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What stage do you think North America is in right now?

Gurnani: North America is in the oh my god is this going to be a Lord of the Flies situation stage. On the verge of the maybe I should have joined that underground bunker cult stage. But things are going to get better. Itll just take some time for society as a whole to get on the same page, accept where we are and settle in until things settle down. The level of uncertainty isnt changing for any of us across the world, but the level of acceptance does change.

Pearce: It was frightening and fascinating at the same time. We were working in China in December so started hearing about it from January, all the way up to now where a number of markets we operate in are within lockdowns. Communicationwas key, both with team members and client partners.

Gurnani: You start to see the patterns, and you start to see where people will go, what people will feel next. Leading creative work for these different markets reminds us that there is a tomorrow.

Pearce: This situation for many people and businesses is pushing them to a place they should have been going to anyway, just much faster than they may have chosen themselves. It has and will force businesses and marketers to stand up and be brave, both through the COVID period and into the new normal. Be more like Ryan Reynolds: bold, quick, calculated and always entertaining.

Gurnani: If there was ever a time to be escapist, silly, hopeful, joyful or purely entertaining, now is it.

Pearce: Full-time doesnt have to be five days a week. You dont have to sit in a major city to be good at your job. Digital make-up and virtual fashion make getting ready to work-from-home much quicker, and better for the environment. Borderless working encourages and creates true diversity of thinking. Creatives are going to want to move west to east, rather than historically east to west.

Gurnani: I believe many more creative leaders will learn to have greater trust in the creatives who work for them. At the end of this, more of us executive creative directors and chief creative officers will be in control of our need for control. Its harder now for us to give clear feedback. Its harder now to help our teams concept. Its harder now for us to jump in and fill the gaps. Were all going to come out of this with a little more let it go in our step.

Thats kind of a nice thing, yeah?

Sir Martin Sorrelljoined Ad Age Senior editor Jeanine Poggi on an episode of Virtual Pages to discuss how S4 Capital is weathering the global crisis. During the conversation, the media mogultells Poggi that he recently discussedwith Cannes Lions organizersthe possibility of the event going virtual. Parentcompany Ascential made the recent decision to cancel outright the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity afterholding companies and agencies cut award show costs and began pulling attendance and submissions for the Lions as financial pressures mounted during the coronavirus pandemic.

Sorrell, who built and formerlyled conglomerate WPP, also offered his opinion of how holding companies are handling the pandemic, namely on their decisions to reduce staff. Sorrell says,"to fire 10 percent of your workforce, or whatever it is, is not the answer." He says holding companies that are cutting staff are"taking out the people on the front line, who interface with clients, are good with clients," and that's only going to cause more problems going forward.

The ANDY Awards, hosted by the AD Club, has decided to keep chugging along, virtually. The Ad Club says it will still be judging standout work from the past year, with jurors doing so remotely. It also introduced a new category, the "Pop Choice" award, which will be decided by the general public via Instagram. Beginning April 24, anyone can vote for their favorite work through Instagram Stories. That voting period will remain open for 24 hours. All ANDYs winners will be announced during a live virtual event on April 27.

Creative agency Arnold and Havas Mediaannounced a new integrated leadership team in Boston. Comprised of talent across both creative and media, the Havas-owned agencies say they will create a unified strategic offering and share resources for clients going forward. As part of this, Scott Stedman, former MDC Media Partners chief marketing officer, will join Arnold + Havas Media Boston as chief growth and product officer. The following executives were promoted under the new agency: Gabrielle Rossetti, executive VP of strategy at Havas Media has become chief strategy officer; Vallerie Bettini, executive VP and marketing director, is now chief client officer; Julianna Akuamoah, senior VP of human resources, was named chief talent officer; and Cass Taylor, executive VP and client lead, has become chief operating officer. Rounding out the leadership team for Arnold + Havas Media Boston (pictured below) are CEO George Sargent, Chief Creative Officer Sean McBride, and Chief Financial Officer Lucia Ferrante.

The core of this Arnold + Havas Media Boston leadership team has been winning with our clients for years. We already know each other well, and our shorthand allows us to be tightly focused on executing on our shared vision of integrated thinking for all clients, Sargent says.

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Agency brief: Vice, Virtue APAC bosses share experiences of leading regional offices through the pandemic - AdAge.com

Coppins: Yeah, exactly. Thats whats actually interesting about this particular playbook, because if you talk to scholars who study propaganda and disinformation, what theyll say is that up until pretty recently, most autocratic regimes or even just kind of illiberal political leaders would try to censor dissenting voices and inconvenient information. They would shut down opposition newspapers and throw journalists and political dissidents in jail. Thats how they kind of maintained control and power.

What youve seen in the last 10 or 20 years is that a lot of the illiberal regimes around the world have realized that in this era of whats called information abundance, where everybody has the internet, everyone has social media, everyone has TV and radio and books, its very hard to fully contain the spread of information. Its much more effective to flood the zone with lots and lots and lots of content and propaganda and disinformation and noise. And what this is called is censorship through noise. Basically, youre drowning out the dissenting voices rather than throwing them in jail.

Wells: I remember one time I had a conversation with someone who grew up in China, and we were talking about the misinformation in Chinese media and state-controlled media and things like that. And I was like, Oh, that seems so disorienting. And I remember she said, Well, in China, we just know not to trust it. But in the U.S., you still actually believe the things you hear.

Coppins: Yeah. Thats such a good insight and an important point. I do think that that is a major problem in our society, and its born out of something good, which is that, compared to a lot of other parts of the world, were actually not used to our own government waging coordinated disinformation campaigns against us.

If you compare us as a people to, for example, people in Eastern Europe or the Baltic countries, who have spent generations dealing with Russian disinformation and Russian propaganda, youll find that they are a lot more savvy about it, and frankly a lot more cynical. We also have this fundamental belief, which I think is generally good, in free speech. We really believe that dissenting voices and opinions shouldnt be censored. And we kind of instinctively push back against any effort to censor speech.

Wells: But that is, like, a sort of ethic that comes from a time when the tool of control was censorship rather than flooding.

Coppins: Exactly. And you read like all the famous novels that are about future dystopiatheyre all very concerned with censorship, like the state coming in and burning books or sticking old newspaper articles down the memory hole. That idea colors so much of the literature about authoritarianism. But in this modern era, thats really not how it works, at least not in most democratic or ostensibly democratic countries.

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Social Distance: Are These Tweets Real? - The Atlantic

Americans dont trust the government, and they dont trust the media. That trend has been evident for years, but the Trump era has accelerated it.

Now we can see the worst-case scenario that trend could create, playing out in front of our eyes: Confronted with a paralyzing coronavirus pandemic, theres deep confusion about the steps the country should be taking to respond.

Dont expect it to get better, says journalism critic Jay Rosen. Thats in large part because the Trump administration uses confusion as one of its primary political tools. Right now, it is employing it to create cover for the president, who wants to argue that he shouldnt be blamed for a litany of missteps as the virus moved from China to the US and exploded across the country.

The fight to keep Americans from understanding what happened from December to March is going to be one of the biggest propaganda battles in American history, he told me recently. The Republican Party and the Trump campaign and the MAGA coalition are going to have to produce confusion and doubt on a scale that is unlike anything youve ever seen before.

That conflict is unfolding in plain sight: The point of that weird campaign video Trump rolled out at a White House press conference this week was to recast himself as bold and decisive in the face of the pandemic as opposed to convincing reports in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets emerging recently that portray him and his administration as dithering and confused, and slow to make crucial decisions like telling the country to start socially distancing.

Its an extension of the challenge Trump has posed to journalists from the start of his administration, when he ordered his then-press secretary, Sean Spicer, to tell the press that his inauguration had an enormous audience instead of a paltry one. Or, in Trumps words, delivered to a group of veterans in 2018: Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not whats happening.

Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University, has been meeting up with me once a year to discuss the challenges the Trump administration poses for the media. This year, instead of a podcast, we chatted via Skype, and Im presenting edited excerpts of that conversation below.

If you read the story I wrote earlier this week about the medias struggles to report on the pandemic, youll recognize similar themes in this conversation, which was happening while I was reporting that story; Im grateful to Rosen for the opportunity to shape my thinking.

Theres a giant gap in the way the American public perceives or has perceived the pandemic. That split is both across political divides and across news consumption divides. Are you surprised in any way to see what were seeing today?

No.

We have talked about this sort of gap for several years. But did you imagine that this would manifest in a literal life-and-death crisis like this?

No, I never imagined a crisis like this. I did, like lots of other people, worry about what would happen in a truly serious event, combined with the Trump presidency. But I was thinking a war, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster of epic proportion, something like that.

But something like this, which affects everyone and is invisible and takes both science and imagination to understand which I think is a very interesting point for us to discuss I never conceived of something like this.

There have been many failures. I think one of them, for a lot of people and I include myself here is a failure of imagination, a failure to see this coming, even though people have literally made books and movies about this for years.

This possibility was talked about a lot. And warnings for the virus began early, and so there was plenty of information that it was going to become important.

But what I meant by imagination is something additional to that, which is: In order to understand what is happening now, in order to be informed, you need not only good information, reliable information, but you need imagination to see what it is.

Imagination buttressed with science ...

Yeah. Thats why [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and others say if it sounds like its too much, its just enough.

But its an incredibly difficult thing to tell people about, because unlike a hurricane or even a war, [the virus] is completely abstract. So thats one of the challenges that journalists faced.

Right. You cant see it until you either have it or youre looking at someone who has it. Even now, one of the things that strikes me and you see this manifesting on Twitter is that even now when there are [thousands] of people who have died, because so much of it is happening in a hospital, or in someones house or en route to the hospital, that youre not seeing it.

And while theres plenty of reporting from inside hospitals ... in terms of visuals, youre still not seeing it. And so you end up with scenes like people on Twitter saying theyre going to the Elmhurst Hospital in Queens to see if they can see these lines with people.

Thats a whole meme now go to your hospital and take video of nothing happening so that you can own the libs.

Are you tracking the percentage of people who say they are worried [or] not worried, and how thats evolving over time and what their sources of information are? It seems like it has changed over time, in part because at various times the president has said this is a serious thing, after saying it was not a serious thing.

Yeah. And this coheres with political science findings from long ago, that public opinion does follow what political leaders and party leaders are saying.

The recognition that theres a reality there, that this thing is happening, its real, its not a story, its not a fake I think that has grown. But as that has grown, so has the attempt to escape responsibility for that.

And I think this is a really important point that Ive been trying to make: The fight to keep Americans from understanding what happened from December to March is going to be one of the biggest propaganda battles in American history. Because so much of it is public. We have so many statements from Trump minimizing the danger. So many things are already on the record.

The Republican Party and the Trump campaign and the MAGA coalition are going to have to produce confusion and doubt on a scale that is unlike anything youve ever seen before. And that, of course, is going to be a huge challenge for the press.

But its much more than the press: I think the fight to interpret what happened in those first three months as someone elses fault and to persuade Americans that it wasnt Trumps responsibility when there are so many things on the record, like giving myself a 10 out of 10 or this is going to go away, itll just magically disappear. All those things are going to have to be overridden somehow. And that is going to put a huge strain on the information system.

In the pre-Trump era, any politician, let alone the president, who not only said this once but downplayed the virus multiples times made a whole series of statements that were then not rebutted but actually refuted that would be the end of the story. Right? Its all on tape. We know what it is. Theres no doubt about it. Theres no debate.

In the Trump era, sadly, weve become used to the idea that Trump can say something on live TV in front of everyone and then is actually able to make it go away, magically. And that there is a significant chunk of the population that either will never hear it or refuse to believe it or doesnt care.

So youre describing a fight to come. But it seems like in some ways, this wont be a fight: Both sides will already be resigned to either believe Trump or not believe Trump. Is there any reason to believe its different this time?

I think thats a little oversimplified.

The Trump base will believe anything that he believes, and theres already polling data indicating that his core supporters trust Trump as a source of information far more than they trust the news media or any other institution. So for that group, yes.

Then, of course, theres a large group of Trump doubters, who are also, not coincidentally, more likely to think that the mainstream media can be trusted as a source of information.

But there are people who are in neither of those camps. I wouldnt call them centrist. I wouldnt try to characterize their ideology. But theyre not in either one of those camps. And for those people, the key for the Trump campaign is to create confusion, not belief. And thats what were going to see in the months ahead: the massive effort to create doubt and confusion about things that are overwhelmingly clear from the public record.

One side says this. The other side says that. I cant make up my mind; Im going to either ignore it or shrug my shoulders.

Yeah, its already happening. Like, [New York City Mayor] Bill de Blasio does not have a great record in himself and warning his public. He went to the gym way after it was too dangerous to do that. And so there is some responsibility there, right? Compared to Trumps responsibility, its, you know, small. But its real.

That kind of fact is going to interact with on the one hand/on the other hand journalism. And theyre going to try and, of course, blow that up.

Another thing that has already started happening is people keep sending me this graphic. I dont know who created it, but Ill send it to you. That is all the headlines from various sources that minimized the virus, that said its not going to be that big of a deal some similar things to what Trump said.

The attempt is to say that it was the MSM a term I dont use, but they do it was the mainstream media that misled us.

I did want to ask you about that. Do you think the mainstream media Ill use the term could have done a better job of raising the alarm earlier?

Probably, yes. As with other very big crises, like the 2008 economic crisis, you can go back and you can find reports that gave the appropriate warnings. But the overall tone of the coverage did not accomplish that.

I think the same thing will be true here. There are definitely reports quite a few that said this thing is bigger than the political system seems to be acknowledging. And then even before this particular virus arose, the possibility of a global virus like this, having this kind of effect, was very well known and discussed quite a bit.

So there is some responsibility there from the news media. But the news media of course isnt one organism.

Ive been thinking about this for a while. I think there are probably two different reasons that the media, broadly, was not more alarmist about this. One is a sincere desire not to be alarmist in general, and specifically over a health crisis. If youre telling people this is going to be terrible, and you quote people who are stocking up on food, you can have a run on markets.

I think it would be part of the reason that you didnt see kind of a Time out, nothing else matters. Pay attention to this. That would be one reason.

But another way to look at it would be if the president and the White House [were] hair on fire about this, there is no doubt there would be media coverage of the same type. So thats a factor as well.

Theres a lot of resistance to reporting on something that is a possibility.

But the other thing is that for many journalists, this reporting involved going to health experts often the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] or the WHO [World Health Organization], or people like that and saying, What should we think about this? and then reporting what they say.

Now were seeing that, in some cases, those institutions themselves were behind in sounding the alarm, being more vocal about the alarm, and some of their advice and prognostications have changed.

And it seems like that would pose a real challenge if you are a good reporter, and you go to what is supposedly a nonpartisan institution staffed with experts, and theyre saying this is our view that itd be very hard for you to run against that.

I agree with that. Journalism scholars say that news reporters are dependent on authorized knowers. This would be a very good example of that. When the authorized knowers arent making a big deal of something, its extremely difficult for journalists to do that.

What do you make of the Ben Thompson argument that this is why Twitter was particularly valuable? Because you had all sorts of experts on Twitter sometimes they werent sanctioned by the CDC, sometimes they were smart people in Silicon Valley and theyve had insight and we should have listened to them more than the CDC or the WHO at various points?

Well, if the question is the availability of information that warned us that this was coming yes, that information was available. And you could find it in part by doing your own research. Thats true.

But the problem is not really the availability of good information that turned out to be right and important. Its the combination of good information and public attention.

Which is kind of the job of the media. To contextualize that information and to put it out.

Yes, and to order things. This is one of the problems we have with our news system. The news tends to be, to use a colloquial expression, one damn thing after another. And what its not that good at even though people say that front pages do this its not that good at helping us organize stories in order of priority.

Like telling us whats most important to worry about. And next most important, and maybe third or fourth. And keeping those priorities both stable, in the sense that they dont change day to day, but also be able to evolve as big events evolve. We dont really have anything like that. And so it tends to be one damn thing after another.

If you just think about producing todays news, then a sense of hierarchy, a sense of relative importance, disappears from the flow of content. This is a big problem with our news system. Its not the fault of any one journalist or any one news organization. Its a problem with relying on news for our knowledge.

But there are hierarchies. Theres the top of the newscast. If you know how to interpret the New York Times, you know that the story on the far right is the most important even though it may be under a smaller headline than the rest of the page. That is part of the job of media, right? Packaging that and ordering it?

Yes. But that tends to be a little bit different than what I said. Thats heres the most important new thing that happened today.

But some things are not new, but they are the most important thing. So some things are persistent and still the most important thing today. And when you have things like that, where actually the news of the day doesnt change the fact that you should be worried about X, Y, and Z first thats where the system breaks down.

I want to come back to the original idea here that I had when I was talking to you, which was: Is there anything we can do about a partisan divide and a news source divide that is now literally a life-and-death situation? Is there any practical solution to this problem today in 2020?

Well, as the reality of the virus grows and everyday life is affected and people have extremely practical questions like, What do I do? How do I protect my family? the news at the local level becomes extremely important because people need to know where to go, what to do.

So its possible that local news providers will experience kind of a rebirth of both use and trust from the many questions and crises that arise from this situation.

And a relationship with a local news provider is basic to how people develop trust in journalism and in the news media as an institution. And so if peoples connection to local news providers is strengthened by this which does happen sometimes in civic emergencies, like hurricanes, for example that could change things a little bit.

I dont think its going to change opinion at the level of Fox versus NBC and Trump versus Jonathan Karl. It doesnt touch that. But reestablishing trust and utility with local publics could help journalism quite a lot.

That would be great. And it would be great if we have local news outlets that are still around to perform that function.

Well, this is part of the problem. Those newsrooms are themselves impoverished. And so it makes it extremely difficult.

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Trump vs. the media: How hes using his war on the press to deny his coronavirus failings - Vox.com

Among some of the false claims propagated on social media include the notion based on unproven race science that persons of East Asian descent were predisposed to suffer from COVID-19, erroneous assertions that the virus was originally designed to be a bioweapon and arguments supporting the idea that racism can protect against global pandemics.

Hatewatch has chosen to repeat some of these posts in full to demonstrate the nature of the problem.

This deluge of COVID-19-related misinformation cuts against a pledge made by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in February 2020, when representatives from some of the worlds largest tech companies convened with members of the World Health Organization (WHO) to discuss tampering the spread of false information related to the virus. The group was gathered, in part, in response to what a representative from the WHO dubbed an infodemic in an interview with CNBC the new wave of false information on major social media platforms.

Groups such as Change the Terms, a coalition of civil rights organizationsincluding the Southern Poverty Law Center, have pushed to bridge this gap. Change the Terms advocates for social media companies to adopt a reasonable standard of care regarding regulation, which aims to constrain hate activity without stifling communities arbitrarily. But there is work yet to be done. Companies, as the 2019 Year in Hate report found, still struggle to prioritize public safety over the freedom of their users to post extremist content. The moderation of hate groups across all platforms is often inconsistent as well. Some groups, such as white nationalist publication American Renaissance, have been banned from Twitter and Facebook for hate speech for years, but have nevertheless continued to operate on YouTube.

As Hatewatch found in a survey of numerous hate groups tracked by the SPLCs Intelligence Project across three major social media platforms YouTube, Facebook and Twitter racism and disinformation has continued to fester. In addition to spreading racist memes and fake news about Asian Americans and other minority groups, hate groups have used all three platforms to boost a slew of conspiracy theories, fake cures (including one that has resulted in a death in Arizona) and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

When considering the real-world threat posed by social media companies inability to enforce their own guidelines on misinformation and fake news, Chloe Colliver, the head of digital policy and strategy at ISD, told Hatewatch that three main risks came to mind. These included the risks posed not only to public health by the proliferation of fake cures, but also to institutions as a result of a preponderance of conspiracy theories. She also cited the danger of target attacks against minority groups and others.

None of which are new, she added. They fit the patterns of platforms inability to deal with [these] specific kinds of attack and disinformation content.

Most, if not all, of the groups spreading this content have been given a pass to do so under existing social media policies.

Obviously, the historical reticence of these companies to promote evidence-based or expert information above other kinds of information has come back to bite [them] now, as weve seen, Colliver continued. The platforms themselves acknowledged that their policies arent up to scratch in a crisis like this.

VDARE, a white nationalist site that has had a promotional page on Facebook since 2012, has seized upon this climate of instability to push its racist agenda. More than 50 posts on its promotional page referred to the epidemic in some capacity.

There is now scientific evidence that Africans (and Whites) are more resistant to [COVID-19] than Asians and that this is for genetic reasons, one post from March 5 said. It included a link to an article from pseudonymous New York-based contributor Lance Welton, titled Chinese Scientists Find MORE Evidence That Coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19) Discriminates By Race.

Im sure the health authorities do have this information, VDARE editor Peter Brimelow contended in an article posted to the site on March 12 as a follow up to Weltons piece. Using debunked race science, Brimelow posited that COVID-19, as well as its predecessor, SARS, were Oriental-specific.

Are some racial groups more prone to catching the Chinese pathogen and are some races more severely affected when they do? asked another Facebook post from March 31 the same day officials announced that deaths in the United States had officially surpassed those of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The same post included a link to an article featuring a section titled Coronovirus [sic] and the Mexican Race.

VDARE, which has often referred to the coronavirus as the Chinese virus or Wuhan flu (or Wuflu), defended Trumps own use of the term on March 17 as well, arguing in a March 17 post that any opposition to such nomenclature was born out of a world where white people are blamed for all . . . problems.

Fake cures, not to mention misinformation regarding the source of the virus and government efforts to contain it, have been featured on a number of pages belonging to hate groups and extremist groups monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

WorldNetDaily (WND), a conspiracy-minded outlet and active antigovernment extremist group with over 840,000 likes on Facebook, has boosted a number of articles featuring antisemitic dog whistles, fake cures and other disinformation. Recent WND headlines include: Coronavirus is being weaponized by Soros, others behind anti-Trump ads; Clyburn: Democrats must use Chinese virus to restructure America to fit our vision; and Newt Gingrichs question for Biden exposes Obamas undeniable role in N95 mask shortage. Another proclaimed that a three-drug cocktail promotedby Dr. Vladimir Zelenko had a 100% success rate in treating 350 patients with COVID-19. The article, which was shared to WNDs Facebook on March 24, includes an embedded video from Dr. Zelenko himself, which has since been removed by YouTube for violating community guidelines.

Though the particular combination of drugs which includes hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial treatment has been used by some doctors, the rapid spread of misinformation regarding the drugs use has raised some concern, especially for patients who may attempt to administer them themselves.

On March 31, WND published an article titled Cover-up: Chinese researched bat virus near Wuhan market, which posited that the virus may have originated in a research lab near Wuhan.

Several antigovernment groups, including militias, peppered their pages with misinformation implying that the virus would result in a communist takeover of essential industries and/or attacks on the Second Amendment. These fears are central to the antigovernment movements opposition to the New World Order. This far-reaching conspiracy theory, which features prominently in antigovernment and other far-right circles, posits that a small, secretive cadre of elites are behind a rising totalitarian, one-world government.

Were not going down the road that leads to tyranny, and thats what this whole crisis is about, James Stachowiak, otherwise known as Johnny Infidel, said on a video on Facebook that sought to inspire lone wolves to take action.

KLAYMAN: LEFT USING COVID-19 TO INSTALL GOVT DICTATORSHIP!, screamed a post on Freedom Watchs page a group run by far-right extremist Larry Klayman in a post from March 25.

Still others encouraged users to view the virus as a vast globalist conspiracy. This antisemitic euphemism is frequently used by groups such as WND and Infowars, and has its roots in the centuries-old antisemitic image of Jews as puppeteers in complete control of society. One post from anti-LGBTQ extremist Scott Lively, published on March 22, claimed that the coronavirus outbreak had been orchestrated by the elites. Their goal, he contended, was to target small business because it is a cornerstone of American self-sufficiency and serves as a barrier to the complete Marxist takeover of our society.

Now think of a country the size of China . . . and think of its multi-thousand-year habit of eating some very strange creatures basically a zoo is a menu in China, it seems. What are the odds that coronavirus just happened to emerge within a stones throw in a giant country of its only level four bioweapons lab? asked white nationalist YouTuber and self-proclaimed philosopher Stefan Molyneux in a video clip posted to his Twitter on March 30.

The odds, of course, are virtually zero, he said. He claimed the virus appeared to be engineered, possibly for transmission and lethality.

Molyneux who runs a verified account on Twitter with over 450,000 followers has spread racist or pseudoscientific disinformation about COVID-19 for weeks.

Open borders guy reaps fruit of open borders, he tweeted on March 7, after the head of Italys Democratic Party tested positive for the virus.

Then, on March 25, Molyneux released a video accusing the media of turning attention away from the mass infiltration of academia, of media, of Hollywood, [and] of real estate [by] Chinese citizens, often with illicit money from the criminal actions of the Chinese government.

Finally, when asked by a follower why German hospitals werent overwhelmed, Molyneux encouraged followers on March 26 to go look up average IQ by country.

Molyneux, a well-known proponent of scientific racism, has as recently as Oct. 7, 2019, stated that the average IQ in Syria is 83. Turkey is 90. They will never ever be like the West. In 2018, he also cited racial IQ differences as a method to push back against Third World immigration without succumbing to racism.

Molyneux has made his affinity for a white monoculture, to borrow his term, widely known. In late 2018, Molyneux said he had endeared himself to white nationalist beliefs after visiting Poland, which he referred to as an all-white country, accordingto a Right Wing Watch report from Dec. 21, 2018.

Other prominent far-right accounts have sought to downplay the threat posed to Americans by the virus in various ways.

Far-right social media personality and Project Veritas founder James OKeefe produced a series of videos featuring him driving to different COVID-19 testing sites and hospitals in the New York City metro area on March 27. The videos, which were published on both OKeefes personal Twitter with over 710,000 followers, as well as Project Veritass verified account with some 460,000 followers, include OKeefe pressing a national guardsman to call the media coverage of the crisis overblown.

Though one of the videos was removed from OKeefes Facebook on April 1, they remain on Twitter.

VDARE, which has evaded waves of Twitter bans targeting white nationalists, advertised on April 3 that they had created a special archive for posts related to COVID-19 and race. According to the white nationalist site, the race-denying ruling class as one author called them in a March 28 article quoted on Twitter on April 1 has supposedly denied the role of pseudoscientific racial differences in the spread of the disease.

Ruling Class concedes its ok to Notice that Coronavirus discriminates by gender, but NOT that it discriminates by race. Why? the account tweeted on Feb. 21.

VDARE also pushed the same anti-Asian rhetoric that has led to a wave of hate crimes across the country. 575,000+ Chinese call NYC home, it posted on March 22, along with a link to an article titled Is NYC Coronavirus Ground Zero Because Massive Be Strong Wuhan Feb 9th Chinese New Years Parade Helped Spread the Chinese Virus?

Twitter has, at times, cracked down on disinformation on the platform. On March 25, Twitter removed a postfrom the far-right site the Federalist, which advocated for spreading the virus through chickenpox parties. A March 27 tweet from Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk, which echoed the presidents endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, has since been removed from the platform for a terms of service violation. Two tweets from the far-right populist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, were removed on March 30 for spreading misinformation.

We actually have sound, instinctive reasons to be xenophobes, American Renaissance head Jared Taylor told viewers in a YouTube video posted on March 12. He continued:

Everyone knows about the bodys immune system, which fights disease. We also have a behavioral immune system. All people everywhere instinctively avoid certain things that could make us sick. Piles of feces. Rotting flesh. People with running sores. Part of this behavioral immune system is an instinctive fear that people who act or look strange could be carrying disease.

Xenophobia, Taylor concluded, can save your life.

Taylor followed up on March 27, noting in a video titled What the Virus Means for Us that everything teaches identitarian lessons, including the coronavirus.

Professor Giorgio Palu, former president of the European Society of Virology, says that early on there was a proposal to isolate people coming from China, but they didnt do that because people wouldve said that was racist. Professor Polu believes that a large level of the devastation [in Italy] was caused by that: fear of being called racist, Taylor said later in the same video.

Though Palu did acknowledge that a proposal to isolate people coming from China was shot down in a statement to CNNon March 18, he also explained that the breadth of Italys outbreak arose from the government lagging on both testing and enforcing lockdowns.

Despite being banned from Twitter since 2018, American Renaissances YouTube channel and its 126,000 subscribers have remained.

Jason Khne, a white nationalist podcaster and vloggerknown online as No White Guilt, blamed anti-whiteism not only for coronavirus spreading throughout the United States, but also for ensuring that many medicines and medical products were produced abroad.

This is an anti-white issue, he said in a video posted on March 24. You can say theres an economic component to it, but the bottom line is that the . . . incentivization structures have been put in place to capitalize on the harm inflicted on Western kind.

Molyneux, meanwhile, used his channel to flesh out the idea, also propagated on his Twitter, that the virus was a bioweapon.

[COVID-19] is kind of like the perfect virus from a weaponization standpoint, and if it was related to eating bats, its not like people in China started eating bats last October, he said in a podcast from Jan. 25.

In a live stream aired March 27, Molyneux, along with his guest, Dr. Paul Cottrell, who received his Ph.D. in finance from the online, for-profit school, Walden University, discussed whether the Wuhan virus is the bioweapon that Cottrell contended had leaked out of a lab near Wuhan in 2015. Molyneux later pondered whether the viruss spread throughout the world ought to be considered an act of manslaughter or even homicide, presumably on Chinas part.

A day later, in a now-unlisted YouTube video linked to on Molyneuxs Twitter he declared a sort of victory for the racist, anti-immigrant right.

All the people who were called xenophobic and racist for wanting to talk about immigration who said that it was possible to stop it relatively easily theyve all been proven right, he said in the March 28 video.

Now the walls go up because it affects those in power, he said.

Photo by iStockphoto

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Hate Groups and Racist Pundits Spew COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media Despite Companies' Pledges to Combat It - Southern Poverty Law Center

Malcolm Turnbulls new memoir, which is due to be published on Monday, is a sweeping account of events from his early childhood in Sydneys eastern suburbs to being forced out of the prime ministership in 2018. Given Turnbulls tumultuous exit from public life, and the history wars that have followed, many readers will be interested in the former prime ministers reflections on Scott Morrison, the man who replaced him. Here are some of the standout passages from A Bigger Picture.

Turnbull says his first encounter with Scott Morrison happened in 2001, when the then-businessman was mulling options to enter politics and Morrison was the state director of the Liberal party. Morrison, Turnbull says, wanted him to be the New South Wales party leader, and hatched an ingenious idea in 2001 that involved a Liberal member of the Legislative Council retiring, my taking up the casual vacancy and then becoming leader of the opposition, running for a seat in the lower house at the next election, due in 2003. Turnbull wasnt interested in state politics and was bemused by the unconventional pathway to leadership that Morrison war-gamed with him. He was also concerned Labor would go after him for being wealthy an out-of-touch plutocrat. Morrison apparently had an answer, and spreadsheets, at the ready. Weve been throwing your name into our polling in western Sydney. And you know what? The battlers like you, Morrison told him. They admire your success; they reckon youre self-made its all about aspiration. Australians dont want class wars. According to this account, Morrison told Turnbull Kerry Chikarovski would make way for him if he signed up to the plan. But the Malcolm for Macquarie Street fizzled.

Turnbull portrays the current prime minister as always ringside, either in person or through surrogates, during the corrosive leadership battles that erupted shortly after the Coalition came to power in 2013. Turnbull says Morrison began to sniff out interest in removing Abbott as early as 2014, only a year after the Coalitions election victory, when the majority of colleagues were not countenancing a change.

There was talk of moving Turnbull to Treasury to replace Joe Hockey after the disaster of the 2014 budget. I was careful to play no part in this. Abbott would never move me to treasurer, Turnbull says. And I felt I was being used as a stalking horse by others, especially Scott Morrison, to position themselves.

Turnbull says the agitation persisted, and on 10 December, he had dinner with Morrison, who wanted to replace Abbott as party leader. It was the first time he laid out, fairly comprehensively, his thinking on Abbott, who he felt would have to go by the middle of 2015 if his performance didnt improve. He said Hockey should go now and he was making the case to Abbott to replace him with me. He was closely in touch with the key figures at News [Corp], he told me, and said they were getting ready to dump Abbott. And he made it clear he saw himself as the successor.

After the reshuffle at the end of that year that moved Morrison out of immigration and into social services, Turnbull says Morrison was furious and this was the first time I recall him saying we will need to remove him before the budget. By 19 January, Turnbull says Morrison had a list of names who would support tipping Abbott out of the leadership. Morrison wanted the job, but didnt want to be seen to challenge him. He felt the rightwing commentators (by whom he meant Alan Jones and Ray Hadley) would never support me. Morrison also, according to Turnbull, wanted to marginalise Julie Bishop, but later backed off that idea, and the three later agreed Turnbull would be the leader in the event the campaign to remove Abbott succeeded.

Throughout this period, Turnbull notes Morrison was vocal in his support for Abbott and publicly denied discussing leadership issues with me. Of course, hed done so on many occasions, and every indication was that hed encouraged, if not masterminded, the [first] spill itself.

Turnbulls ire is directly predominantly at Mathias Cormann and Peter Dutton for the coup that terminated his prime ministership in 2018, but he concludes after some equivocation (its never possible to be 100% certain about these things) that Morrison was playing a double game: professing public loyalty to me while at the same time allowing his supporters to undermine me. It was, of course, precisely what hed done in 2015 when he said hed voted for Abbott in the leadership ballot but worked closely with me to ensure his supporters voted against Abbott.

Turnbull says he knew on the morning he spilled the leadership, while I was prepared to accept Morrisons assurances of continued loyalty, I knew that some of his supporters were starting to urge him to make a move himself. He says he was aware of the risks of tactical voting by Morrison supporters in the first ballot. Turnbull says Morrison sent him a note while the ballots were being distributed. The note said: I dont know why we didnt discuss this. But thats your call. Turnbull is on my ballot. I replied, Thanks! Its the right call. The room has to make up its mind.

Scott is a control freak and Id seen before ... how hed publicly vote one way while ensuring his supporters voted the other way

When the result was 48 votes for Turnbull and 35 for Dutton, I wondered whether some of Morrisons supporters had taken the chance and voted for Dutton, hoping they didnt accidentally deliver him a win. Subsequent accounts of these events indicate that Stuart Robert and Alex Hawke had organised about half-a-dozen of them to vote for Dutton enough to lift his numbers up to a level that damaged me but didnt get Dutton over the line. If Morrisons friends had voted the way he said he did, the Dutton insurgency would have been utterly dead that morning.

The idea that they did that without his knowledge is fanciful. Scott is a control freak and Id seen before in the ballots in 2015 how hed publicly vote one way while ensuring his supporters voted the other way.

When it was clear he had no prospects of retaining the prime ministership, Turnbull actively encouraged Morrisons campaign. Turnbull says he lined up behind Morrison because he believed he was a responsible, safe pair of hands. But Dutton, were he to become prime minister, would run off to the right with a divisive, dog-whistling, anti-immigration agenda, written and directed by Sky News and 2GB, designed to throw red meat to the base. With no constraints, Dutton would do enormous damage to the social fabric of Australia. Its one thing having the tough cop handling border protection and counter-terrorism, but not at the head of our multicultural society.

Turnbull also records the messages he exchanged with his successor after Morrison was sworn in. I messaged him, Turnbull says, Congratulations prime minister and good luck. According to Turnbull, Morrison replied the next morning. Only you can know how I feel today, but I cannot begin to know how you feel. I loved working for and with you. Im really proud of what we did. And that is always how I will always feel and speak of it. I want you to know I am thinking about you a great deal and you know I pray for you. That doesnt change now. I dont know why all this happened, but now it has come upon me, you know I will be relying on my faith, friends and values to overcome and conquer what is ahead Thank you for all youve done for me. But above all as one PM to another, thank you for everything you did for our country. No one knows that contribution better than me.

Love you mate.

Turnbull notes at one point in the memoir that working to prevent the legalisation of same-sex marriage was the most animated Morrison ever got during internal policy debates. Morrison, Turnbull says, wanted a constitutional amendment on the question. Scott explained to me a few days later, I dont want gay marriage. And because referendums are almost always defeated, I think thats a good way to ensure it never happens. Morrison also ran interference on the issue. In the 2016 election, Turnbull says the issue of marriage equality was broadly neutralised until this equilibrium was thrown out in the last crucial week of the campaign by Scott Morrison, who had been the principal advocate of a plebiscite.

During an interview with Leigh Sales on 7.30 on Tuesday 28 June, he refused to say how hed vote if the plebiscite was carried and this immediately raised concerns about the governments sincerity. Scott had a very sincerely held and viscerally intense opposition to same-sex marriage and could have said hed abstain, but I fear his troubled conscience was reserving the right to vote against it. Every other minister was then asked how theyd vote; most sensibly said theyd vote for legalisation if the plebiscite passed. A cautious answer from Julie Bishop was unreasonably portrayed as equivocal. She was a strong supporter of same-sex marriage despite a ferocious anti-same-sex-marriage element in her constituency, led by Margaret Court.

Turnbull recounts a number of instances in the memoir where he asserts Morrison was either leaking government discussions or front-running issues with trusted media surrogates during internal debates about tax reform and about budget measures. Turnbull says he had several tough discussions with Morrison about his behaviour. He says both he and the finance minister Mathias Cormann were at our wits end as to how to manage Scott. He says Cormann said the government had a treasurer problem. In an exchange of messages between the two Turnbull says he replied: [Morrison] operates completely differently from us. We prefer to stay absolutely resolute on course until we decide to change. He wants to flag possible changes way in advance (why?) which reduces optionality and makes us look undecided. I cant work it out because its so counter productive.

[Scott Morrison] was brittle emotionally and easily offended.

Nothing is more corrosive of good government than policy consideration being front-run in the media, Turnbull says. I found it completely incomprehensible and couldnt see how anyones interest or agenda was assisted. Scott adamantly denied any responsibility, but regrettably nobody believed him.

I had no problem whatsoever with Scotts political pragmatism he was, after all, a former state director of the party and looked at issues almost exclusively through a political prism. But working with him was difficult; so much of what we discussed or were thinking about found its way into the media.

Many of my colleagues encouraged me, without success, to mistrust Scott and to see his briefings as malign, the calculated undermining and manoeuvring of a Machiavellian plotter. And yet we enjoyed a close working relationship. Despite Mathiass begging me to be selective in what I told him, I continued to be open with Scott. He seemed to me to be my most likely successor, and as far as I could I preferred to work with him as a trusted partner. Scott, like many politicians, wanted to keep himself constantly in the centre of things. That was the purpose, Mathias maintained, of Scotts constant stream of briefings, mostly to Simon Benson at News Corporation.

Some of the more scathing commentary Turnbull makes about his successor is delivered through passing references to the prime minister. Mathias and I agreed we had to make sure Scott was a success.

We had to recognise he was brittle emotionally and easily offended. At a practical level we both sought to ensure, as tactfully as possible, that he stayed out of negotiations with the Senate. He had a blustering manner that could easily be mistaken for bullying and was often counterproductive.

It should be clear from the preceding references that Turnbull narrates a hostile relationship between Cormann, the finance minister, and Morrison, then treasurer. Turnbull suggests that Cormanns strong support of Dutton during the leadership crisis in 2018 reflected two things a close personal relationship between the two rightwingers, and Cormanns fixed dislike of Morrison.

Mathias regarded Scott as emotional, narcissistic and untrustworthy and told me so regularly.

Mathias regarded Scott as emotional, narcissistic and untrustworthy and told me so regularly, Turnbull says.

Turnbull says Dutton was also hostile to Morrison. Of course, if Mathias had a poor opinion of Scott, Duttons dislike of him was even stronger, he says.

Turnbull suggests the feelings were more or less mutual. Morrison for his part didnt entirely trust Mathias, not because he saw Mathias as a rival for the leadership one day, but because he knew Mathias was close to Peter Dutton. Scott didnt trust Dutton at all and regarded him as deficient in all respects character, intellect and political nous.

Within that troika, Turnbull says, it would be fair to say that each of them trusted me more than they trusted the other.

Cormanns move against Turnbull clearly stung the most. Turnbull says he was hurt personally by the finance ministers decision to agitate on behalf of Dutton, because he thought there was a friendship that eclipsed the transactions of politics. Although he also quotes Cormann describing the move against him by Dutton as madness, and it is terrorism but you have to give in to it.

A Bigger Picture by Malcolm Turnbull is published by Hardie Grant Books (RRP $55). It will be available from 20 April.

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Scott is a control freak: what Malcolm Turnbulls new book tells us about his relationship with Morrison - The Guardian