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Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Concrete Milkshakes and the Power of Misinformation

Recently, there was a protest and counter-protest in Oregon.

If you've heard of it, I'm sure it was in reference to concrete milk shakes. The message being spread is extreme leftists Antifa members mixed quick dry concrete with milk shakes, essentially turning them into bricks they could sneak around with and chucked them at the far right group.

Where this came from is an interesting study in misinformation and the power of the online grift.

The problems with this conspiracy theory are many.
  1. Sugar is actually used to slow down the process of concrete hardening. It's used in the industry as a way to have more time working the concrete. If milkshakes had the concrete in it, they would definitely not be turning into the bricks our right-wing personalities would like you to believe. 
  2. Where were the pictures of right-wing protesters and police covered in cement? None were released. You would think an image of someone covered in powered concrete, bleeding from the head, would be something you would want to spread across the Internet. 
  3. While the chemistry behind this actually creating a very acidic mix is true, we also had no reports of chemical burns. You would think if someone was hit with this damaging mixture, someone would have gone to the hospital. 
  4. The distributor that was supposedly handing out these weapons were filmed all day, handing milkshakes to people, and those people drinking them. I would expect there to be reports of people with concrete insides throughout the day. 
The background of the milkshake being thrown at conservative personalities originated in Britain. Tommy Robinson, an anti-immigration extreme far right Brit, was hit with a milkshake and it went viral. Ever since, it's been common practice to throw a milkshake at these personalities instead of an egg, because a milkshake has much more volume, is much more embarrassing, and will likely stick with the personality the rest of the day. It's a perfect, non-violent way to say, "Go fuck yourself."

So where did this conspiracy come from?

The Portland police where the first ones to Tweet about this. To be fair, they didn't say there was confirmed reports, but Tweeting this at all is sort of an issue. Until they had confirmed reports they should've said "we've received some reports of assaults with weapons happening" or something vague but getting the point across.

Right wing grifter Jack Posobiec ran with this unconfirmed report and Tweeted it out to his 507,000 followers. A unconfirmed report became a confirmed chemical attack.
The same guy that spread the Pizzagate conspiracy is now spreading a concrete in milkshake conspiracy and it's spreading like a Lib owning California wild fire.

From here it spread to more fringe right-wing sites like Infowars, but eventually everyone's favorite 24 hour news network, Fox News, picked up the story. They eventually altered the headline to not contain the quick mix concrete portion, but the damage was done. Headline reading fans looking for any evidence to throw in the face of snowflakes were repeating this as truth.


This a problem. Fox News pushed out the headline knowing that most of their viewers would never read the story. Their viewers saw a headline about these violent leftists that want to destroy America. And then Fox News quietly edited the headline, after the original push notification went out.

It's not just Fox News. Everyone is in this race to break a story. "Reporters" are willing to Tweet out unconfirmed reports with the hopes for the clicks.

And you can see, there are many posts in letters to the editor asking why their local paper didn't cover the concrete milkshakes. There were many more dubious sites with similar comment sections like LawOfficers dot com where people question why the leftists hate America so much. Questioning why they want to push Sharia law.

Most Fox viewers are smart enough not to act on this sort of stuff. They'll post to Facebook about how the libs are being owned, and that Trump should bring in the National Guard, but they likely won't act on it.

Problem is, sometimes they do. Remember when I mentioned Pizzagate earlier? This was a right-wing conspiracy that implicated the Democratic Party and the Clinton family in running a pedophilia ring out of the pizza place in Washington. Yes... this dumb conspiracy was actually believed and covered by our friends at Fox. And the result of pushing this story was that the employees and owners of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria  were given death threats and harassed until finally on December 4th of 2016, Edger Maddison Welch, fired into the pizza place with an AR-15. When later asked why, he said he had read about this and wanted to investigate it himself.

And I can empathize with Welch, if I thought there was a pedophilia ring operating in my neighborhood, I would want to take action as well.

And history repeats itself.

That community group handing out the milkshakes in Portland during the protests, well they've been receiving death threats since the protest. 

The radicalization of viewers through headline manipulation and the spread of actual "fake news" is going to cause a further divide in our country. It's going to keep everyone in the middle class tearing at each other for the scraps and ultimately it's going to lead to violence.

You see, I'm finished giving Fox News the benefit of the doubt. They've moved father to the right, existing in what used to be reserved for more fringe sites like The Federalist, Breitbart, and InfoWars. Fox blurs the line between editorial and actual news, mashing the likes of Hannity and Carlson between the days stories. Fox and Friends fill your morning with muted misinformation, smiles at the camera, and sips their coffee.

If you want talk about Fake News, Fox just needs to look in the mirror. Anyone that works for them with a journalism degree of any sort should feel disgusted for being part of this propaganda machine.

You may think I'm being overly critical, but I have family and friends that watch nothing but Fox News, and they are buying more and more weapons, they are becoming more paranoid about MS-13 coming to kill them in middle-American suburbs. I have an uncle that won't hug his grandson because he's afraid he might be gay and thinks that somehow will push the kid over the edge.

It's not acceptable. It's despicable. And at some point, the empire is going to come crashing down. I just hope that happens before there's real violence.

Not only do we have dishonest journalism, but we have an open Internet where any idiot troll that wants to throw gas on the fire has the world listening. Whether your a Russian hacker or a right-wing troll, it's easy to spread this crap.

As things seemed to be calming down, a flyer started being distributed around the Internet reportedly showing people that received chemical burns from the milk shakes.

A 30 second reverse image search shows that this image came from an article from a couple years before about a chemical burn from a spa day gone wrong.


We live in a hellish environment where people refuse to research what they read. They want the comfort of the echo chamber. And there are grifters willing to embrace this for the almighty dollar.

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