Attorney General Loretta Lynch Supports Summer of Chaos-Reported as Fiction!

Attorney General Loretta Lynch Supports Summer of Chaos-Reported as Fiction!

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Summary of eRumor:
Attorney General Loretta Lynch supports the summer of chaos strategy of Black Lives Matter activists Deray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie.
The Truth:
We’re reporting this one as fiction since there’s been no credible evidence provided to support the summer of chaos conspiracy theory, or the idea that Attorney General Loretta Lynch supports it.
The rumor started shortly after Black Lives Matter and former Baltimore mayoral candidate Deray McKesson was arrested on a charge of obstructing a highway while protesting the death of Alton Sterling at the hands of police in Baton Rouge on July 9th. McKesson was released a day later.
Many opponents of the Black Lives Matter movement, or of Deray McKesson, took to social media to celebrate McKesson’s arrest. One of the most vocal was a social media account of an individual identified as “The Saint,” whose social media handle is @TheSaintNegro29.
Playing off of credible reports that Deray McKesson’s Twitter account had been hacked on July 8th, the twitter handle posted a screen grab of what appeared to show McKesson and Johnetta Elzie discussing their so-called “summer of chaos” plan, and Loretta Lynch’s support of it:


Simply put, the summer of chaos plan is to supposedly cause so much chaos that President Obama can declare martial law, cancel the national conventions of both political parties and seek a third term in office. Or, an alternative end game is for Bernie Sanders to become president, supposedly.
Aside from these screen grabs, there’s no proof that Black Lives Matter activists are undertaking a “summer of chaos” plan, or that Loretta Lynch has supported it. And these screen grabs did not come from a credible source.
The Saint has a well-documented history of public deception (more on that later), and he seemed to indirectly admit that the screen grabs were a hoax on Twitter. He tweeted a screen grab of an interview with a passage underlined: “photoshopped tweets Trump supporters are dumb enough to believe,” and he commented, “In case anyone was wondering if the DMS I obtained from Deray’s acct were fake, here’s your answer”:

Beside that, “The Saint” has a well-documented history of operating parody social media accounts that track media outlets and the general public into believing falsehoods. In January, The Saint described in an interview with the Washington Post how easy it was to trick national media outlets into believing he was Ammon Bundy on social media:

The Saint” registered the parody account in the earliest hours of  Jan. 3, when he began tweeting a couple of real quotes that Bundy had given media. Within hours, his friends told him that they saw the account appear during a CNN broadcast — attributed to Bundy himself.

“I was like ‘woah.’ I didn’t really expect anything to happen like that. That was not my intention,” he said. Soon after, reporters began reaching out to the parody account, expecting to reach Bundy through it.  It was at that point that he decided to see how far he could go until someone caught on that the account was fake — that happened Wednesday morning.

The social media operator refused to be identified by name, but we know he is a white man from west Texas. He now operates a social media account from the perspective of a fictional black character to mock people, and Black Lives Matter activists in particular. The genre has become known as “digital black face”:

The Saint’s account is known among his friends for his image manipulations, which often involve placing the mask image over the bodies and faces of black people — including in contexts that reference racial stereotypes. Some of his images and captions make fun of activists in the “Black Lives Matter” movement — particularly activist Shaun King.

“The Saint” said that he believes some Black Lives Matter activists are fair game for his particular brand of mockery because they don’t want to have an “open discussion” on race and police brutality — and instead, he argued, automatically label those who disagree with them as white supremacists.

Given The Saint’s history of public deception, and that he seemed to admit that he had photoshopped the direct messages about Loretta Lynch supporting the summer of chaos, we’re reporing this one as fiction.