No, Bernie Bros didn't start the Seth Rich conspiracy theory

Sorry, or rather, "sorry," to Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch, but contra your Tweet

It was launched by the Bernie Bros & amplified by FoxNews and Assange (one of his less honorable moments) ....See Andy Kroll's excellent new book Murder on W Street... https://t.co/ETfAnogvmn

— Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch (@JeffreyStClair3) November 24, 2022

That might be simplistic, and Andy Kroll doesn't seem to say that in his new book. Rather, per Axios, he makes it clear that it was launched by Assange.

• What was the moment the Seth Rich story began to spin out of control? 

I would pinpoint that moment to August of 2016. I would place it very specifically on an interview that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gave to a Dutch radio station.

I do recall that some Berners had some part in trying to amplify it. Launch might be too harsh, whether Kroll covers that elsewhere in the book or not. (I do intend to get it, whenever my library should have it.)

Note the "some" is in bold, and they're probably no more than 10 percent. And, that's "amplify," not "start." Sorry, Jeff, but in this case you sound like you're amplifying Hillbots' conspiracy theory about all Berners. And, on its effects in the 2016 general election? Contra Hillbots like Amanda Marcotte at Slate, Hillary's PUMAs in 2008 defected from Obama in bigger numbers than Berners did from Clinton in 2016. And, even Marcotte admits that other people than Berners were playing it up at the start.

As I told Jeff, I had done a Google Trends long ago, as noted in my Assange and Guccifer 2.0 longform, and the "takeoff" of the conspiracy theory indeed corresponds with Assange offering a reward for Seth Rich's murderers and framing it in a way to imply the DNC did it.

As far as "starting" it? Michael Isikoff reminds me and St. Clair both that Russia's SVR (Internet Research Agency) "started it." 

This, then, per my "longform" link, leads back to the issue of whether or not Assange was lying back in 2016 when he said the leaked emails didn't come from Russia. I'm at least 90 percent certain he was lying and quite willingly, and thus, contra my original tweet which St. Clair was quote-tweeting, itself a quote tweet of an Assangista, Julian Assange is far less than 100 percent honest.

The book does sound interesting, I will say. At the same time, does it have THAT MUCH new compared to Isikoff's 2019 longform? We'll see.

Former prosecutor Deborah Sines, per Isikoff, confirms my other hunch, that the murder was in all likelihood drug-related. Now, the question there, is, was this totally mistaken identity or similar, or is there something else about Seth Rich that we may never know?