Paladino’s Latest Hate Infested Email filled with Fake News

This morning we started getting emails and text about an intensely racist, xenophobic, and hate-filled email sent out by none other than a notorious local racist Carl Paladino.

The email labeled “19 Pictures From Hell (Formerly called Paris, The Capital of France)” is chock-full of racist, bigoted and downright false comments towards refugees.

The email ends with a warning at the bottom stating:

PITIFUL….. IS AMERICA NEXT ? PLEASE FORWARD.”

So we decided to look into the email a bit more to see what was real and what wasn’t.

a few google searches later the conclusion was simple.  It was all pure racist bullshit.

This viral email is purported to have originated by “Czech Tourists in 2018 about what they encountered on a weekend trip to Paris”. Upon closer inspection, it’s obvious that the email chain was poorly translated into English by the Russian propaganda machine and spread across White Nationalist websites and forums across the internet, created to do nothing but incite fear and hate among some of the worlds most vulnerable.

The email starts by claiming:

France is being destroyed, as reported by neutral Czech Tourists in 2018 and still getting worse. The overwhelming abuse of the indigenous culture. Shame on those who welcomed such foreseeable destruction.

The viral email has actually been around since before 2017 and has been widely spread on White nationalism and neo-nazi websites and forums across the globe.

It features 19 pictures purporting to be of Paris, France. In reality, most, if not all of the pictures come from other sources dating back as far as 2011.  Almost none of which are photographs of present-day Paris.

Since it is so widely available in the white supremacist and conservative websites around the world, we decided not to reprint the email. You can google it if you want to see the original version.

Also, Alan Bedenko has a good portion of it on his Twitter that sums up the racist, nasty tone of the email:

We decided to do some additional searching through some of the 19 pictures spewed throughout the email to determine where they might have actually come from.  As we predicted, most of the 19 pictures have little or nothing to do with Paris, France or even refugees for that matter.

The first is a picture of three soldiers standing guard with the statement:

“At the Louvre, which is always full of onlookers and tourists, is now deserted, but around armed to the teeth with patrols. These people look at you with suspicion and do not remove their finger from the trigger. And this is not ordinary police, but real soldiers in full dress! As it turned out, in Paris for almost a year living in a state of emergency .. “

The photo below originated from a 2015 news article labeled “soldiers on patrol after attack”

 

Oddly enough, the picture looks very similar to this one taken around the same time (2015) after the Paris Attacks at New Era Field.  SCARY!!!

The next picture is of  these “scary women” wearing Niqāb’s:

Which is actually a doctored picture from a 2011 Yahoo news article about a potential ban on full body veils in Austria.

Another set of photos claiming to be trash and debris left over by refugees, is actually that of the Paris Garbage Strike in 2017 and a flood that turned parts of Paris into a giant garbage dump

The other picture of trash was also used in this Ukranian newspaper article from 2017:

The next series of pictures is a collage of black people doing non-threatening things, like sleeping in tents and standing in lines.

Most of which first appeared on islamophobic white nationalists Twitter feeds in 2018:

UPDATE: Upon closer inspection of some of the pictures below, we found two of the pictures actually originated from a Russian Propaganda website as far back as 2017.

these were accompanied with the statement that:

“It was a terrifying experience. I can imagine what’s going on in Marseille and Calais where migrants already de facto set their own rules. In France, a civil war is brewing, that’s what I say. Therefore, I recommend not to go there – Farewell, beloved France! God forbid that we had something like this in the Czech Republic!

The last part of the email labeled ‘more of Paris’ aren’t actually photos from Paris at all. In fact, one of a man urinating on a subway train was actually taken in the United States on a New York City subway car.

DISINFORMAZIONE La foto dell’uomo che urina nella metropolitana e “l’Italia di Renzi”

It was also used by Nationalists in Italy to politically attack Matteo Renzi, who served as Prime Minister of Italy in 2014:

The second picture of a black man making a mess of some McDonalds on a train appears to have also originated in Italy. 

Lesson learned:  If you’re going to waste your days spreading hate, fear, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, at least make sure what you send to thousands of people via email is actually real.  Otherwise, you’re just another ill-informed, racist asshole like Carl Paladino.

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In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, a slew of far-right websites popped up and cashed in on content propping up then-candidate Donald Trump. And those sites continued to rake in millions of dollars during Trump's time in the White House. But since 2020, the right-wing media cash spigot has effectively slowed to a trickle.

A new report in the Atlantic found that since the 2020 election cycle, the most prominent pro-Trump websites have seen their once robust traffic dry up. Writer Paul Farhi analyzed data from media analysis website The Righting, which focuses on conservative publishers, and reported that of the 10 most popular right-wing websites, traffic was down by an average of roughly 40%.

"The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing," Farhi wrote. "Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent."

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"FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing 'only' 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago," he added.

According to Farhi's research, the primary reason for the precipitous drop in clicks for far-right websites is ultimately due to Facebook. Conservative publishers were for years dependent on Facebook engagement as a primary source of traffic. The social media platform's algorithm (the complex code that determines what content shows up in a user's feed) had predominantly favored outrage, as content that provokes a negative reaction is more likely to get a user to click, like, comment or share a post.

In 2020, Vox reported that the Facebook algorithm was overwhelmingly favorable to conservatives, with far-right pundits like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino bringing in tens of millions of clicks per month from Facebook engagement. Progressive media analysis group Media Matter for America found that anti-transgender content in particular generated a disproportionate amount of clicks for conservative websites. New York Times columnist Kevin Roose found that "conservative pages were beating out liberals’ [pages] in making it into the day’s top 10 Facebook posts with links in the United States, based on engagement, like the number of reactions, comments, and shares the posts receive."

Amid a wave of criticism from Congress and international bodies over Facebook being exploited by bad actors to influence elections, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to the algorithm in 2018 aimed at promoting content from friends and family over news publishers. He further tweaked it in 2021 to further deprioritize content from publishers, which has, over time, resulted in far fewer clicks for the conservative publishers that used to dominate the platform.

"All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites," Farhi wrote. "The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media."

According to Farhi, conservatives are now retreating from websites depending on clicks to other forms of media entirely, like podcasts, Substack newsletters, YouTube channels and videos on the far-right broadcasting platform Rumble.

"There’s a lot of choice," said The Righting owner Howard Polskin. "Even if [the big] sites went out of business tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there."

Click here to read Farhi's Atlantic article in full.