Liberals Fall All Over Themselves to Report Fake Story About Trump and Gorillas
While both the left and the right contain fringe elements that regularly delve in conspiracy theories and other nonsense, it’s only on the left where we frequently see reputable people with influence and power peddling this same sort of junk.
This week, for instance, a remarkable number of fancy-pant liberals — I’m talking well-known reporters, columnists and even an MSNBC contributor who all loathe President Donald Trump — were caught spreading such garbage.
According to Ben Shapiro at The Daily Wire, it began Thursday night when a satirical Twitter account, @pixelatedboat, “tweeted out a parody segment supposedly lifted from” the book published by Michael Wolff, whom the Conservative Tribune already outed as a fraud.
Read the snippet below:
Just to clarify, the guy who runs @pixelatedboat changed his Twitter alias to “the gorilla channel thing is a joke” after it went viral.
Regardless, you would think liberals would know better — given both Wolff’s lack of credibility and the glaring absurdity of this particular snippet — than to buy into it. But you would think wrong.
Take Scott Dworkin, a frequent MSNBC contributor who helped co-found the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, which describes itself as “the home of The Resistance.” He shared @pixelatedboat’s story to Twitter thinking it’s real. He later deleted his retweet, but not before conservatives snapped a photo of it:
What a mindless bozo, right? But he wasn’t the only one. Not even close.
Eric Garland, a vehemently anti-Trump stooge who provides “strategic and competitive analysis to executives from business and government agencies,” fell for the gorilla story hook, line and sinker:
Why did you delete this tweet, @ericgarland? pic.twitter.com/WKV29Atztv
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) January 5, 2018
So did Sky News reporter Samantha Maiden and left-wing author/columnist LItsa Dremousis:
Brookings Institute fellow Shadi Hamid may have fallen for it as well, though it’s hard to tell if he was being serious or facetious:
As a reminder, these aren’t just random nobodies falling for and then spreading conspiratorial garbage. Even Farhad Manjoo, a contributor for NPR, almost bought into the lie:
What does this willingness so easily believe nonsense tell us? According to Shapiro, it tells us “people will believe anything that’s convenient for them to believe, particularly about President Trump.”
I disagree. I feel it tells us that liberals “will believe anything that’s convenient for them to believe, particularly about President Trump.”
Seriously, when was the last time you saw noted conservative figures like Shapiro, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Steyn or Michelle Malkin sharing lies?
While it’s possible they may have accidentally shared “fake news” perhaps once or maybe even twice over the course of their whole career, I seriously doubt they ever shared anything as stupid as this. And that, folks, is the point.
Please share this story on Facebook and Twitter and let us know what you think about so many notable liberals falling for the gorilla story hook, line and sinker.
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