Hunter Bidens perverterade crack-kokain-sextape-email och dess politiska konsekvenser

The fantastical rumors, which NBC News is declining to repeat verbatim, echo specific plot points central to "pizzagate," a viral disinformation campaign that predates QAnon but also falsely alleges a vast conspiracy of child abuse.

But the child abuse conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden that emerged from the fringes of the internet began swirling before the New York Post article and can be traced to associates of former White House aide Steve Bannon. They are now reaching a fever pitch less than two weeks before the election, in which Trump trails Biden in most national and many battleground state poll

"This is gaslighting of the highest order," [Whitney] Phillips said. "This has been the Steve Bannon playbook this entire time. He has celebrated the strategy of 'flooding the zone with s---' — when you confuse people, when you make them angry, when you just sort of throw too many things at them for them to process."

Keenan Chen, a First Draft researcher who has been monitoring the spread of the Hunter Biden rumors, said that they appeared to have originated from Dinggang Wang, an anti-Chinese government YouTube personality known for spreading misinformation about Covid-19.

Wang is connected to Bannon, the 2016 Trump campaign CEO, and Giuliani through Guo Wengui, a billionaire who fled China amid accusations of bribery and other crimes.

While the claims have not been repeated by any mainstream media outlets, that does not mean that they have not had their intended effect. Phillips, the Syracuse assistant professor, said the goal of the rumors isn't necessarily to make people believe the claims, but to confuse and disillusion voters into distrusting any piece of information and, in turn, keep them from wanting to vote at all.

"All 'flooding the zone with s--t' does is just make reasonable people not want to engage," said Phillips. "So then the screamers and the people on the far, far, far-right take over the discourse, and then that means no one can have a discourse."