Gary Franchi began his rise to fame in conspiracy circles as a leading promoter of the idea. In 2009, for instance, he produced the video Camp FEMA: American Lockdown, arguing precisely that FEMA – a notoriously bureaucratic and chaotic government institution completely unsuited for secretive conspiracies – is building such camps to house political dissenters. The camps are located “on existing military bases now,” said Franchi – adding that “it’s not a big secret” (it is, in fact, not a big secret, but not for the reason Franchi thinks) – but that FEMA was ready to utilize other structures as well, including airport hangars and vacant office buildings; even “[y]our local church may have already signed a deal with the devil.” And then, of course, his rhetoric turned ominous: “If you believe in the 2nd amendment, if you believe in the right to self-defense, then perhaps you will have a different decision to make than the person that will let them kick your door in and drag you out.”
Franchi was at that point (and probably still is) national director of RestoreTheRepublic.com, a group (website) dedicated to eliminating the Federal Reserve and the IRS, to making it illegal to implant microchips in people, and ro end globalization since globalization is a means to a one-world government. He also ran the Patriot social networking site RestoreTheRepublic.net and appeared as a host of the ‘Reality Report’ on Freedom.TV and as editor of Republic Magazine, and was a mainstay at various Patriot conferences where he would lay out his conspiracy theories about global elites: “There is a global elite structure of bankers and organizations that are pulling the strings of the parties, pulling the strings of the president, the speaker of the House,” contended Franchi.
In the 2010s, Franchi’s media conglomerate evolved into the Next News Network (NNN), an infamous online operation “that recycles stories harvested from far-right publications, fake news sites and Russian media outlets” particularly targeted at exploiting youtube’s algorithms to generate as many views as possible. Prior to the 2016 election, for instance, YouTube’s algorithms “consistently amplified” the NNN’s anti-Clinton conspiracy videos, and in the 2020s, NNN’s COVID-19 conspiracy videos racked up more than a billion views – despite YouTube’s promise to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation. Indeed, YouTube instead gave Franchi a gold “creator Award”. As for the 2016 election videos, the top-performing NNN video was apparently one claiming that Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old (Franchi is more or less open about the claim being simply made up out of thin air); data show that three quarters of the traffic to such videos were due to YouTube recommendations – external traffic accounted for almost nothing.
As for COVID, NNN produced much-viewed videos covering the whole gamut of conspiracy theories (with no apparent regard even for coherence), claiming that COVID is a “false flag” to force “mandatory vaccines” and microchips on people and that Bill Gates and 5G cell phone towers were somehow involved – indeed, NNN was to a large extent responsible for popularizing such conspiracy theories among paranoid, reason-challenged low-information groups. Their video “EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Rashid Buttar BLASTS Gates, Fauci, EXPOSES Fake Pandemic Numbers As Economy Collapses”, featuring discredited osteopath and hysterically deranged conspiracy theorist Rashid Buttar, received nearly 7 million views and 1.2 million Facebook engagements before being taken down. In the video, Buttar claimed that Anthony Fauci had the COVID-19 virus created in a North Carolina lab before outsourcing it to China in a deliberate attempt to cause a pandemic for not-entirely-coherently-explained purposes but also that not a single death had actually been demonstrated to be caused by the COVID-19 virus – the plan, of course, was to use an entirely benign virus to introduce vaccines that would then kill everyone, in line with Bill Gates’s depopulation agenda – that the activity at hospitals was all fake, that hydroxychloroquine had “at least 99% efficacy” in treating COVID-19, and that 5G and chemtrails were involved; Franchi himself concluded that Buttar had showed (Franchi doesn’t distinguish showed from claimed without justification whatsoever) that there is fraud “being perpetuated across the world by the World Health Organization, the CDC, Bill Gates, the deep state, the mainstream media”.
The audiences for NNN’s massive promotion of evertyhing conspiracy include people like the 87th United States attorney general Attorney General Pam Bondi and Rudy Giuliani, and it has proved to be a threat to civilization also far beyond the US.
Diagnosis: Although it would be natural to suspect Franchi of being merely a scrupulous entrepeneur, evidence shows that Franchi has been a deranged conspiracy theorist from the start. Whatever the case may be, as one of the most influential producers and promoters of fake news and misinformation in the US, Franchi is a major threat to civilization.
For decades, these 2nd Amendment freaks yammered on about defending themselves against a tyrannical government with unchecked power. But now that we have such a government under Trump, the gun nuts have gone silent. I always knew they were full of shit.
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