Good morning! We're coming to your inbox early this Monday morning because I got stuck writing the piece you'll see just below. Just a quick thank you to all the people who've been sharing and tweeting and sending feedback on this weird project. I really appreciate it. Fun thing: the New York Times mentioned Infowarzel last week, which was fun and hilarious to see this awful pun in the paper of record. Anyhow, let's charge into the fever swamp! 
Twitter's Pro-Trump Bot Crisis Is Really A Human Crisis: Here's a new piece from me from late last night. I wrote about the desire to blame all the disinformation and toxicity floating around on Twitter on bots. In reality, it's a lot more complicated.
From the piece:
"While the numbers sound substantial, the true effect these bots have on political discourse is still incredibly hard to quantify. And focusing on Twitter’s bot scourge is an enticing but partial explanation for a far more difficult problem. It’s also ignorant of the very real, very human media machine bent on pushing a pro-Trump narrative and trolling its opponents at all costs, for whom bots are just one of many tools."
The Kathy Griffin debacle and why it matters: This week's center-stage outrage centered around Kathy Griffin and her mock beheading of President Trump. It was exhausting and arguably a distraction from huge, important issues like healthcare, Congressional investigations, and the long-term fate of our planet...but it is also a useful lesson in understanding the pro-Trump media.
Last month, after the Montana GOP candidate Greg Gianforte bodyslammed a reporter, the pro-Trump media excoriated the mainstream media for its outrage toward Gianforte and called them hypocrites. Their argument was that the left had not disavowed violence directed toward Republicans and pro-Trump voters at protests across the country following Trump's elections and as such, they had no right to be mad when it happened to them (this, of course, is a bad faith argument by the pro-Trump media aimed at further discrediting the MSM).
Now, flash forward one week later to Griffin. The mainstream media almost universally condemned the Griffin photoshoot. But it didn't matter. The pro-Trump media had the ammunition it needed from the left and went into full gear. Here's a little of what it looked like:
The main argument — and they're not entirely incorrect — is that if this had happened with a conservative comedian and Barack Obama, the media would revolt and there would be protests and lost jobs. Which highlights an important element of the pro-Trump media:
They argue they're using the media's own tactics against it.
Pro-Trumpers and the alt-right love to quote Saul Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals' which they cite as "the entire leftist activist playbook." This is part of their conspiracy that suggests the MSM is constantly colluding with each other and using a secret handbook rather than what they're actually doing (reporting). Keep an eye out for it on Twitter and you'll see them pop up again and again. Here are two examples that turned up in a quick Google search.
Among the most important of those rules: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
The pro-Trump media seized on the Griffin saga replicating their fun-house imagining of how the MSM would cover it if the shoe were on the other foot. Remember the call-in campaigns to Bill O'Reilly and Hannity's sponsors after their respective scandals? The pro-Trump media did the same thing to CNN for Griffin.
Why the Griffin incident is a big deal: The pro-Trump media can manufacture controversy and push narratives with the best of them. But to be truly effective the pro-Trump media needs real ammunition and real controversy. When it comes to making memes and pushing trending topics they're not precious: they float trial balloon scandals all the time in hopes they take off. Most don't. But when they have something truly useful — that can really rally the base — they'll latch on and never let go.
An example: a pro-Trump message board regular giddily DM'd me this just minutes after the Griffin incident:
And the memes sure did come: Last week after Griffin apologized for the photoshoot, Infowars, started a $200,000 contest on its site encouraging readers to head to protests this weekend carrying signs that read “CNN is ISIS” (an attempt to draw a comparison between the mock beheading and Griffin’s side gig as an occasional host on CNN’s New Year’s Eve show with Anderson Cooper).
The contest worked. At last Saturday’s March for Truth, media spotted dozens of “CNN is ISIS” signs, sending the pro-Trump cohort into a tizzy and causing the campaign to spread aggressively.
The result: real paid protestors!
...Which in turn fed the Trump White House's narrative.
On Saturday as the March for Truth was winding down, the Trump campaign sent an email to supporters sharing an Infowars story, suggesting that pro-Trump protestors outnumbered the March for Truth protestors (spoiler: they did not). Regardless, it's a closing of the pro-Trump media loop. 1) Gin up outrage. 2) Create viral incentive to take to streets. 3) White House amplifies that narrative and frames it as reality.
Great things you should read:
Jonathan Tilove was in the trenches with me for two weeks covering the Alex Jones trial. He's a fantastic reporter for the Austin Statesman and a longtime observer of Roger Stone. Last week he has a long piece about hanging out wiht Stone in Austin — Jonathan takes him to a Russian bar and gets Stone to pose in a Russian hat next to a Grizzly. Read it.
Worth your time to read this scoop from my colleague Joe Bernstein about how a pro-Trump writer is suing Fusion reporter, Emma Roller after Roller tweeted that the writer flashed a white supremacist sign at the White House earlier this spring. My sense is that this will not be the last of these kinds of suits aimed at the MSM by pro-Trumpers.
Olivia Nuzzi over at New York mag wrote a good thing this week about Seth Rich that tries to look at the deceased young man at the center of this conspiracy. It's really important context, given that Rich himself has largely become an abstract stand-in for something toxic.
As usual, my colleague Craig Silverman is on the front lines of fake news wars. Here he is writing an interesting piece on Trolls Targeting Indian Restaurants With Create-Your-Own Fake News Sites.