Troll: A fake flag burning at Gettysburg was only his latest hoax
Source: Washington Post
Troll: A fake flag burning at Gettysburg was only his latest hoax
A Bernie Sanders supporter has provoked the far right for years using online aliases, sometimes with dangerous results.
By Shawn Boburg and Dalton Bennett
JULY 17, 2020
Adam Rahuba, a former concert promoter, works part-time as a food-delivery driver and a DJ. At 38, he spent most of the past year staying on a friend’s couch in a small town north of Pittsburgh.
A Washington Post investigation found that Rahuba is also the anonymous figure behind a number of social media hoaxes — the most recent played out in Gettysburg on Independence Day — that have riled far-right extremists in recent years and repeatedly duped partisan media outlets.
Rahuba once claimed that activists were planning to desecrate a Confederate cemetery in Georgia, The Post found. He seeded rumors of an organized effort to report Trump supporters for supposed child abuse. And he promoted a purported grass-roots campaign to confiscate Americans’ guns.
These false claims circulated widely on social media and on Internet message boards. They were often amplified by right-wing commentators and covered as real news by media outlets such as Breitbart News and The Gateway Pundit.
The hoaxes, outlandish in their details, have spurred fringe groups of conspiracy-minded Americans to action by playing on partisan fears. They have led to highly combustible situations — attracting heavily armed militia members and far-right activists eager to protect values they think are under siege — as well as large mobilizations of police.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/07/17/gettysburg-antifa-flag-burning-troll/
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