Yet again, liberals everywhere fell for and retweeted a fake quote attributed to a conservative that would supposedly prove how stupid and ill-informed that conservative is.
This time, the putative speaker was Representative Jim Jordan (shown), the Ohio Republican, who, if the quote were real, wouldn’t have known who the president was when Muslim terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.
And yet again, the hoax proves that liberals are willing to believe just about anything they read on Twitter about President Trump or any Republican who supports him. And the hoax is in keeping with at least one other anti-Trump hoax still in circulation.
The Latest
The latest hoax came from Dan Lyons, a humorist, best-selling author, and former scribe for Newsweek.
Tweeted Lyons, over a photo of Jordan:
GOP rallies around Trump 9/11 role. “While Obama and Biden were cowering in fear on Air Force 1, Mr. Trump was on the ground with first responders searching for survivors and pulling people to safety,” Jim Jordan says. “I remember seeing him on TV, running toward the danger.” pic.twitter.com/P7ol4wycoF
— Dan Lyons (@realdanlyons) July 29, 2019
The commentary under the tweet jumped on Trump, of course.
Next day, Lyons fessed up:
There should be a word (probably in German) for when you pull a prank and you are laughing but also scared at the same time. Angstenfreude? pic.twitter.com/GBlJut3VrZ
— Dan Lyons (@realdanlyons) July 30, 2019
But not before a number of notable anti-Trump leftists retweeted the quote. Alex Griswold of the Washington Free Beacon helpfully captured the ensuing outrage … and hilarity.
Among those whom Lyons fooled were movie director and self-professed “Fierce opposer of Trump” Morgan J. Freeman (not to be confused with actor Morgan Freeman), Princeton professor Kevin M. Kruse, and the largely unknown leftist writer Allison Kilkenny.
MY GOD! What would the @GOP say if Trump declared he was also the first man on the moon?!!! “Hard to tell WHO was actually in that space suit. No reason not to think it wasn’t Trump.” https://t.co/HPxWYsj7w7
— Morgan J. Freeman (@mjfree) July 30, 2019
Kruse didn’t, apparently, go off the deep end, as others did, and when Lyons revealed the ruse, Kruse explained that his repeating a complete falsehood is understandable:
Deleted a tweet with a fake quote from Jim Jordan.
In my defense, he does say a lot of ridiculous things.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) July 30, 2019
Jim Jordan: While Trump was bravely wrestling terrorists at Ground Zero, Abraham Lincoln was sipping martinis in his space rocket
— Allison Kilkenny (@allisonkilkenny) July 30, 2019
Many politicians on the radical Left also say ridiculous things, but one suspects that neither Kruse nor Freeman nor Kilkenny are much concerned about them.
Fake News
Leftists frequently either concoct or repeat tales about Trump, then apologize later with the explanation that the fakery is believable because of Trump himself; i.e., that whatever Trump is supposed to have said, it’s plausible because Trump says things just like it.
In June, has-been singer and professional Trump hater Bette Midler retweeted a fake quote attributed to Trump and debunked long ago: “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.”
Trump never said it, and Midler said she believed it: “I apologize; this quote turns out to be a fake from way back in ‘15-16. Don’t know how I missed it, but it sounds SO much like him that I believed it was true! Fact Check: Did Trump say in ’98 Republicans are dumb?”
In May, Ian Bremmer, an editor at Time and political science professor at New York University, hoked up this since-deleted line, again supposedly from Trump, about former Vice President Joe Biden: “Kim Jong Un is smarter and would make a better President than Sleepy Joe Biden.”
Bremmer deleted the fake quote, the Washington Examiner reported, “but not before it was shared widely by Representative Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a prominent Trump critic, and a swath of commentators and journalists, including anti-Trump analyst Ana Navarro-Cardenas.”
Under fire for the fabrication, Bremmer sallied forth with the usual: “This is objectively a completely ludicrous quote. And yet kinda plausible. Especially on twitter, where people automatically support whatever political position they have. That’s the point.”
The Left likely wouldn’t accept plausibility as an excuse if a Trump supporter manufactured similar material about Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, or, even better, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Photo: AP Images
