified conspiracies? For instance, Watergate fits that definition just fine, COINTELPRO fits that definition just fine, Tuskegee fits that definition just fine. To me there seems to be a mismatch, an unacknowledged element to the definition, which is that it has to counter some official narratives. But even if we include that second part in conceptualization, there’s still tons and tons of stuff.

"Why don't we ever ask about institutionally verified conspiracies? For instance, Watergate fits that definition just fine, COINTELPRO fits that definition just fine, the Tuskegee experiment fits that definition just fine."

I read a very interesting paper this past week. This came out as a content analysis of TikTok, but it’s specifically about the conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift is secretly gay, and she's closeted and dropping all these hints in her tracks. Maybe people will say that isn't a politically consequential conspiracy theory, but it’s within the realm of conspiracy claims by any definition.

I've even heard that and I don't follow Taylor Swift news at all. It's clearly out there.

Yeah, if I had to guess, if you polled the demographics it would disproportionately be women. So that makes me think, OK, a lot of studies emphasize that men are more into this stuff. Does that have something to do with the prompts that are selected for the surveys? How does that come into play?

I bring up the Taylor Swift example to demonstrate that the realm of things under this blanket is, like, so large that trying to generalize any kind of research findings to the entire world of claims about elites doing sneaky stuff ends up being very difficult. I suspect there are claims that graduate-degree holders are more into that we haven't quite figured out yet. I suspect there are claims that women are more into that we haven't really figured out. I'd like to see a lot more, a) alignment between the conceptualization and operationalization and b) experimentation within that. We have a big world of things that fit this conceptual framework.

We’ve talked a bit about “collective identity” as a useful concept and you've said “it applies to all varieties of conspiracy cultures." Could you expand on that?

To be totally sociological, collective identity is useful in understanding all kinds of cultures more generally. Within conspiracy cultures, there's a couple things going on. If we talk about rumors, if I tell you some finding before it's published, it feels like you're in the know, it feels like you have a piece of secret information. It's exciting, it feels good. It also creates a bond between people that I think can be part of identity. So that's one level.

There's also the level that gets to the question of institutional distrust. There's a general sense in this country that, you know, people like us — whatever “us” means — are being screwed over by elites in some faraway place. We can't really see what's happening over there, we're not in the rooms where these decisions are made. I think there's a very general sense of that. And who “people like us” ends up being defined by is, I think, very important, because different people are going to understand it in different ways. There’s a general sense that there's opaque power that's screwing us. We don't really know where it is, or what's happening. You hear that kind of sentiment a lot in this milieu.

There's also collective identity more overtly. If I make the claim that white people are being replaced in this country — which to me is one of the more consequential conspiracy claims — I'm invoking a very specific identity, saying, “Hey, we collectively are under threat and need to do something about it!” So some conspiracy claims, even in the claim themselves, name the in-group or name the out-group. It will say who the “we” are, who the mysterious “they” is. Identity plays a key role there as well.

What stands out for you as the next steps? What questions need answering that follow from what you've done so far?

"A lot of people in the conspiracy milieu feel like they're being studied from afar by people that aren't talking to them at all. I think that absolutely adds to the resentment. If you were an expert in Amish culture, you'd probably want to spend time talking to Amish people."

To me, a lot of the most interesting questions are about how, when and why these beliefs matter, which I do think are better suited to qualitative methods. There's been very little in the way of qualitative inquiry into conspiracy cultures, with the big exception of Jaron Harambam, whose work has been very inspiring to me. Back to this matter of collective identity, something he points out that I find intriguing is that there are all kinds of conflicts over identity, even within the conspiracy milieu. There are people who understand themselves as aiming to get new converts to the movement, and other people who understand themselves as basically having given up and clocked out. There's all kinds of variation within the community.

Also, part of my reasoning for wanting to do qualitative research is that I feel like a lot of people in the conspiracy milieu feel like they're being studied from afar by people that aren't talking to them at all. I think that absolutely adds to the resentment.

I saw a tweet recently from somebody who is loosely in these circles that basically said, “How come none of these conspiracy theory experts are even talking to us?” If you are an expert in Amish culture, you'd probably want to spend a lot of time talking to Amish people. If I were studying the student movements that are going on right now, I'd probably be down at the encampments hanging out. It's not like believers in conspiracies are a small or fringe minority group that's super-hard to access. Some of these claims are totally mainstream, and even for the more taboo ones that you might envision would be hard to do qualitative research into, they're concentrated among graduate-degree holders. So in some sense those of us in academia are exceptionally well positioned to engage these communities at a closer level. So I definitely would like to do qualitative research in the coming years.

Finally, what's the most important question I haven’t asked? And what's the answer?

I can tell you a question that I get whenever I present my research to my undergraduates, but I'm not going to answer it. I give this whole presentation and at the end they’re like, “What are the ones that you believe in?” That's not my role as a sociologist. [Laughs.] So that’s my favorite question.

UN experts urge all countries to recognise Palestinian statehood

Reuters
Mon, June 3, 2024 

Smoke rises following Israeli strikes during an Israeli military operation in Rafah


GENEVA (Reuters) - A group of United Nations experts called on Monday for all countries to recognise a Palestinian state to ensure peace in the Middle East.

The call came less than a week after Spain, Ireland and Norway officially recognised a Palestinian state, prompting anger from Israel, which has found itself increasingly isolated after nearly eight months of war in Gaza.

The experts, including the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, said recognition of a Palestinian state was an important acknowledgement of the rights of the Palestinian people and their struggle towards freedom and independence.


"This is a pre-condition for lasting peace in Palestine and the entire Middle East – beginning with the immediate declaration of a ceasefire in Gaza and no further military incursions into Rafah," they said.

"A two-state solution remains the only internationally agreed path to peace and security for both Palestine and Israel and a way out of generational cycles of violence and resentment."

Israel's Foreign Ministry did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

With their recognition of a Palestinian state, Spain, Ireland and Norway said they sought to accelerate efforts to secure a ceasefire in Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza.

The three countries say they hope their decision will spur other European Union states to follow suit. Denmark's parliament later rejected a proposal to recognise a Palestinian state.

Israel has repeatedly condemned moves to recognise a Palestinian state, saying they bolster Hamas, the militant Islamist group that led the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel which sparked the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.

The conflict has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's health ministry. Israel says the Oct. 7 attack, the worst in its 75-year history, killed 1,200 people, with more than 250 hostages taken.

(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Ed Osmond)



Photo of Palestinian flag flying at UN headquarters was taken in 2015, not 2024

Tommy WANG / AFP Hong Kong
Sun, June 2, 2024 

A photo of the Palestinian flag after it was raised at the United Nations headquarters in New York for the first time in September 2015 has resurfaced in social media posts that falsely claimed the flag was "finally flown" by the global body in May 2024. The old photo was shared against the background of the ongoing war in Gaza, which has revived a global push for Palestinians to be given a state of their own.

"Just today, the Palestinian flag was finally flown at UN Headquarters! History will always remember this as the momentous day when the flag of the State of Palestine was raised over UN Headquarters," read part of the simplified Chinese caption to a photo shared on Weibo on May 24, 2024.

The photo appears to show the Palestinian flag flying alongside the UN flag outside the headquarters of the international organisation in New York City.

Screenshot of the false Weibo post, captured on May 30, 2024

The same photo was shared alongside similar claims on X here and here.

The claim circulated seven months into the war in Gaza, which was sparked by Hamas' unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,189 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed at least 36,439 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry.

The Gaza bloodshed has revived calls for Palestinians to be given their own state.

Spain, Ireland and Norway formally recognised a Palestinian state on May 28 in a coordinated decision that infuriated Israel. The move brought the number of UN member states to have recognised a Palestinian state to 145 out of the 193.

However, the photo shared online is old -- it has circulated since September 2015.
2015 photo

Reverse image searches and subsequent keyword searches on Google found the picture was published by the German photo agency IMAGO on September 30, 2015 and credited to "IMAGO/Xinhua" (archived link).

Its caption read: "NEW YORK, Sept. 30, 2015 -- Palestinian flag (lower) flies together with the United Nations flag at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Sept. 30, 2015."

Below is a screenshot comparison of the falsely shared image (left) and the photo published on IMAGO's website (right):

Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared image (left) and the photo published on IMAGO's website (right)

The Palestinians raised their flag at the United Nations for the first time on September 30, 2015, after the General Assembly voted earlier that month to allow the flags of Palestine and the Vatican -- who have observer status -- to be raised alongside those of member states.

The flag of the Holy See was raised for the first time five days earlier, on September 25, 2015 (archived link).

Google Street View imagery from May 2016, June 2019 and August 2021 shows the Palestinian flag continued to fly outside the UN headquarters.

"As a Permanent Observer State, Palestine’s flag does fly outside the UN Secretariat building in New York, although it is slightly separated from the UN Member State flags and is not part of the alphabetic line-up," read an article posted on the UN's official website on April 18, 2024 (archived link).

AFP has fact-checked other misinformation around the Israel-Hamas war here.

Buffalo shooter’s previous threat raises red-flag questions

ABOLISH THE SECOND AMENDMENT

GUNS DON' KILL PEOPLE

PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE USING GUNS

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST, MICHAEL TARM and JAMES ANDERSON

 In this July 20, 2012, photo, a row of different AR-15 style rifles are displayed for sale at the Firing-Line indoor range and gun shop in Aurora, Colo. A warning about possible violence last year involving the 18-year-old now being held in the Buffalo, New York, supermarket shooting is turning attention to New York's "red flag" law.

 (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Less than a year before he opened fire and killed 10 people in a racist attack at a Buffalo grocery store, 18-year-old Payton Gendron was investigated for making a threatening statement at his high school.

New York has a “red flag” law designed to keep firearms away from people who could harm themselves or others, but Gendron was still able to legally buy an AR-15-style rifle.

The “general” threat at Susquehanna Valley High School last June, when he was 17, resulted in state police being called and a mental health evaluation at a hospital. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told Buffalo radio station WKSE-FM that Gendron had talked about murder and suicide when a teacher asked about his plans after school ended, and it was quickly reported but the threat wasn’t considered specific enough to do more. No request was made to remove any firearms from the suspect, New York State police said Monday.

The revelations are raising new questions about why the law wasn’t invoked and how the effectiveness of “red flag laws” passed in 19 states and the District of Columbia can differ based on how they’re implemented.

WHAT ARE RED FLAG LAWS?

Typically, red-flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders, are intended to temporarily remove guns from people with potentially violent behavior, usually up to a year. In many cases, family members or law enforcement must petition the court for an order, though New York is a rare state in which educators can also start the proces

Removing weapons for that long, however, requires a hearing in which prosecutors must convince a judge that the person poses a risk. Most states also block the person from buying more guns during that period.

Red-flag laws are often adopted after tragedies. Florida did so after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that killed 17 students. Law enforcement officials had received numerous complaints about the 19-year-old gunman’s threatening statements.

“This is actually one of the very few policies we have available where it actually builds on this vanishingly small point of common ground between public health people who want to stop gun violence and gun owners and the gun industry,” said Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry at Duke University who researches gun violence.

But, Swanson added: “The issue is it’s so easy for people to get guns anyway. ... It’s not a one-thing problem, and there’s not one solution to it either.”

WHAT DOES NEW YORK’S FLAG LAW SAY?

The 2019 law allows family members, prosecutors, police and school officials to ask courts to order the seizure of guns from someone who poses a danger to themselves or others. The subject of the court action is also prohibited from buying guns while the order is in effect.

An explanation of the law on a state government website says the law made New York the first state to give teachers and school administrators the ability “to prevent school shootings by pursuing court intervention.”

The online description, crafted before the Buffalo shooting, expresses optimism about the law’s impact, saying it would both safeguard gun rights “while ensuring that tragedies, like the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, are not repeated.”

The question is why one wasn’t used in Gendron’s case.

WHAT’S THE PROCESS OF REQUESTING AN ORDER?

Someone seeking an order files a simple, two-page application with the primary county court. It’s considered a civil case, with no criminal charge or penalties involved.

A judge decides whether to issue a temporary order on the same day the application is filed, according to a New York courts website. If it is issued, police take the guns.

A hearing, involving witnesses and evidence, is set within 10 days. If the judge decides to issue a permanent order, it would remain in effect for a year. The petitioner can ask for an extension.

HAS THERE BEEN PUSHBACK TO THE LEGISLATION?

Some opponents of the red-flag legislation in New York feared it could lead to false accusations by family members or others with a grudge against a gun owner.

Legislators in New York and elsewhere were aware of the potential legal pitfalls and drafted laws in such a way to avoid constitutional challenges, said Eric Ruben, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who also teaches law at SMU Dedman School of Law in Dallas.

Among the safeguards in New York, he said, is a relatively high standard of proof — clear and convincing evidence — required to secure a final, yearlong order, he said. The law also includes penalties for false applications.

DO RED-FLAG LAWS SAVE LIVES?

The law, Ruben said, “poses significant obstacles” for someone under a red-flag order wanting to buy firearms because they are entered in the background check system as long as the order is in effect. “It wouldn’t stop someone from illegal purchases, however.”

Experts in red-flag laws contend that the laws have undoubtedly saved lives, be it in cases involving planned mass shootings, suicides or potentially deadly domestic violence cases.

“Certainly, red-flag laws are more than anything else aimed at trying to stop mass shootings,” said Dave Kopel, research director at the Colorado-based libertarian think tank Independence Institute, which supports gun rights. “But they can be and should be used for more than just that. A handful of killings or suicides is horrific enough.”

Swanson worked on a study that estimated Connecticut prevented one suicide for every 10 to 20 people subjected to gun seizures. A 2019 California study found it was used in mass-shooting threats 21 times. Maryland authorities granted more than 300 petitions in the three months after its law went into effect, including at least four threats of school violence.

That research shows the laws have worked, said Allison Anderman, senior counsel for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, though absolute proof can be tough.

“It’s very hard to prove a law is effective based on things not happening,” she said. “We still have a problem where we have more guns than people in this country, and this patchwork system of laws and our overall weak laws.”

India’s opposition leveraged caste and constitution to shock Modi in election

Shivangi Acharya and Krishn Kaushik
Thu, June 13, 2024 




 Awadhesh Prasad greets his supporters inside his house in Ayodhya


By Shivangi Acharya and Krishn Kaushik

AYODHYA/VARANASI, India (Reuters) - A seminal moment in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's unsuccessful campaign to retain his parliamentary majority occurred days before India's marathon election began in April.

Speaking in the constituency that includes the Hindu temple town of Ayodhya, lawmaker Lallu Singh said that his and Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was seeking a supermajority in parliament's lower chamber to make material changes to the constitution.

Opposition parties latched onto Singh's remark to assert, without evidence, that the BJP would amend modern India's founding document to strip Hindus at the bottom of the caste hierarchy of access to affirmative action policies.

The attack line hit a nerve - splitting the Hindu vote and ending the BJP's decade-long dominance in the country's most populous state.

Opinion polls had pointed to a landslide in Ayodhya's home state of Uttar Pradesh and nationally but when results came through on June 4, the BJP had lost 29 seats in the state - nearly half of all the party's losses nationwide.

"It hit the people like fire," said Awadhesh Prasad of the opposition Samajwadi Party (SP), whose base comprises Muslim and lower-caste voters in Uttar Pradesh. He successfully wrested the constituency anchored by Ayodhya from Singh, who had held it since 2014.

Despite the BJP's best efforts to debunk the emerging narrative, the damage was done.

"The prime minister and other leaders tried to explain to the people, but by then their mood was set," said Dileep Patel, a state BJP official in Varanasi. Singh declined to comment.

Reuters interviewed 29 party leaders and workers from the BJP and rival parties, four analysts and 50 voters for this story. They described how lower caste concerns about affirmative action, along with a shortage of jobs, and complacent BJP activists combined to tip the scales in Uttar Pradesh, which sends the most lawmakers to parliament.

After a decade of electoral near-invincibility that combined economic success with a narrative of Hindu supremacy, Modi's party was reduced to 240 seats nationwide. He was able to form a third government only with the help of allies, some of whom have a reputation for political fickleness.

It was a reminder that BJP cannot take Hindu votes for granted.

THE SUPERMAJORITY CALL

Ayodhya was supposed to be the safest of seats.

In January, Modi inaugurated a grand temple there to the deity Lord Ram in a ceremony that sparked national euphoria. It also fulfilled a decades' long pledge used by the BJP to rise from India's political margins into a major force.

Singh's speech made no mention of taking benefits from lower castes and Modi's aides have frequently downplayed concerns about changes to the constitution, which guarantees school and government job quotas to historically disadvantaged castes and tribal groups, both still among India's poorest.

But it quickly spread on social media, fuelling an opposition campaign.

SP chief Akhilesh Yadav wrote on social media that the BJP wanted to end the quota system and keep underprivileged segments of society "as their slaves."

At election rallies, Yadav's ally and the opposition's main figurehead, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, began whipping out a pocket-sized copy of the constitution, warning it was under threat.

The message was echoed in media advertisements and by the regional party's workers in Uttar Pradesh, which a SP spokesperson described as 600,000 strong.

India's castes have co-existed uneasily with each other for millennia.

The BJP was long considered a bastion of upper-caste Hindus, but Modi, who belongs to a lower caste, had previously made inroads with marginalised groups, according to analysis by the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS).

He has sought to unite Hindus by shifting focus from traditional notions of caste, instead putting the spotlight on the poor, youths, farmers and women - which he calls the four biggest castes in modern India. In power, Modi successively backed a man from a lower caste and a woman from a tribal group for India's largely symbolic presidency.

A relatively united Hindu vote in the last two national elections allowed the BJP to sideline India's nearly 200 million Muslims and overcome longstanding concerns around unemployment, inflation and rural distress.

Sandeep Shastri, coordinator of a program on Indian elections at CSDS said the number of people voting primarily on Hindu ideology appeared to have plateaued in 2019.

This year, BJP won just 54 of the 131 seats reserved for candidates from underprivileged groups, down from 77 in 2019. It won eight of the 17 reserved seats in Uttar Pradesh, compared to 14 the last time.

Dharmendra Yadav, a 30-year-old in Varanasi constituency who comes from a lower caste, said he believed the BJP "would have ended the reservations."

"When the opposition raised the issue of the constitution, it just verified it for us," said Dharmendra, whose surname indicates a caste affiliation with the SP's Akhilesh, who he is not related to.

Dharmendra previously backed the BJP but went for the opposition this year.

"Caste politics still has a major influence in the Hindi belt," state BJP official Patel said, referring to states across central India that have been BJP's stronghold since 2014.

WHERE ARE THE JOBS?

Surveys suggest Modi remains the world's most popular elected leader.

But this year, Modi's personal majority in his seat, centred around the holy city of Varanasi, shrank by more than 300,000. He retained his constituency with the lowest margin of any sitting premier in over three decades.

"The BJP heavily relied on the prime minister's leadership to ... win votes and also maybe to camouflage problems that people are facing," said researcher Shastri.

Among those problems is a lack of jobs created over the past decade.

Young voters like Dharmendra had backed BJP in a landslide in 2014, when Modi promised to create 20 million jobs a year nationwide. The pledge has not been fulfilled.

Dharmendra said he had taken numerous exams for white-collar government jobs, highly prized for their security and benefits. In February, nearly 4.6 million people applied for 60,000 constable vacancies in Uttar Pradesh, only to have the BJP-run state government cancel the exam after the test was leaked online.

Banaras Hindu University political science professor Ashok Upadhyay said the exam leak, which was not the first and was repeated in March, gave young Indians, who have grown up in an increasingly unequal country, a sense that the job selection process was unfair.

Adding to the BJP's electoral missteps, some voters and BJP leaders said the party faltered because they had assumed another landslide victory and were dismissive of issues that were important to voters.

DON'T WANT VOTES?

The redevelopment of Ayodhya into a temple town was preceded by the demolition of thousands of homes and stores. Nearly two dozen locals, including BJP supporters, told Reuters they were dissatisfied with the compensation offered.

A SP voter who identified himself by his first name of Shakti said he was part of a group that had lobbied BJP leaders for support.

"They said they didn't want these 10,000 to 20,000 votes from local businessmen, they would win anyway," he said.

Another Ayodhya trader confirmed Shakti's account and local BJP leader Veerchand Manjhi said he had also found it difficult to get locals' issues addressed by authorities.

District magistrate Nitish Kumar said in response to Reuters questions that the compensation process was fair.

Ratan Sharda, a senior leader of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP's ideological parent, wrote in the June 16 issue of its "Organiser" magazine that the result was a "reality check."

BJP activists and leaders were "happy in their bubble, enjoying the glow reflected from Modiji’s aura, they were not listening to the voices on the streets," he wrote.

BJP RESILIENCE?

The BJP retains many strengths, including a leader with popular backing across the party, control of Uttar Pradesh's state government and the backing of the influential RSS, said Delhi University professor Chandrachur Singh.

Analysts such as CSDS's Sanjay Kumar noted that the BJP did well in states where there wasn't a strong local party like the SP in Uttar Pradesh, which was able to capitalise on regional discontent.

And while Congress tried to nationalise its message that the BJP posed a threat to affirmative action, caste-based messaging held less appeal in urbanising India's many cities. "In urban areas, caste is overridden by class identities," Singh said.

The BJP's Patel said that the party had launched a detailed review of the loss and was confident of winning state elections in Uttar Pradesh that are due by 2027.

"The BJP either wins, or it learns," a BJP worker in Ayodhya told Reuters.

(Reporting by Shivangi Acharya in Ayodhya and Krishn Kaushik in Varanasi; Additional reporting by Rupam Jain, Krishna N. Das and Saurabh Sharma; Editing by Katerina Ang)


Clip shared with false claim 'Pakistan flag hoisted' after opposition won in Indian mega-state

AFP India
Thu, June 13, 2024

A video of a religious flag atop a truck has been shared in posts that falsely claimed residents of Bareilly city in India's Uttar Pradesh state waved the flag of Muslim-majority Pakistan to celebrate the failure of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to secure a majority in the state after the country's general election. The flag in the video differs from Pakistan's national flag, and the video circulated online weeks before the results of India's marathon national polls were announced.

"Bareilly became Pakistan!!" read part of a Hindi-language post shared on social media platform X on June 5, 2024.

"As soon as Samajwadi Party won 37 seats in Uttar Pradesh, people from the peace loving community in Bareilly waved the flag of Pakistan," the post continued, using a phrase that Hindu hardliners sarcastically employ to refer to Muslims.

A video attached to the post shows people sitting atop a truck waving a green flag that bears the star and crescent moon symbol of Islam.

Superimposed on the video is an image of Pakistan's national flag, and a person speaking over the footage says: "The Pakistan flag is waving in Bareilly, policemen are also standing there."

Screenshot of the false X post, captured on June 6, 2024

The post surfaced after the results of India's marathon general election were announced, showing that the opposition Samajwadi Party had won more seats than Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP in Uttar Pradesh -- India's most populous state and a bellwether for national elections

It was the first time in 15 years that the BJP had failed to win the most seats in the state, the heartland of India's majority faith that had formed the bedrock of the BJP's parliamentary strength.

Modi will remain in office but with a substantially reduced mandate and needing to rely on coalition allies to govern.

The video was also shared with similar claims elsewhere on X and on Facebook.

But it does not show people in Bareilly waving Pakistan's national flag.
Not Pakistan's flag

The flag shown in the video is different to Pakistan's national flag; it does not have a vertical white stripe close to the hoist and the star and crescent symbol faces in the opposite direction.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the flag in the video (left) and a picture of Pakistan's national flag from AFP's archives (right):

Screenshot comparison of the flag in the video (left) and a picture of Pakistan's national flag from AFP's archives (right)

Moreover, a reverse image search of keyframes followed by keyword searches led to the same footage posted by an Instagram user on May 19 (archived link).

The Instagram post was shared more than two weeks before the results of India's weeks-long general election were announced on June 4.

A representative for Bareilly's police force told AFP the video "has no connection with the results" of the poll.

The officer said the video is from a religious procession that took place in 2023.

"The flag seen in the video is not the flag of Pakistan but is related to the religion of Islam."

AFP has debunked more misinformation around India's elections here.