Turkish trolls hijacked American right-wing media — and Rudy Giuliani’s brain
Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer and former Republican mayor of New York who has been amplifying misinformation to Republican President Donald Trump, has more than just one favorite online conspiracy. His obsession with the utterly unfounded theory that Democrats colluded with Ukrainian nationals to delegitimize Trump’s 2016 presidential win is only Giuliani’s latest flight of fancy. It is predated by another that is equally ridiculous: that a 78-year-old Muslim cleric named Fethullah Gülen used a global network of followers to conspire with Hillary Clinton to influence the 2016 presidential campaign.
At one point in 2017, according to the Washington Post, senior administration officials asked Giuliani specifically not to bring up Turkish issues — like Gülen’s status in the US — when he met with Trump. Giuliani’s Turkish “hobby horse,” as one former official described it, is far from a random international political figure, though. Gülen is an important node in a tangled web of far-right paranoia. Giuliani told BuzzFeed News that he has never pushed for Gülen’s extradition, even though the Washington Post reported otherwise. Nevertheless, understanding why Giuliani was so obsessed with him means understanding how state-sponsored Turkish trolls were able to hijack American right-wing media in 2016 — and may do so again this time around. [Continue reading…]