Lee Stranahan and the Great Yogurt Conspiracy

For about twelve years, starting in 1987, the American fringe was my home, or at least my playground. If it was weird, it was in my files.

Did you ever hear about the firefight between Special Forces and evil cannibalistic aliens in the underground base beneath Dulce, New Mexico? I did. Milton William Cooper (king of the conspira-kooks) and his rivals got into a massive argument about the date of this battle. Emotions ran white hot, even though there was no actual firefight, no underground base and no aliens.

Wherever and whenever weirdness happened, I was on the case. An outbreak of Virgin Mary sightings in Scottsdale, Arizona. Satanic cults in Long Island. CIA shennanigans on the Cabazon Indian Reservation. Bill Clinton's mad reign as the King of Cocaine. And, of course, there was the night when the Secretary General of the UN saw a woman float out of a Manhattan high-rise. I had a file for all of the then-current rumors, and even believed some of them.

(The Cabazon thing was real. Sweartagod.)

The sense of fun wore off as the 1990s wore on. The Oklahoma City bombing -- committed by people who took Cooper seriously -- signaled that the fringe had lost its charm. I could no longer tolerate shout-fests with bulging-eyed motor-mouthed maniacs obsessed with spreading outlandish stories about the Waco raid and the Jon-Benet Ramsey affair. Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say -- that the Illuminati was a myth, that Freemasons were innocuous, and that the "New World Order" was a scarecrow erected to frighten rubes.

I no longer follow every burble and belch emitted by the fringe dwellers, although the occasional whiff reaches my nostrils. Apparently, there's an invisible planet called Nibiru poised to destroy us all. The Rapture hit on the 12th of this month; nobody vanished. There are giant mega-rats living in the trees in the Solomon Islands.

But I did not learn until recently about the Globalist plot to destroy Idaho -- an evil scheme masterminded by Chobani, the makers of Greek yogurt.

Now you know why Alex Jones went after Chobani.

Deep yogurt. Apparently, the whole mess started with some disturbing news reports coming out of Twin Falls, Idaho. There was a case of sexual exploration involving very young children, who videotaped their activities. Such events are worse than unfortunate: They are frightening and infuriating, and they must always be taken seriously. But let's be honest: These things do happen. It's a story as old as the human race, although we did not have video recordings until recent times. The ubiquity of porn in our culture, plus easy access to smart phones, makes these episodes increasingly likely.

The rumor mill transformed this sad incident into an absurd grotesque. Right-wing websites (including the Drudge Report) spread the story that adult Syrian refugees had raped a five year-old white girl in Idaho, and that they had done so to prove their allegiance to ISIS. This, despite the fact that there were no Syrian refugees in Twin Falls. (Not to mention the fact that the refugees were running from ISIS.) When authorities denied these rumor-encrusted reports, those officials were deemed to be part of the cover-up. For obvious reasons, the video evidence -- which would have established the facts once and for all -- can never be seen by the public.

Citizens councils in Idaho spread fear-fiction about Muslim child molesters who had declared war on America. Fulminating conspiracy theorists threatened and harassed Shawn Barigar, the mayor of Twin Falls; they also went after his wife.

Others accused him of being a “globalist,” a word that has taken on many definitions but in this case meant he was part of a vast, arcane conspiracy. They believed that establishment politicians wanted to turn red states like Idaho blue by starting wars and then importing refugees from those war zones as cheap labor who would not only displace American workers but also reliably vote Democratic.

One message, with the subject line “Muslims,” said that refugees were committing rapes and hit-and-runs and urinating on women and that the mayor was guilty of treason. “It’s out of the bag, [expletive],” it read. “We will and are holding you responsible for any and all crimes committed by these quote refugees. No courts. No police. Just us. You will answer to us in the darkness of night.”

Naturally, the Breitbarters fastened onto this story. They sent out an investigative reporter named Lee Stranahan, whom Steve Bannon has hailed as a "pit bull."

2011 and all that. I had run into Stranahan before, during the original Weinergate imbroglio. This humble blog played a very small role in that affair, though I can't claim to understand fully why the right fastened onto my work.

Forgive me, but we're going to have to go over some old ground. I'll try to zoom and zip through this territory.

Basically, I believed -- and still believe -- that Weiner's computer had been hacked. My great sin (in the eyes of the right) was to aver that Weiner was not the one who "accidentally" tweeted that notorious "dick pic," although he may have so conceded in order to get the story behind him as rapidly as possible.

Why did I dare to posit this unforgivably outrageous theory? For a number of reasons -- too many to list here. For now, note this: Incriminating imagery was available to Weiner's enemies before the infamous bulging-underwear shot showed up in his Twitter feed. One of the women with whom he sexted was a ringer.

When my Weinergate writings elicited some attention, an entire fake website was set up to counter mine. It was run by a right-wing operative calling himself Seixon, although his real name seems to be George Gooding. He claimed to be a liberal, even though all of his associates veered right. (Michelle Malkin was one of his cyber pen-pals.)

The National Review excoriated me for maintaining that Weiner was hacked. Apparently, my example proved that all liberals were fanatics -- unlike, say, the birthers and the Benghazi theorists.

(Was Stranahan one of the Breitbarters who castigated me for suggesting that Weiner was hacked? I seem to so recall, although my memory may be at fault on that point.)

In 2011, the rightwingers pretended to be offended by anything that reeked of conspiracy theory, and were particularly infuriated by my rather modest contribution to the genre. Never mind that email hacking was and is pretty common. Never mind that there had recently been a massive breech of Yahoo. (Weiner had a Yahoo account, and many people use the same password across multiple services.) Never mind the fact that Weiner's enemies -- not least among them the guy who claimed to be shocked when the "dick pic" popped into the Twitter feed -- included people who bragged about their hacking skills. And never mind the fact that a guy like Weiner is an incredibly easy target for social engineering: If someone claiming to be one one of his online girlfriends had sent him a link to a nude pic, he would have reacted like one of Pavlov's dogs.

Above and beyond all of that, we have to take into account the strange and unfairly-forgotten "Betty and Veronica" episode. This was a Weinergate subplot which involved hired actresses who claimed -- falsely -- to be underaged girls who had sexted with Weiner. These actresses fooled Mediaite reporter Tommy Christopher, who believed himself to be in contact (and not just online contact) with both the girls and their mother. All three were proven to be fictional personas.

This bizarre charade was designed to paint Weiner as someone who sought cybersex with adolescents. At the time, there was absolutely no evidence that he had any interest in the underaged.

Years later, Weiner was sentenced for sexting with a non-fictional 15 year-old girl. The fact that the "Betty and Veronica" business was a complete concoction naturally makes one wonder about the later incident. Are the ersatz case and the real case somehow related? Unless and until the girl in question comes forward, I can offer no further speculation; even my imagination has limits.

The "Betty and Veronica" affair proved one thing: Weinergate 1.0 -- by which I mean the original 2011 scandal -- was not just the tale of one man's sexual misdeeds. He was the target of an operation. Actually, I don't think that he was the ultimate target: I suspect that the hackers friendly to Breitbart were primarily focused on Weiner's wife Huma Abedin, who was and is close to Hillary Clinton.

It should not be forgotten that Weiner was the original owner of the laptop computer which, years later, won the election for Donald Trump. (Arguably.)

In 2011, I said that Weiner was hacked. That claim, if true, means that that particular laptop (which Weiner gave to his wife) was compromised. At the time, I could not fathom the full implications. Who could have guessed that Weiner's laptop would play a key role in the 2016 election?

But even then, it seemed clear that there was more to Weinergate than met the eye. Not only did I say that Weiner was targeted by hackers, I said that Breitbart and his crew -- including Stranahan -- were not disinterested reporters. They were participants in the drama.

Personas non grata. Throughout that controversy, my blog -- along with plenty of other sites -- was swarmed by what we would now call bots. (At the time, the term "personas" saw some usage.) Concurrently, several Breitbarters had their own blogs in which every single post elicited dozens and dozens and dozens of comments, all written in pretty much the same style. The number of comments was quite impressive, since the sites did not command a wide readership.

I understood for the first time the miracle of sockpuppetry. I could not understand the motive for such an elaborate masquerade party.

Lee Stranahan played a major role in all of this. Here's what I wrote about him at the time:

During the height of the controversy, I ran into a fellow named Lee Stranahan, who bears some interesting similarities to the mighty Seixon. Here we have yet another fellow who claims to be a liberal, even though all of his contacts go to RightWingWorld.

(Incidentally: In his other life, Lee is a photographer of erotica. I like his work.)

Stranahan also teaches a class in how to make money from blogging. I've been at this game since 2004; near as I can tell, the only way to make pay-the-rent money via blogging is to sell out.

Stranahan, it turns out, works for Breitbart.

But he's a liberal, y'see.

The Great Yogurt Conspiracy. Let's return to the NYT Magazine piece:

In college, Stranahan was a libertarian and even attended Ayn Rand’s funeral. But when he moved to California, he became a liberal, vehemently opposing the Iraq war and the presidency of George W. Bush. He voted for Barack Obama in 2008

Oh, fer chrissakes. Lots of Randroids have opposed the Bush family, the Iraq war, and John McCain. I don't know whether true liberalism ever resided within Stranahan's heart of hearts; I know only that I can't trust any words coming out of his mouth of mouths.

Never forget that Stranahan was still claiming to be a liberal in 2011 -- the same year this happened:

In 2011, Breitbart took Stranahan to the Conservative Political Action Conference and introduced him to Michele Bachmann, who, in Stranahan’s recollection, convinced him that she had uncovered disturbing details about Islam that no one in the establishment was willing to talk about. Stranahan says this conversation was the genesis of his concerns about the religion.

Not many "liberals" hang out with Bachmann.

Here's how Stranahan covered Twin Falls:

But Stranahan thrived in the void of facts. He was granted one of the few interviews with the victim’s family, but his account of the crime offered little more information than others’ had — and far more inaccuracies, according to the police and the county prosecutor. He described what took place as a “horrific gang rape” and wrote graphic details about the incident, which the Twin Falls Police say are untrue. On Breitbart radio, Stranahan openly wondered whether Barigar, the mayor, was “a big, you know, Shariah supporter.” And he suggested repeatedly that mass rapes by refugees had occurred in Europe and were inevitably coming to the United States.

Stranahan says his Breitbart editors sent him to Twin Falls to report on the “Muslim takeover” of the town. (Breitbart denies this and says it’s “absurd.”) But he soon became enamored of a grander theory about what was happening in southern Idaho: globalism. He wrote that local businesses received government kickbacks for employing foreigners instead of Americans. (Stranahan did not cite any evidence of this, and it is untrue, according to the state Department of Labor.) And he often referred to a Syrian refugee crisis, though no Syrians were ever resettled there. Then, to bring the story full circle, he claimed these Muslim refugees were being used to replace American workers and that the government, big business and law enforcement were either conspiring to conceal the sexual-assault case or intentionally looking the other way, in order to keep the machine turning.

How, you may be wondering, does yogurt fit into all of this? Here's how...

Stranahan believed that Chobani, a Greek-yogurt company, was at the center of the scheme. Breitbart had been covering the company for months, ever since the owner, Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish-born businessman, made a speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos encouraging other chief executives to pledge financial and political support to refugees.

These claims about the Yogurt Conspiracy reached Alex Jones, who gave them a respectful airing on his show. He eventually had to issue a retraction -- after first insisting that he would meet his enemies in court.

Stranahan struck me as passionate about his stories; not about their veracity but about the freedom he and the critics of refugee resettlement should have to speculate as they wanted without being belittled by the fact-mongering mainstream. When I reached him by phone this June, he told me he was planning to travel back to Idaho for more reporting on Fawnbrook, now that he was no longer constrained by his editors at Breitbart. He told me that he believed that he had uncovered another dimension of his globalist theory related to Chobani’s participation in the federal school-lunch program.

Let me sound, once again, the key theme of this post. In 2011, the Breitbarters scoffed at my outrageous suggestion that Weiner's accounts were hacked. In 2016, Breitbarter Lee Stranahan promulgated the theory that an Evil Globalist Scheme had targeted Idaho, and that a key component of this plot was yogurt. To the rightist mind, Stranahan's Great Yogurt Conspiracy seems rational and plausible, while only the worst sort of braying-at-the-Moon kook would dare to suggest that Weiner was hacked.

Stranahan now works across the street from the White House, where he has been a welcome visitor.

The NYT piece doesn't detail the Stranahan/Russian connection, although author Caitlyn Dickerson mentioned it during her interview with Rachel Maddow last night. Having feuded with the Powers That Be at Breitbart, Stranahan now works for Sputnik, which the FBI is investigating as a Russian propaganda arm. Is Stranahan guilty of violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act? Doesn't matter: He's in no danger. Under the new rules (which seem to apply only to Trump-lovers), one may register retroactively.

When he joined Sputnik, Stranahan bragged about being "on the Russian payroll." Yet he's welcome in the White House.

Hell, I doubt that they would allow me into the White House to take the goddamned tour.

Stranahan's show routinely targets George Soros, whom Putin hates. This story explains why the new Czar of all the Russias demonizes Soros:

What Soros funds is precisely what the new generation of populist far-right politicians fear. He supports fact-checkers to call out the misleading claims of the populists. One study of the methods of the Putin handbook put it: “Don’t worry at all about lying or presenting incomplete or otherwise inaccurate information.” Former US government security analyst Aaron Azlant notes Trump’s aides may have learned their post-truth politics while working closely with Kremlin agents in the Ukraine. Fact-checkers undermine these lies.

Birds of a feather. Stranahan continues to be in tight with Alex Jones, even though the latter stepped away from the battle against the Yogurt Conspiracy. Last month, for example, Stranahan went on Jones' show to reveal that the Soros Conspiracy was behind both the Ukrainian civil war and the events in Charlottesville.

Of course, Stranahan is close with Roger Stone, the king of the political dirty tricksters: See here and here and here. In the previous post, I suggested that Stranahan was the libertarian "journalist" whom Stone used as a cut-out in his dealings with Julian Assange. This suggestion may prove wrongheaded; others have pointed toward someone called Randy Credico, a comedian. The Credico theory fits the chronology; he was in London at the right time, and he tweeted a picture of himself outside of the Ecuadorean embassy.

Of course, labeling him a journalist will strike some as a bit of a stretch. Then again, his claim to that title seems no worse than Stranahan's.

As noted above, I put in twelve years as a fringe-watcher. Back then, the fringe-dwellers were both amusing and annoying. Now they have money and power -- and they pose the greatest threat this country has ever faced.