Debunking Cory Morningstar and Other Conspiracy Theorists and Alt-Leftists
By: Ro Heath
Tags: Syria, Conspiracy Theories, Alt Left, Avaaz, Libya

It’s difficult to define what the “alt-left” is and who belongs to it because, unlike the alt-right, no one outright claims to belong to it or support it (as far as I know). However, the term alt-left is necessary to use in modern political discourse for certain people in order to make it clear how twisted, harmful and divorced from reality their ideas and beliefs are.

The alt-left is an example of the horseshoe theory in action. The horseshoe theory is the idea that the far-left and the far-right are two sides of the same coin. Like the alt-right, the alt-left lives on conspiracy theories and denial of easily-verified facts.

One example of a conspiracy theory that some members of alt-left promote is that the White Helmets, also known as Syria Civil Defense, are actually organ traffickers who stage attacks and rescues and are allied with terrorists. This conspiracy theory goes hand-in-hand with the conspiracy theory that the genocidal dictator Bashar al-Assad of Syria is neither genocidal nor an illegitimate dictator and is unfairly portrayed as evil by the Western mainstream media.

In reality, the White Helmets are a group of courageous volunteers who have saved thousands upon thousands of lives.

The White Helmets at work in Syria (Screenshot from Netflix)

One of the first people to start arguing that the White Helmets were actually malevolent frauds was Cory Morningstar. She has several online platforms and currently operates a blog called “Wrong Kind of Green” with Forrest Palmer, who endorses and edits much of her writing.

Again, the White Helmets are the ones who are helping suffering Syrians and nothing that Morningstar or others like her (e.g. Michael Swifte, a blogger who calls the White Helmets a “propaganda construct”) says about them will make this fact untrue.

Morningstar calls herself an investigative journalist and has called her research “extensive and exhaustive,” but one look at the people who vouch for her and at the kinds of people and sources she presents as legitimate shows that this cannot be true.

One such person is John Steppling, a writer whose activities include defending dictators. He and Morningstar promote each other’s work online. They both hate Hillary Clinton (who Morningstar has referred to as “Killary” and who Steppling has said that she has “a love of war” and has called her “merciless,” “very unbalanced,” and “a sociopath”). Hillary Clinton is the legitimate president of the United States, and she has done so much to help others. Morningstar and Steppling also malign leading human rights organization Amnesty International. Steppling also hates Barack Obama, one of the best presidents America ever had, and has called him “a hollow man” and a “monster.”

Steppling believes that the Western media is unfairly slandering Venezuelan dictator Nicolàs Maduro. In reality, the current humanitarian crisis there is largely the fault of the Maduro regime and he is a brutal dictator.

Two other writers who Steppling presents as credible are Andre Vltchek and Paul Haeder. Andre Vltchek believes that both the anti-extradition protestors in Hong Kong and the Venezuelan protestors who are trying to free their country from the Maduro regime are “treasonous.” Vltchek has called Juan Guaidó “a U.S. puppet,” even though Guaidó is currently recognized as the legitimate, democratically-elected president of Venezuela by 54 countries. He also denies the ongoing cultural genocide of Uyghur Muslims in China.

Meanwhile, Haeder defends Andrew Wakefield and seems to support his call for the suspension of the MMR vaccine. As is widely known, the MMR vaccine is safe and Wakefield has been soundly discredited.

Anyway, in one article of Steppling’s that was published by the far-left website Counterpunch, he wrote: “[l]ook at the official list of American enemies. Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, and the DPRK. What do they have in common? They are independent…The horror!… Chavez and Milosevic and Castro and Qadaffi et al — were not threats to world peace. They were not tyrants. I have said before, if the US targets you, then you deserve to be defended.”

In reality, Gaddafi, Chavez, Milošević, and Castro were all tyrants. Gaddafi himself swore that he would transform Libya into “into a hell” in order to stay in power and declared that his forces would “come zenga by zenga, house by house, room by room,” for those that bravely fought against his regime).

Secondly, the governments of Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, China, Russia, Syria, and North Korea have bad reputations in the West because of their rampant and notorious human rights abuses.

From time to time, Steppling and Vltchek (who also supports the evil Assad regime along with the evil Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and defends the dictators Gaddafi and Chazev) appear on PressTV, a propaganda network funded by the Iranian government (similar to other unreliable sources Russia Today and Telesur, which receive funding from the Russian and Venezuelan governments, respectively). The official PressTV Youtube channel is currently hosting a video in which anti-semitic propagandist Kevin Barrett says that the Christchurch mosque shooter was “mind-controlled by [the] 9/11 false flag operation…designed by Israel.” PressTV is thankfully no longer able to access its Youtube account after being blocked by Google.

Morningstar is friends with Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Beeley, two propagandists who work to slander the White Helmets, and deny Assad’s crimes against humanity (e.g. his horrifying chemical attacks). They have also been expertly debunked multiple times. Beeley, Bartlett, and Morningstar all share and promote each other’s work online.

On Bartlett’s Patreon page, a video of her can be found in which she argues that evil dictators Assad, Gaddafi, and Kim Jong-Un have all been unfairly vilified by the West. Beeley and Bartlett also claim to support Palestinians, but thousands of them have been killed and displaced by the Assad regime that they support, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of Syrians killed and imprisoned by it, along with millions of Syrians displaced.

Morningstar also promotes the work of Australian war crime denier and 9/11 truther Caitlin Johnstone as if she were a legitimate source. Morningstar also promotes the website Black Agenda Report, in spite of the fact that one of its writers, Ajamu Baraka, is yet another dictator-defender (as is grifter Jill Stein). And she promotes Tim Hayward (who is another war crime denier).

In addition, Morningstar treats the “news” websites 21st Century Wire, OffGuardian, Global Research, and American Herald Tribune as legitimate sources. The 21st Century Wire website is currently hosting articles which assert that vaccines are dangerous, that the ongoing cultural genocide against Uyghur Muslims in China might not be happening, that global warming is a scam, that Trump’s hateful transgender military ban “makes sense” and that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s anti-refugee policy is fine.

Beeley is also an editor of this hideous website. She and Holocaust-denier/Sandy Hook truther Paul Craig Roberts (who currently has a lot of articles on Counterpunch) share the belief that the horribly tragic 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting was a false flag. She is an anti-semite. She also vilifies philanthropist George Soros as a “Zionist Billionaire” who supports the “deep state.” Beeley also supports fascist Julian Assange.

OffGuardian has published anti-vaccine articles, and American Herald Tribune has published 9/11 truther and other bogus conspiracy theory articles. Global Research is also disgusting and rife with nonsense and anti-semitism.

Patrick Henningsen, the executive editor and founder of 21st Century Wire, equated the Oscar-winning Netflix documentary film “The White Helmets” to Nazi propaganda, and Morningstar currently hosts the article in which he asserts this on Wrong Kind of Green.

Morningstar and Palmer believe that NATO’s intervention in the Libyan civil war in order to help get rid of dictator Gaddafi was wrong, in spite of the fact that most Libyans supported it. She has vilified the legitimate NGO Avaaz for its support of the 2011 Libyan revolution and the pro-democracy/anti-Assad uprising in Syria. Morningstar currently supports Maduro, as does Counterpunch contributor Eric Draitser, and filmmaker John Pilger.

The Maduro regime is currently using death squads to kill Venezuelans who resist it.

Just as the people of Libya wanted freedom from the Gaddafi regime, the people of Venezuela and Syria want freedom from the cruel Maduro regime and the horrifying and genocidal Assad regime.

She has also favorably quoted mass-murderer Che Guevara, and supports Evo Morales in Bolivia, in spite of his authoritarian ways. She supports the Ortega regime in Nicaragua.

Morningstar thinks that leading environmentalist Bill McKibben and his organization 350 are not worth supporting. Recently she has spent a great deal of time in harassing and attacking the wise and courageous 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg and attempting to discredit her as a manufactured corporate pawn. Morningstar proved how odious and twisted her obsession with this child is by going so far as to publish her slanderous writing about her in a book that she is now selling on Amazon.

No news outlet or journalist is perfect or gets every single fact right one hundred percent of the time. But some journalists and news outlets have standards and work hard to use credible evidence to back up what they say, and some do not. Would PBS or NPR ever publish a video or article which argued that 9/11 was an inside job or that vaccines are dangerous? No.

Both the alt-left and the alt-right spread and build their worldviews around terrible conspiracy theories and nonsense propaganda. They both gaslight people by insisting that legitimate journalism done by credible journalists is propaganda or fake news, while they spread actual propaganda and fake news themselves.

They both like tyrants and mass-murderers and ignore, disregard, and talk over their victims and refugees. They both deny war crimes and reject expertise, experience, and objective facts. They are both enemies of progress and democracy.

They both have no regard for human rights whatsoever and must be defeated.

Instructors at every level of education also must do more to help young people learn how to differentiate between fake news and real news, and reliable and unreliable sources. They should tell students when they use unreliable sources in essays and other work, and they should be sure to not use unreliable sources while they teach.

And everyone needs to spend the time and effort to learn to be discerning on their own. Thankfully, many already do and have.

Again, every journalist and news outlet gets things wrong sometimes, but if a journalist or news outlet publishes something like an article which argues something as aggressively false as vaccines are dangerous, or Gaddafi and Castro weren’t dictators, or 9/11 was a false flag, or that the White Helmets are frauds, or that Assad isn’t a mass-murderer or dictator who uses chemical weapons, that shows that that journalist or news outlet can’t tell (or doesn’t care about) the difference between real news and fake news.

The existence of democracy depends on people who can sufficiently differentiate between real news and fake news.

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