When propaganda fails

Even though Hillary Clinton is a private citizen, and even though she is certainly not going to run for any office ever again, somebody has put a lot of money into an anti-Hillary ad campaign. The ads -- which you can see on all sorts of clickbait sites -- promise that Hillary's "hit list" has finally been unveiled. "You'll never guess who's number 1!"

Always on the lookout for new amusements, I made an honest effort to find out the name of Hillary's number 1 target. The link goes here. Use caution if you click on that link, because you never know where malware lurketh. Here's the only visible ad copy:

"We voted AGAINST her lies. But now she's plotting on final devastation.

Will THIS be Crooked Hillary's Secret Revenge?

[31,747 DEAD in 2017. If you're over 55, watch the warning below to protect yourself and your spouse.]

And...that's it. Nothing else loads up.

I think the page is supposed to play a video, but if it does, I couldn't see it. I tried three separate browsers. A shame, that. I'd like to know just how Hillary managed to murder 31,747 people in a fashion so secretive that not even Fox News noticed.

(Maybe I should have used a better computer. I visited that page using an ancient notebook computer at the local Mickey D. Gotta protect against nasty ol' malware, you know.)

The ubiquity of these ads indicates that a decent-sized pile of money went into this campaign -- a campaign which failed utterly for technical reasons.

The anti-Hillary page is part of a larger site called the Health Sciences Institute, which claims to have treatments for cancer, diabetes, back pain and heart problems. You can read more about the lovable funsters at HSI if you visit the Ripoff Report and Snopes. To paraphrase an old axiom: If it looks like a quack and quacks like a quack...

It turns out that the big, hidden cancer cure is honey. Hillary is preventing you from eating honey. Because Evil.

According to a Ripoff Report correspondent, HSI also trades in heavy-duty anti-Catholicism. I guess the Pope also has a thing against honey.

Mother Jones did a piece on these guys back December of 2015. Turns out they have a link to the Huckabee family; they've also hooked up with Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich. You know: The gang.

As fate would have it, this company traces back to a local Baltimore crew that I've had my eye on for years. I've even made cryptic references to them in past posts, though I've never mentioned the name until now.

The Health Sciences Institute is part of a company called NewMarket Health, which is just one asset of a Baltimore-based publishing empire named Agora Inc. Agora’s subsidiaries and affiliates publish more than 40 newsletters and sell more than 300 books on a range of topics, including biblical health tips, natural-healing supplements, and “insider” investment advice—a mix of ideas the company considers the intellectual equivalent of the marketplace of ancient Athens. To find new readers for its ever-expanding catalog of publications, Agora’s subsidiaries have tapped into a network of conservative heavyweights, including Huckabee, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich, who sell access to their massive email lists to advertise Agora’s products.

In April, Paul appeared in a 51-minute video for an Agora subsidiary in which he argued that the United States was on the verge of martial law and societal collapse. The libertarian patriarch, whose own Survival Report newsletter once played to its white readers’ worst fears, urged viewers to buy a newsletter subscription to find out more. Conservative outlets including National Review and Townhall have also rented their email lists to Agora subsidiaries. While it’s not unusual for publications (including Mother Jones) to send sponsored messages to their subscribers, Agora’s emails skirt the line between spammy and scammy. An email sent last year to followers of the popular right-wing site RedState on behalf of the Health Sciences Institute claimed that the Obama administration was blocking a miracle cure that “vaporizes cancer in six weeks.”

The rest of the MJ article contains the fascinating backstory of Agora.

I first heard about these folks when I was researching the National Inflation Institute, a pump-and-dump scheme linked to Jonathan Lebed which Fox (for some reason) was pushing heavily back in 2011. (I even made a film about them.) Although I know of no link between Agora and Lebed's operation, I did notice certain similarities -- such as a heavy emphasis on Ayn Randroid libertarianism, mixed in with a willingness to engage in certain lines of endeavor which some uncharitable souls might describe as "scammy."

(Another example of the breed would the sex cult/multi-level marketing scheme called NXVIM, which deserves a whole separate post.)

Pump and dump. "Natural" health cures. MLM schemes. These are the things that fund the paranoid right. There are paranoids on the left as well, but most liberals aren't enlightened enough for to seek out these kinds of "opportunities."

Agora became particularly interesting to me when I discovered a potential link to a local mystery. I even toyed with the idea of investigating this matter as part of a larger film about various aspects of Baltimore's colorful history. This post is not the place to discuss the event in any detail. But perhaps one image will offer certain interested parties an indication of the mystery that I'm talking about...