Fake News Comes in Many Forms

INACCURATE INFORMATION, MISLEADING IMAGES USED TO HAWK WARES

by Sharon Rondeau

(Mar. 3, 2020) — A SkyWatch TV post dated March 1, 2020 invoking the name and image of political commentator Candace Owens deceives the reader by suggesting that Owens issued a statement about the book, “Shadowland,” which became available in paperback form on Monday.

SkyWatch claims it conducts “investigations into prophecy, discovery, and the supernatural” and that it has documented “occult activity behind Washington elites and [the late Jeffrey] Epstein’s Orgy Island.”

Authored by Dr. Thomas R. Horn, “Shadowland” recounts historical events in which Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other well-connected political operatives were involved but includes speculation as to Horn’s as-yet-unproved theories detailed beneath Owens’s image, among other places on Horn’s website.  “Shadowland” has been available on Kindle since January 5 and, as The Post & Email has reported, contains a chapter written by Carl Gallups about the five-year investigation which determined that the “long-form” birth certificate posted on the White House website in 2011 is a “computer-generated forgery.”

In a video released February 13, Horn inaccurately claimed that Gallups presented “new forensic information” in the chapter.

The chapter, Obama birth-certificate investigator Mike Zullo said, “does not belong in a book filled with latent conjecture and inference.”  The only primary source of information on the probe, Zullo was not provided a copy of Gallups’s final manuscript prior to publication, which, as it turned out, glaringly contained no mention of his name.

For 6+ years, Gallups and Zullo were professional acquaintances and friends, with Gallups supplying a media outlet for Zullo to provide updates on the investigation.  Unexpectedly last fall, Gallups breached the longstanding agreement he and Zullo had to write a book together about the probe by writing the chapter alone and including it in Horn’s book after promising Zullo it would not be published.

The SkyWatch article, titled, “Candace Owens: SHADOWLAND Is A Doomsday Cult,” depicts the book’s cover and Owens side-by-side, below which is a paragraph from a linked article at CNS News.  In that article, Owens is quoted as having said, “The Left is becoming a Doomsday Cult” without any reference to “Shadowland” or Horn’s endeavors.

Rather, the February 20, 2020 article features tweets Owens issued expressing her belief that “liberals” are exaggerating the effects of “climate change” and “coronavirus.”

“2,800 people worldwide have been killed from the coronavirus. 0 people in America have been killed from the coronavirus,” Owens tweeted at the time. “In other news, socialism has killed 100 million people in the last 100 years.”  Referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Owens added, “@AOC literally does not believe in history.”

SkyWatch erroneously claims Gallups to be a “former police detective” and that the Justice Department Office of the Inspector General (OIG) accused Hillary Clinton of “crimes against children,” the latter by presenting out-of-context an excerpt of a Fox News interview from June 2018.

The inaccurate claim about Gallups’s background occurs in a promotion for Horn’s “The New ‘Vault Classified’ Special Report,” which incorporates a blurry image of Zullo without his permission used to promote “Tom Horn’s Secret Files.”

The hyperlink under the word “SkyWatch Editor” in the March 1 post leads to the false OIG-Clinton report invoking “Shadowland” despite the lack of connection between the report and the book.

The “New Vault” promo links to another for Gallups’s book, “Gods of the Final Kingdom,” which asks the prospective reader, “What is at work around the world and behind the DEEP STATE? What plot is quietly unfolding before our very eyes yet remains elusive to the vast majority of people?”