MSNBC's Maddow Highlights How Clinton Health Conspiracies Made Their Way From Alex Jones' InfoWars To Fox News

Maddow: “This Whole Fever Dream Has Percolated Up Through So Much Of The Right-Wing Media And Onto Fox News” 

From the August 17 edition of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show

Video file

RACHEL MADDOW (HOST): This morning as the entire political world was surprised and a little rattled to wake up to the news that the Trump campaign is getting a whole new top leadership team less than 90 days from the election, and it's going to be led by the head of Breitbart News of all things, well that was the mainstream, oh my god political news story of the day. The front page of the conservative mothership website today, the Drudge Report, instead led today with this. Pillows for Hillary! And when you click through, you get this expose on how Hillary Clinton is supposedly constantly being propped up on pillows. There's these photos that have big yellow arrows pointing to the incriminating evidence that Secretary Clinton likes lumbar support when she does interviews. This is the big front page splash at the Drudge Report today.

[...]

There are fake Hillary Clinton medical records circulating in the right-wing blogosphere. They have her real life doctor's name printed at the top, though not her correct title as a doctor. And this fake letter purports to show that Secretary Clinton has severe neurological impairments. There's even a fake MRI circulating in the right-wing Twittersphere, supposedly showing damage to Hillary Clinton's brain. See can't you tell that's Hillary Clinton's brain? Looks like her, it's wearing a pant suit. Look! Both the fake records and the fake brain scan were tweeted out by a Twitter account that has since been deleted, but they've been shared over and over and over again on the right-wing web and talked about on right-wing talk radio. There's also an absolutely nutballs video produced by Alex Jones' InfoWars, a conspiracy theory website that uses slowed down video of Hillary Clinton joking around with reporters, to claim that she's having a seizure. What was actually going on in that moment is that she was joking around about the fact that reporters were all asking her a bunch of questions at the same time, and she was going hey hey hey hold on a minute. But they slowed it down and made it seem like she's collapsing. I should tell you that this is from InfoWars and for good measure, the video from InfoWars also says that in addition to these seizures that they accuse her of having, they say that she also has autism and that she has syphilis. They can tell. 

And then sure enough, this same conspiracy theory makes its way to the Fox News Channel. One of their hosts is named Sean Hannity. That's him here. He devoted an entire segment of his show this past week to investigating whether Hillary Clinton is experiencing a serious undisclosed medical condition. Yesterday the morning show at Fox News, which is called Fox & Friends, they spent a portion of their morning asking whether Hillary Clinton is too tired or too unhealthy to be president. This whole fever dream has percolated up through so much of the right-wing media and onto Fox News, so that now, all the Drudge Report has to do is splash pillows for Hillary on the front page and consumers of that kind of news know exactly what they're getting at. They know what that's about. So that's what it's been like on the right side of the campaign recently. Now that the head of a really, really, really conspiratorial right-wing website is actually running the Donald Trump campaign, I think we should expect it to get more like that.

Previously

CNN's Stelter: Hannity’s Peddling Of Conspiracy Theories “Does A Disservice” To His Audience

Watch CNN's Media Critic Blast Hannity For Spreading “Conspiracy Theories About Hillary Clinton's Health”

Sean Hannity Dedicates Entire Segment To Debunked Conspiracy Theory About Clinton's Health

Watch As Sean Hannity Fails To Convince Doctors That Hillary Clinton Suffers From Seizures

Hannity Responds To Trump Campaign Troubles With Clinton Health Conspiracy Parade