[After Backès' office started the Schiappa bashing about the Marianne funds, we propose to republish here the text by Rudy Reichstadt initially published on Conspiracy Watch]

I ask you, dear reader, to put yourself in my shoes for five minutes.

You work for a small media outlet that you created fifteen years ago and have been supporting ever since. An online press service published by a non-profit association under the 1901 law and run by a small team of employees who are less motivated by their career prospects than by their commitment. A unique website that makes a point of making all its content freely accessible, free of charge. You work for Conspiracy Watch.

This activity, both thankless and time-consuming, you never really tried to "monetize" it: you did not create a paid subscription plan, did not launch an online kitty and did not resort to hosting sponsored content. Moreover, for ten years, you ran this site voluntarily. And it is because a noble private institution (but recognized as being of public utility) offered to financially support your project that you came to make it your full-fledged professional activity.

You work on conspiracy theories, that is to say on a theme located at the crossroads of the most extremist and toxic movements imaginable: racist, fundamentalist, sectarian and even terrorist. Your site is thus the subject of cyberattacks. SLAPP procedures are launched against you. But above all, this activity has earned you, for a long time, daily booing on social networks. You are made to understand that they have your address. You are threatened. Your loved ones are defamed. You are forced to work in a secure place while, every day, your name is dragged through the mud by people who literally dream of dancing on your grave.

Two years ago, the state launched a call for projects with the particular aim of combating conspiracy theories online. The publishing association of Conspiracy Watch is one of the 17 winners of this call for projects. Now, an administrative inquiry has been launched into the way in which public funds allocated to one of these 17 associations (which has nothing to do with yours) were used. The press gets hold of it, the affair becomes political, the courts are involved, the oppositions are demanding the establishment of parliamentary commissions of inquiry...

Sensing an opportunity to link your name to a potential scandal involving the misappropriation of public funds, the conspiracy sphere unleashes a campaign of harassment of rare violence against you. Thousands and thousands of messages in a few days.

You have nothing to reproach yourself for, the project for which your association obtained financial support has been examined, he received a discharge from the administration, everything is in order but the opportunity is too good to miss. Against you, and against you alone, they are using every means possible. They are falsely accusing you of having been personally "paid" tens of thousands of euros for non-existent work, they are accusing you of having stolen from the till and they are ordering you several times a day to "return the money" while attacks of virulent anti-Semitism are mixed in with the messages that promise you the guillotine.

This relentlessness against you, this passion aimed at trying to bring you down is one of the best proofs of the effectiveness of your work, one of the clear signs that your action deserves to be supported.

Now, here is a section of the press, rather than investigating the reasons for this ignoble lynching, deciding to investigate you, verifying Salman Rushdie's decidedly inspired remark: “Lie once about someone and many won’t believe you. Repeat the same lie a million times and it’s the man you lied about that no one will believe anymore.”

You are then contacted by a young journalist urgently assigned by his editorial staff (that of CheckNews, the newspaper's on-demand journalism service Libérationincluding Conspiracy Watch frequently relays the work) to investigate how the public funds that your association has benefited from have been used. Your association alone, not the others – note well. Because it is above all your association, and not the others, that is targeted by the conspiracy theorists. Bonus for the lynchers, double punishment for those who resist them.

The young man may be polite and friendly, but his approach disheartens you. Reading Kafka has made you far too familiar with the diabolical mechanism that is being set up before your eyes for you to ignore its harmfulness. You are inclined to see it as a concession to the abject spirit of McCarthyism that social networks are printing at the time, but you tell yourself that this is also perhaps an opportunity to be cleared of the suspicions that rumor has been spreading about you for days.

Having observed it for years and having written a small book on the subject which has just been published, you know better than anyone the destructive power of the adage: "where there's smoke there's fire." So you opt for transparency. So that the smoke can clear and everyone can see that there's no fire, you open the windows and the door of your office to the young journalist. You answer all his questions, produce the documents he wants to consult so that he can comb through them. You check your bank statements so as not to risk giving him an incorrect figure (you suspect that the slightest error could be held against you). This represents precious time that you could spend fulfilling your mission. But you take it anyway because you nourish the hope that your colleague and his editorial staff will endeavor to disperse the suspicions weighing on you, allowing you to close this painful chapter.

The article is finally published and, even if, between the lines, he exonerates you, it comes across as an impression of unfinished business. The article is in fact entitled: "Rudy Reichstadt, founder of the anti-conspiracy site Conspiracy Watch, did he unduly benefit from the Marianne Fund?" It is accompanied by your photo. But here's the thing: no passage in this text answers the question asked.

(Imagine that the day after a hysterical Twitter frenzy lasting several days, a newspaper starts to headline things like "Does Celine Dion consume children's blood?", "Does Bill Gates want to implant nanochips under our skin?" or "Is Brigitte Macron a man?" while refraining from answering the questions these headlines raise. Then transpose.)

In the article that CheckNews you devote yourself, you search in vain for a paragraph, a line, answering directly the question of whether you have "unduly benefited from the Marianne Fund". You search, without finding it, for the word "no". This word, however, CheckNews knows him. Small sample: "No, the unemployment rate in France is not at its lowest in 40 years, as the presidential Renaissance party claims" (February 14, 2023); "No, this gigantic fault has nothing to do with the earthquake in Turkey" (February 20, 2023); "No, "lots of branches" of the profession do not pay employees below the minimum wage, as Emmanuel Macron claimed" (March 23, 2023); "No, Emmanuel Macron did not promulgate the pension law in the middle of the night" (April 16, 2023)...

It is therefore in conscience that we refrained from writing: "No, Rudy Reichstadt did not unduly benefit from the Marianne Fund". As if I remained suspect, stuck in purgatory without knowing what I should have done so that I would not be forgotten there. Knowing on the other hand that this cautious indecision will give my defamers an additional argument to attack my honor and sully the unparalleled work that my small team and I carry out.