Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other Jack Michael Posobiec III (/pəˈsoʊbɪk/ pə-SOH-bik; born December 14, 1984)[1][2] is an American alt-right[3] political activist, television correspondent and presenter,[4] conspiracy theorist,[5] and former United States Navy intelligence officer.
[11] He has promoted fake news, including the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory claiming high-ranking Democratic Party officials were involved in a child sex ring.
In October 2017, Posobiec and Cernovich formed a super PAC called #Rev18 and announced its support for Josh Mandel in the 2018 U.S. Senate election in Ohio.
Richard Spencer, another alt-right figure who organized a separate, competing rally at the same time, ridiculed Posobiec's event and called it "pathetic".
[32] In November 2017, Posobiec encouraged his Twitter followers to target a woman at her workplace after she came forward with allegations that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore had attempted to have sex with her when she was 14 years old.
[33][citation needed] In Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district special election in March 2018, Posobiec supported Democrat Conor Lamb over Republican Rick Saccone.
[37] In August 2024, opinion journalist Michelle Goldberg criticized Posobiec for co-authoring a book titled Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), which argues that leftists are not entitled to be considered human, and that democratic means for destroying the American political left are no longer viable.
He was also invited to participate in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's overseas trip abroad to Germany, Belgium and Poland as a media representative.
[8] In response to a 2017 Anti-Defamation League report on the alt-right, which included Posobiec, he tweeted a selfie of his visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in Poland: "The @ADL_National would be wise to remember what happened the last time people made lists of undesirables".
[42] In April 2017, Posobiec promoted on Twitter an event staged by Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny, a Polish neo-fascist movement that bombed Jewish homes in the 1930s.
[16] In May 2017, Posobiec hired neo-Nazi brothers Jeffrey and Edward Clark to help create a documentary about the murder of Seth Rich for Rebel News.
Jeffrey Clark was arrested by the FBI on gun charges after saying that the Jewish victims of the October 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting "deserved exactly what happened to them and so much worse".
[14] In September 2018, he presented the pro-Hitler online poster known as Microchip on the network without indicating that person's affiliations, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
[63] Posobiec left OANN in May 2021 to begin hosting a show for the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, and to join Human Events as a senior editor.
[16] He was one of the most prominent promoters on social media of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that high-ranking officials were involved in a child-sex ring centered at a Washington, D.C., pizzeria.
[72] Posobiec falsely said that former FBI director James Comey, at a United States Senate hearing on May 17, 2017, "said under oath that Trump did not ask him to halt any investigation".
[73] In June 2017, shortly after Republican congressman Steve Scalise was shot and injured during a baseball practice, along with four others, Posobiec tweeted that it was a terrorist attack and blamed comments from liberal anti-Trump individuals.
Later, he falsely tweeted that former United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch had called for "blood in the streets" the previous March[74] and that Bernie Sanders had ordered his followers to "take down" Trump.
[75] In December 2017, Posobiec, along with Cernovich, The Gateway Pundit, and InfoWars, promoted a false theory that a passenger train derailment near Dupont, Washington, was linked to the Antifa anti-fascism movement.
[76] In October 2019, after Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a White House national security official and decorated Iraq war veteran, testified in Congress about President Trump requesting that the Ukrainian President investigate his political rival Joe Biden, Posobiec falsely claimed that Vindman had been advising the Ukrainian government on ways to prevent Trump from implementing his foreign policy goals.
[77] In June 2020, during the protests against racism and police brutality in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Posobiec falsely claimed that there were pipe bombs planted at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and that "federal assets [were] in pursuit".
[2] In February 2023, Posobiec tweeted a deepfake video depicting President Joe Biden announcing a military draft in response to a purported national security crisis.
"[79] In May 2024, after Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 charges of falsifying records in his hush money trial, Posobiec called on supporters to "[t]ake the path of the hunter, and with one singular voice, we are going to make them the prey."
[82] In October 2024, Posobiec posted a meme on his Instagram profile claiming that the January 6 House Select Committee had destroyed all the evidence it compiled against Donald Trump.
[85] In the same month, Posobiec boosted a false sexual assault claim against Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz that originated from Russian propaganda network Storm-1516.