Reuters published a false claim linking Charlie Kirk’s assassination to the “far-right” – and then tried to cover it up, editing the original article without informing readers of the change, according to the Foundation for Freedom Online.
Archives of Reuters’ original article were obtained by the Foundation for Freedom Online, showing the news agency tapped a “democracy expert” at the Carnegie Foundation, known for its efforts to counter “online disinformation,” to assist in its attempt to spread disinformation.
Reuters quoted the expert as saying that the assassin’s bullet casings pointed to the involvement of the “far right” – even though the statements found on the casings were explicitly anti-fascist slogans.
From the original:
RIGHT, LEFT OR CRAZY?
An expert on democracy and security said it was hard to read too much into the messages left on the shell casings recovered by authorities. One of the inscriptions read: “hey fascist! CATCH!” followed by a combination of directional arrows, an apparent reference to a sequence of button presses that unleashes a bomb in a popular video game.
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the symbology found on the bullet casings suggests the shooter had affiliation with the so-called Groyper movement, associated with far-right activist and commentator Nick Fuentes.
“It’s an eclectic ideological movement marked by video game memes, anti-gay, Nick Fuentes white supremacy, irony,” she said. “It certainly leans right, but it is quite eclectic.”
The article was later edited to remove the direct assertion that the symbology on the bullet casings suggested the assassin’s affiliation with the far-right. But Reuters attempted to do this in secret according to the Foundation for Freedom Online, neglecting to add a note informing readers of the change.
The updated version of Reuters’ article carries the milder but still misleading argument from Carnegie’s democracy expert, that it “wouldn’t be surprising” if the shooter was far-right:
RIGHT, LEFT OR CRAZY?
“In a way, the ideological beliefs of the shooter don’t matter,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“What matters is how they’re taken by society. And if our society chooses to keep pointing fingers, whether the person turns out to be right, left or just unstable, then the violence will grow from the pointing of fingers, regardless of the act itself.”
Kleinfeld said most perpetrators of political violence were not clearly on one ideological side or another, but typically driven by “a hodgepodge of conspiracy beliefs and mental illness.”
“So it wouldn’t be surprising at all if this person was a person of the far right, if this person was a person who held a variety of different beliefs and was sort of unclassifiable,” she added.
The Foundation for Freedom Online noted that the Carnegie Endowment has been a leading force pushing for online censorship over the past decade – under the guise of countering “disinformation.”
Via FFO:
The Carnegie Endowment has for years received millions of dollars in US federal funding, including $1.27 million from the Department of War, $1.09 million from the Energy Department, $781,776 from the State Department, and $53,680 from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
The Endowment is also funded by a variety of western governments including the UK, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, the European Union as well as Japan and NATO.
The Carnegie Endowment currently has an ongoing $839,059 grant from the Department of Energy that ends in July 2026. The nearly $1 million grant started in August 2023, during the Biden administration.
During the past decade, the Carnegie Endowment became a hub for the kind of “disinformation research” that fueled online censorship. Major figures in the censorship industry are associated with Carnegie, including former Twitter head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, Brazilian censorship advocate Marco Ruediger, and longtime National Endowment for Democracy employee Dean Jackson.
Carnegie’s Influence Operations Researchers Guild serves as a global umbrella for some of the most important organizations behind online censorship, including the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, GLOBSEC’s Center for Democracy and Resilience, Graphika, and the Global Disinformation Index.
Far from pointing towards the right wing, every bit of information about the shooter’s suggests conventional leftist motivations – opposition to “fascism” and “hate.”
The shell casings on the assassin’s bullets carry explicitly anti-fascist slogans, including “Hey, fascist! Catch!” as well as “O Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Ciao, ciao!”, the lyrics from an Italian anti-Mussolini protest song.
It has now emerged that the killer told his parents that he targeted Kirk because “there is too much evil and the guy [Charlie Kirk] spreads too much hate.”
Despite this, the false narrative about the killer’s alleged far-right sympathies swept the media in the wake of Kirk’s murder. Articles fueling the theory were published by The New Republic, Salon, The Daily Telegraph, and Newsweek as well as Reuters.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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