Folks, we now live in a time when the credulous fools making up much of the grassroots base of one of our major political parties believe the most outlandish things liars can make up. For example, a notorious hoaxster started an internet rumor that President Obama ordered a nuclear attack against Charleston, South Carolina, and fired all of our top generals when they refused to carry it out — a rumor that a retired teacher swallowed whole, and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum failed to refute head-on:
(Are you at all curious why Santorum will never be president? Probably not for the reasons you think. He’s badly trailing in GOP polls, not because he’s too spineless to rebuke a nut in the audience, but because he isn’t crazy enough to satisfy the GOP electorate.)
Above is a photo of an anti-ISIS rally in Dearborn, Michigan, on December 5, 2015, that got spun like this:
Snopes.com debunks this and similar messages here; but, needless to say, plenty of people swallow this stuff whole, without any fact-checking, and unfortunately internet lies never die.
The internet has marvelously expanded our access to information, but the dark side is that anyone can post anything, without editorial oversight, which makes the internet a powerful instrumentality for spreading ignorance, lies, and propaganda. This, coupled with the tendency of people to believe what they want to hear, and screen out messages that challenge their beliefs, is turning America — or at least a large swath of it — into a nation of credulous fools. Where is the accountability for unscrupulous (or just plain ignorant) people who exploit the internet to propagate hateful lies?