Trump gathers on the territory of the deep states of Pennsylvania

MONTOURSVILLE, Pennsylvania – President Donald Trump has claimed that fake "suppression tellers" were used to discourage Pennsylvania supporters from voting in 2016 and accused those responsible for his "treason" investigation. This message was not unusual for Trump, but he chose an unusual setting to deliver it on Monday night.

The president came here to gather supporters of an airport hangar to improve presidential participation ahead of the special election in the US House of Representatives in the 12th district of central Pennsylvania. But Montoursville was an appropriate stop for another reason: two decades ago, the city had become one of the first centers of the same powerful mix of theories on the Internet, disdain for the national media and mistrust of the government federal government, which today feeds the populist insurgency of Trump. The mogul gained political prominence by promoting false Internet conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birthplace and won the presidency by conveying the worldview of disgruntled voters who had drifted far from the power centers of the United States. country.

History continues below

In places like Montoursville, the conditions of this rise were present well before Trump himself managed to exploit them. In July 1996, a Boeing 747 bound for Paris, taking off from the John F. Kennedy Airport, exploded and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island. Among those killed were 16 students from the French club of Montoursville High School and five of their chaperones. The mysterious crash has become an instant national news phenomenon with a new twist: adoption of the Internet was becoming the norm in the United States.

He has also shaken the city.

On Monday, when she was selling pizza at rallies on Broad Street, Tia Fisher, 46, the city's main street, recounted the consequences of the accident. At the time, she worked for one of the first local Internet companies called Penn Net, which helped customers use email. She added that the company had sent an email containing condolences from around the world after the tragedy and passed them on to other people in the city of 5,000 people.

Internet not only allowed supporters to travel to Montoursville. It also allowed a new type of free-wheeling conspiracy theories to ask questions and challenge official narratives. The accident was originally believed to be an act of terrorism and eyewitnesses reported seeing a projectile coming out of the sea just before the explosion. But the exact cause was a mystery that has become a source of international fascination. While the primitive national media websites enjoyed a steady increase in traffic since their coverage of the event, obscure bulletin boards were full of alternative interpretations of events.

Among the most popular ideas was the theory that the US military would have accidentally shot down the plane and then scrambled to conceal the fatal mistake. At one point, Pierre Salinger – a former press officer for 70-year-old John F. Kennedy, who was working as a journalist for ABC – made public allegations that the navy shot down the plane. Salinger said he based his claim on what he heard from a French source of information, but also on documents found online that turned out to be fake.

Today, many people in the city do not know where exactly the official explanation has come from.

"There were so many charges," Fisher said. "It was a missile. This was fuel tanks. It was sabotage. "

Fisher said he did not know that in 2000, the National Transportation Safety Board had formally concluded that the probable cause of the disaster was an accidental short circuit that resulted in the explosion of a fuel tank. "I do not believe that," she says. "Someone fired missiles, and one crashed into the plane."

Christopher Janusis, a friend who helped Fisher sell pizza, was wearing a cartoon shirt, Trump, urinating on the CNN logo – a popular style among Monday's rally fans.

This anti-media sentiment also echoes the Montoursville experience with the TWA crash.

Kathy Shipton, owner of a retired sub-store and dressing table, sits on a nearby folding chair in the shade. She recounted her disgust at seeing pickups arriving the day after the accident. "How are you invading our city this way?" She remembered thinking of herself.

Shipton also does not believe that the mainstream media has been able to shed light on this incident. "I still think the truth has not been revealed," she said.

Shipton and a friend, 48-year-old Wendi Sterner, believed that they had said they had seen with their own eyes: the Sunday after the accident, a group of cloud-shaped Angel is formed in the sky above the city. "It has comforted a lot of people," said Shipton.

On a quiet parcel of land next to the city's high school, a few tens of meters from the road where thousands of rallies lined up on Monday, a statue of an angel is erected as a memorial of 21 victims of the city. An inscription at its base describes the original heavenly apparition, adding: "At the feet of the angel were 21 smaller white clouds, first in a circle and then in two straight rows."

Today, few people in the city are eager to return to the cause of the accident. But as late as in 2016 – when Trump got 70% of the vote in Lycoming County, surpassing Mitt Romney's total in 2012 – a father of a Montoursville girl killed in the US. plane, Don Nibert, continued to play the skepticism of the public towards the manager. explanation. That year, he told the local Penn Live news site that he thought he had tried to kill him during his accident investigation.

Meanwhile, as Trump's response to the "witch hunt" following scrupulous monitoring of his relations with Russia fueled the growing suspicion of establishing national security on the populist right, some considered theft 800 of TWA as an episode that deserved a closer look.

In September, an article published on the site Federalist, a site of political opinion pro-Trump, called the president to reopen the investigation into the crash. The piece claims that it looks a lot like the Trump era surveys, perceived as intrigue or deep concealment. "The political and investigative similarities between the TWA 800 and Hillary Clinton server cases, as well as the anti-Trump investigation, are disturbing and deeply troubling," the document explained.

Since the 1990s, the power of the Internet to fill the void left by distrust of media and government has reached new heights. In the time of Trump, millions of Americans were attracted to QAnon, a kind of conspiracy theories on the Internet, which postulates that Trumps and Robert Mueller are working together in secret to thwart an attempted coup. 39 State from the pedophile of the elite and other harmful state actors. , among other fantastic claims.

QAnon has grown in popularity – in some cases, it is marked by an obsession close to religious fervor – far from the centers of power in many rural areas where Trump's support is strongest.

"I do not listen to the mainstream media anymore," said Christine Witmer, 61, a part-time gym worker who drove 160 km north of Reading, Pennsylvania, and wore a Q-shaped button printed with an american flag pattern. chest. Rather, she became a Q fan, she explained after discovering a YouTube channel on which a woman with the pseudonym "Red Pill" compares the statements of Q – the anonymous QAnon author – to passages of the Bible.

Indeed, at a time when Americans were struggling to reach consensus on understanding public affairs, the rally drew the skeptics of the official line.

On Monday afternoon, a topless rider with medium-haired hair and gray goatee stopped on Broad Street in a red Mercedes convertible.

The man, who refused to provide credentials, said he was unaware of the TWA crash. He had just traveled 150 miles from Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The plane crash that he knew best was the destruction of the United United 93 flight on September 11, 2001 in Somerset County, near his home.

"The place where the flight took place and where it is indicated that it is descending corresponds to two different zones," said the man, claiming that the government authorities had mislaid the benchmarks of the place of the crash at about 300 meters. "I was there when he fell, and I was there later, and it was two different places."