George Soros conspiracy theories surge as protests sweep US

DAVID KLEPPER and LORI HINNANT, Associated Press•June 21, 2020


America Protests Soros Misinformation
FILE - In this June 21, 2019, file photo, George Soros, Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Foundations, looks before the Joseph A. Schumpeter award ceremony in Vienna, Austria. Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist who has long been a target of conspiracy theories, is now being falsely accused of orchestrating and funding the protests over police killings of black people that have roiled the United States. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak, File)

They say he hires protesters and rents buses to transport them. Some say he has people stash piles of bricks to be hurled into glass storefronts or at police.

George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist who has long been a target of conspiracy theories, is now being falsely accused of orchestrating and funding the protests over police killings of Black people that have roiled the United States. Amplified by a growing number of people on the far right, including some Republican leaders, online posts about Soros have skyrocketed in recent weeks.

They have been accompanied by online ads bought by conservative groups that call on authorities to “investigate George Soros for funding domestic terrorism and his decades-long corruption.”

Soros, 89, has donated billions of dollars of his personal wealth to liberal and anti-authoritarian causes around the world, making him a favored target among many on the right. The Hungarian-American, who is Jewish, has also been the subject of anti-Semitic attacks and conspiracy theories for decades.

Such hoaxes can now travel farther and faster with social media.

Related: George Soros Accuses Facebook of Plotting to Reelect Trump

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Over just four days in late May, negative Twitter posts about Soros spiked from about 20,000 a day to more than 500,000 a day, according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London think tank focused on extremism and polarization, found an even more pronounced jump on Facebook, where there were 68,746 mentions of Soros in May. The previous record of 38,326 Soros mentions was in October 2018, when angry posts alleged he was helping migrant caravans headed to the U.S.

The new wave began as nationwide demonstrations emerged over George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police. Some insist Soros financed the protests, while others say he colluded with police to fake Floyd's death last month. But all available evidence suggests the protests are what they seem: gatherings of thousands of Americans upset about police brutality and racial injustice.

“I think partly it’s an attempt to distract from the real matters at hand — the pandemic, the protests or the Black Lives Matter movement,” Laura Silber, chief communications officer for Soros’ philanthropic Open Society Foundations, said of the theories. “It’s pretty demeaning to the people out there protesting when someone says they’re all paid. It’s insulting.”

A look at some of the claims:

— Soros pays protesters. No evidence has been presented to suggest demonstrators were paid by Soros or his organizations. It’s a new take on an old hoax: past versions claimed Soros paid for a long list of other events, including the 2017 Women’s March held just after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

— Soros pays to transport protesters. Last week, a photo claiming to show two buses emblazoned with the words “Soros Riot Dance Squad” got widespread attention. The photo was cited as proof of Soros’ involvement in the protests, but it was bogus. The original photo showed two unmarked buses; someone later doctored it to add the language supposedly implicating Soros.

— Soros organizes stashing piles of bricks near protests. Several false claims involving stockpiles of bricks have been debunked, and no evidence has turned up showing they were purposefully placed.

Experts who study conspiracy theories say the new claims about Soros are a way to delegitimize the protests and the actual reasons behind them. Some see anti-Semitism, or a new spin on the age-old hoax that a shadowy cabal of rich men — whether it’s the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Bill Gates or Soros — is manipulating world events.

The theories have had real-world consequences. In 2018, amid news of caravans of migrants making their way toward the U.S.-Mexico border, online misinformation about Soros was linked to violence. Cesar Sayoc, a Florida man who was obsessed with Trump, mentioned Soros dozens of times on social media before mailing pipe bombs to newsrooms, top Democrats and Soros himself.

Despite significant scrutiny, no evidence was ever found to tie the caravan to Soros. Trump, however, helped fan the flames when asked whether Soros was involved.

“I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people say yes,” the president said.

Still, some Republicans have begun pushing back on false claims of Soros’ connection to the protests and those spreading the rumors. After several Republican Party chairpeople in a Texas county shared posts claiming Soros was behind the demonstrations, the state party leader called on them to resign.

Experts say conspiracy theories can become a problem when they lead to threats of violence or cause people to lose trust in important institutions. They can fade into the background only to reemerge at times of crisis.

“Conspiracy theories are like themselves viruses,” said Josh Introne, a Syracuse University information studies professor who researches conspiracy theories. “The characters may change a little, and the theory itself may mutate. But they stick around.”
___
Klepper reported from Providence, Rhode Island, and Hinnant from Paris.

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President Donald Trump slammed for using offensive, 'racist' remarks at Tulsa rally

John Fritze, Courtney Subramanian, Nicholas Wu and David Jackson, 

USA TODAY•June 21, 2020

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump drew fire from critics Saturday for sprinkling racially divisive stereotypes throughout his remarks at a high-profile campaign rally in Tulsa as the nation is grappling with racism and police misconduct.

Speaking after protests and unrest broke out in cities across the nation following the death of George Floyd last month, Trump described violent protesters he claimed had forced the cancellation of a separate outdoor campaign event in Tulsa as "thugs." He used the term "kung flu" to describe the coronavirus. And he blasted the removal of Confederate statues, arguing that a "left wing mob" wanted to "vandalize our history."

At one point during his remarks, as he sought to brush aside calls from some on the left to defund police departments, Trump painted a scene of a "tough hombre" who he described as "breaking into the window of a young woman whose husband is away."

"And you call 911 and they say, 'I'm sorry, this number is no longer working,'" Trump said.

President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Okla., Saturday, June 20, 2020.

The president's remarks came as demonstrators continued to gather in many cities to protest the death of Floyd, a Black man whose neck was pinned under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer for nearly nine minutes. Violence erupted in many cities after Floyd's death, but protests were largely peaceful nationwide.

"Trump just completed the racism trifecta in a three-minute span," a Democratic National Committee social media account posted during the rally, the president's first return to the campaign trail since the coronavirus struck the nation in force this spring.

"121,000 Americans are dead," Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., tweeted after the rally.

"Donald Trump’s response is to make racist jokes."

The rally ran into trouble on racial issues before it even began. The campaign had to reschedule after it initially set the event for Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States. Trump has also faced a backlash for holding the rally in a city that was home to one of the worst racial attacks in U.S. history.

He then claimed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that "nobody had ever heard" of the Juneteenth holiday before the controversy erupted.

Trump never mentioned Floyd's name during his remarks Saturday night. Nor did he mention the Juneteenth holiday on Friday that prompted his campaign to reschedule its initial date for the rally. He also did not mention the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, in which a white mob killed an estimated 300 Black Americans while destroying homes and businesses in a once-thriving district known as the Black Wall Street.

Trump has drawn fire for many past comments on race, including when he said there were "fine people on both sides" at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when he described members of the violent MS-13 gang as "animals" or reportedly called Haiti, El Salvador and African nations "shithole countries."

But Trump's remarks on Saturday fell at a particularly sensitive moment in the USA, when the Floyd killing has forced a reexamination not only of police use of force practices but also charges of underlying racism in the nation's criminal justice system.

Polls suggest the perception of police has fallen in recent weeks. Among white Americans – a group from which Trump enjoyed broad support in 2016 – those who had a very favorable or somewhat favorable view of police dropped to 61% from 72% the previous week in a survey from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Project.

People wait for the arrival of President Donald Trump during a rally at the BOK in Tulsa, Okla., Saturday, June 20, 2020.

On the one hand, Trump argued Saturday that he is better positioned than presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden to pick up support from Black voters – opening up a new line of attack he is almost certain to repeat on the campaign trail. Trump said Americans should "not take lectures of racial justice" from Biden, adding that the former vice president "praised and partnered with segregationists," a reference to a controversy centered on other lawmakers with whom Biden worked with in Congress.

On the other hand, Trump offered little in the way of concrete policies he would pursue in a second term to benefit Black voters. And he repeatedly embraced language and themes that groups advocating for racial justice have decried.

"The unhinged left wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrating our monuments, our beautiful monuments, tear down our statues and punish, cancel and persecute anyone who does not conform to their demands for absolute and total control, we're not conforming," Trump said Saturday about protesters forcibly removing statues and other symbols of the Confederacy.
Democrats and other critics on social media also blasted Trump for using the term "kung flu" to describe coronaviurs. White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway disputed reports this year that the term was used inside the West Wing. A CBS News reporter said an unnamed official used the phrase in her presence.

At the time, Conway described the term as "highly offensive," said "of course it's wrong" and asked reporters to identify who the official was. "I'd like to know who they are," Conway told reporters outside the White House in March. "You can't just say that and not name them. Tell us who it was."

Public health officials have discouraged terms that associate a pandemic with a place. Trump had frequently called the coronavirus the "Chinese virus" in the early weeks of the pandemic as a way to blame Beijing for its handling of the crisis there.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Democrats, critics slam Trump for 'racist' remarks at Tulsa rally

2020 likely to be the warmest year on record globally

Jeff Berardelli,  CBS News•June 15, 2020

While the public's attention is consumed by concern over the global pandemic and protests against social injustices, the chronic condition of climate change continues to escalate. In fact, it's becoming more and more likely that 2020 will be the hottest year globally since records have been kept, dating back to the late 1800s.

Reviews of temperatures for May 2020 have now been reported by four standard-bearer climate data organizations including NASA, NOAA, Berkeley Earth and the European agency Copernicus. The unanimous conclusion: Last month was the warmest May on record globally, with the caveat from NOAA that it was a virtual tie with May 2016.

According to NOAA, one of the few places on Earth to be cooler than average in May was much of Canada and the eastern United States. But that did little to counteract 2020's overall warmth.

For the year to date, both NASA and Berkeley Earth rank 2020 as the second warmest globally, a shade behind 2016. This is particularly impressive considering in 2016 there was a Super El Niño. In El Niño years the tropical Pacific Ocean releases copious heat into the atmosphere and record warm years are expected. This year there is no El Niño.

In addition, we are currently at the bottom of the 11-year solar minimum, a time when incoming energy from the sun decreases. This is further proof that solar minimums don't have a substantial impact on climate.

Solar minimum is not so grand I guess. Jan-May is 2nd warmest period on record and Berkeley Earth says the chance of 2020 being the warmest year on record is almost 90%. pic.twitter.com/7RFYxaKoKy

— Jeff Berardelli (@WeatherProf) June 13, 2020

To put this into perspective, the world's five warmest years on record have all occurred since 2015, with 2020 highly likely to continue that trend.

Climate scientist Ed Hawkins' now famous #WarmingStripes visualization provides a simple way to grasp the dramatic changes. At the request of CBS News, Hawkins generated this image below showing January through May temperature anomalies, from 1850 to 2020, with 1850 starting on the left. Each line represents one year, with blue for cooler than normal and red for warmer than normal — the reddest of which appear in 2016 and 2020.
 

jan-to-may-berkeleyearth-1850-2020.png

Warming Stripes visualization of January through May departure from average temperatures. Each line represents a year from 1850, at left, to 2020, at right. Blue = cool years; Red = warm years. Ed Hawkins

The visualization has become a worldwide symbol of climate change, inspiring art installations, the facade of a train station and even the logo for the U.S. House of Representatives' Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. In fact, to mark the summer solstice later this week, hundreds of thousands of social media users are expected to participate in this year's ShowYourStripes campaign Thursday, June 18, by displaying their city's local Warming Stripes.

Since the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of the globe overall, the reddest set of stripes are likely to be found in cities in the far north. Global temperatures this May were given a big boost by astonishing warmth in western Siberia, where some locales were 18 degrees Fahrenheit above normal for the month. As a whole, western Siberia averaged 10 degrees above normal for May, obliterating anything previously experienced.

What's perhaps even more impressive is that this relative warmth has persisted since December, with average temperatures in western Siberia also 10 degrees Fahrenheit above normal — doubling the previous departure from average in 2016.

siberia-temps.jpg

As a postdoc in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, Zack Labe studies changes in the Arctic for a living. "The Siberian warmth is truly remarkable. It's not only the magnitude of warmth, but what is more striking is its persistence," says Labe.

To put the heat into perspective, on May 23 the Siberian town of Khatanga, far north of the Arctic Circle, hit 78 degrees Fahrenheit. This was 46 degrees above normal and shattered the previous record by a virtually unheard-of 22 degrees. Then on June 9, Nizhnyaya Pesha, an area 900 miles northeast of Moscow near the Arctic Ocean's Barents Sea, hit a sweltering 86 degrees Fahrenheit, a staggering 30 degrees above normal.

The average heat across Russia from January to May is so remarkable that it matches what's projected to be normal by the year 2100 if current trends in heat-trapping carbon emissions continue. In the image below, the data point for 2020 is almost off the charts and matches what climate models expect to be typical many decades from now.

A remarkable event indeed. A taste of the average conditions at the end of the century under a high emission scenario (RCP 8.5) in the MPI climate model. https://t.co/iwPaB7bS07 pic.twitter.com/O8qBtV3bxe

— Flavio Lehner (@ClimateFlavors) June 14, 2020

This leads to the question, what is causing this extraordinary heat? Climate scientists are always quick to point out that individual events are not caused by climate change, but climate change acts as an amplifier. A good analogy is a subwoofer on a stereo — the sound already exists, but the amplifier magnifies the sound and blasts it out.

"Over the last few years we have observed remarkably extreme events in the Arctic due to warmer than average temperatures," explains Labe. Reflecting on the Arctic's record-warm May, he said, "While it is difficult to attribute this event, especially to understand all of the drivers, it is consistent with climate change within the Arctic."

While it doesn't explain everything, a commonly accepted explanation for areas in or near the Arctic experiencing these remarkable warm spells is the decline of sea ice, and in some cases snow cover, due to rapidly warming temperatures. The lack of white ice, and corresponding increase in dark ocean and land areas, means less light is reflected and more is absorbed, creating a feedback loop and heating the area disproportionately.

The below image is a month-by-month ranking produced by Labe showing all months since January of 1979 in the Arctic. Blue represents cooler than normal months, and red means warmer than normal. The number ranking for each month and year can be seen in each box, with May 2020 ranking at No. 1.

labe-temps.jpg

Zack Labe

The dramatic warming in the past few years is rapidly reshaping the Arctic. Over the past four decades, sea ice volume has decreased by 50%. Warming and drying of the landscape is leading to unprecedented Arctic fires, with the summer of 2019 being the worst fire season on record. Right now, what are being called zombie fires — fires that were never quite extinguished over the winter — are flaring back up.

Climate crisis: ‘Zombie fires’ return to warming Arctic, year after unprecedented blazes https://t.co/4KrWQ2fRcACritical peatland at risk, with region warming much faster than the rest of the planet pic.twitter.com/MN2nrjLBmF

— Svein T veitdal (@tveitdal) June 10, 2020

In some cases, the ground is literally giving way as a consequence of permafrost melting. This has resulted in the appearance of several huge craters in Siberia, which scientists are linking to Arctic amplification from human-caused climate change.

In fact, just weeks ago, in the Siberian city of Norilsk, it appears to have factored into the leak of more than 20,000 tons of diesel fuel from a reserve fuel tank at a power plant. The fuel accident — one of the biggest in modern Russian history — colored nearby rivers crimson red and prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare a state of emergency. Russian officials have blamed permafrost melt for the accident.

The persistence of the warm air in Siberia and the Arctic as a whole has led scientists at NASA and Berkeley Earth to increase their odds of 2020 being the warmest year on record. Even though 2020 is currently running second to 2016, Berkeley Earth is giving 2020 a 89% chance of ending up as the warmest year. NASA has also increased its estimate of the chances to 72%.

Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says the reason confidence is growing that this year will turn out to be the warmest globally has to do with the lack of El Niño. "Normally, record years start out with a big El Niño event [like 2016] and the anomalies decline through the year," he said.

In other words, in El Niño years the relative warmth typically lessens as the year goes on. However, Schmidt explains, "This year is odd because we didn't start off with an El Niño, and so statistically we aren't expecting the anomalies to decline." This means the odds are temperatures will remain warm. Thus Schmidt surmises, "it's possible it will catch up to and outpace 2016 by the time we get to the end."

One added consideration is the recent decline in pollution due to the global pandemic lockdowns. Burning fossil fuels releases particulate matter like aerosols, which typically reflect sunlight back to space, keeping Earth a bit cooler than it would otherwise be. However, the dramatic short-term decrease in air pollutants may allow more sunlight in, warming the climate even more.

Schmidt says this has not yet been factored into forecasts, but it could tip the scales, "This will be a real effect. It's not going to be huge, but it could be the difference between a record or not."

Summer Solstice 2020: When is the longest day of the year and how do people celebrate?

Sarah Young, Sabrina Barr The Independent 20 June 2020


William Toti/500pxMore

The start of the new season has officially arrived in the form of the summer solstice.

The longest day of the year is a cause of celebration for many, whether you feel a spiritual connection to the power of the sun or are simply relieved that the warm-weather months have finally arrived.

In astrological terms, the summer solstice marks the end of spring and start of summer for the northern hemisphere. It will end with the autumn equinox, which this year falls on Tuesday 22 September.

Here’s everything you need to know about the summer solstice 2020:
What is it?

The summer solstice – otherwise known as the estival solstice, midsummer or Litha – is the longest day of the year.

It occurs when the earth’s geographical pole on either the northern or southern hemisphere becomes most inclined towards the sun and officially marks the beginning of summer.

When the summer solstice takes place in the northern hemisphere this month, the sun will reach its highest possible altitude.

As a result, the day on which the summer solstice falls will have the longest period of daylight of the year.

In some cultures, such a paganism, the summer solstice is symbolic of fertility and the harvest.
When is it?

The summer solstice in the northern hemisphere occurs in June and in the southern hemisphere in December.

In the northern hemisphere, it will take place this year at exactly 22:43pm on Saturday 20 June.

The UK will be treated to 16 hours and 38 minutes of daylight in the day, with the sun rising at 4.43am and setting in the evening at 9.21pm.

After 20 June, the nights will begin to close in as the planet rotates with the northern hemisphere titling away further from the sun.
How is it celebrated?

According to Dictionary.com, the term solstice is derived from the Latin word solstitium. It’s made up of the Latin sol, “the sun,” and sistere, “to make stand, stand still”.

It’s believed by some that Stonehenge – the prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England – was built as a kind of astronomical calendar.

On the day of the summer solstice, the rising sun lines up with the Heel stone and the Altar stone of the ancient site.

Thousands of people usually gather at Stonehenge to watch the spectacle and celebrate the start of summer.

However, this year's event has been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, English Heritage will livestream the sunrise across its social media channels.

Many people also celebrate the summer solstice in other ways regardless of whether they feel a religious affiliation with the event or not.

Expect to see numerous summer picnics, bonfires and maybe even some Maypole dancing take place to mark the occasion.
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