Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:07 pm
The inability to discern crazy conspiracy from fact must run in the family.
Donald Trump Jr fell for a totally obvious fake Hillary Clinton email conspiracy today, because why not share something that feeds his father’s unhinged narrative about rigged polls? Who cares if it’s real!
Somehow Trump looked at this tweet and thought, yeah, that’s legit:
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WIKILEAKS REVEALS SHOCKING EMAILS BETWEEN HILLARY CAMPAIGN AND @ppppolls #RiggedElection pic.twitter.com/oIRvu0ubce
— MassRafTer (@mongo_ebooks) August 30, 2016
Here’s the screencap of Trump’s RT, which he’s left up even after being called out on it by Mediaite:
It’s not like these guys haven’t seen emails from the Clinton campaign. Here’s a big tip: The Hillary campaign emails don’t look anything like that and I’m thinking that “FROM HILLARY” might have been a big giveaway.
This is all assuming that since this is a Trump we’re talking about, the actual information in the “letter” wouldn’t have been the biggest clue of all, since it’s totally bat crap crazy.
Hillary Clinton is being hacked constantly and Donald Trump Jr’s father just asked his pal Putin to hack her some more. No campaign (well, okay, maybe the Trump people would but no one is hacking them) — even if they were trying to do something this ridiculous — would put that in an email.
Public Policy Polling gets a B+ from Nate Silver in terms of accuracy, which is to say that they aren’t likely to be rigging their polls to help anyone. I know, it hurts when the polls are unskewed and reality still exists.
Polls can have problems for sure. Nate Cohn pointed out that Reuters 50 state poll had some big problems, “Reuters has highest white male turnout in decades, lowest hispanic/youth turnout in decades”.
But this is nowhere near a suggestion that anyone is deliberately rigging polls at the behest of a candidate, no less.
If you’re wondering why Trump supporters seem unhinged or say things like, “Donald Trump is winning California!”, this is why. The Trump machine is feeding the crazy to conservatives who have been primed by Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge et al to only trust “conservative news”.
They’ve been fed a steady diet of fairy tales, boogeyman horrors and outright lies for years. So when Donald Trump came along ready to force feed them even bigger lies, they were ripe for the taking.
Trump twitter accounts began tweeting this fake report to various media outlets. This Trump supporter tweeted the fake memo out to every media person they could image in multiple tweets, only to ask later “is this confirmed it is real?”
@mongo_ebooks @DonaldJTrumpJr @ppppolls is this confirmed it is real??
— denise (@java899) August 30, 2016
Donald J Trump still didn’t take it down, because hello – it doesn’t matter if it’s real and it certainly doesn’t need to be confirmed! That’s the Trump campaign for you.
And it worked because look at the Trump supporters go with the outrage:
@KarraPaquette @mongo_ebooks @ppppolls Keeps getting more & more disturbing.
— Desert Dancer (@zavie8) August 30, 2016
@TrumpD2016 @WeThePeople4US @mongo_ebooks @ppppolls where is all the out rage over this there is the proof that it's rigged wake up
— Kay sexton (@Kaysexton20) August 30, 2016
Wow! Threatening tone. She can make someone disappeared if she needs to. https://t.co/2Edw7xx1nX
— Tom tsetung (@tom_tsetung) August 30, 2016
Yikes! Yeah, that fake Hillary sure is threatening.
Donald Trump Jr is a chip off of the old block. There is no conspiracy too obviously false to share. They’ll take anything that helps prop up their narrative. Facts need not apply.
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