From Pine View Farm

How Stuff Works, the Right-Wing Noise Machine Dept. 0

In the midst of a larger article about Trump’s fumbled fulminations about expressing condolences to the families of the four soldiers who fell in Niger, Paul Waldman describes the wingnut propaganda process. You can follow the link for the complete article, but here’s the crucial bit:

Now here’s why this matters. Yes, many news outlets pointed out that Trump wasn’t telling the truth. But there are probably three interns at Fox News who are now scouring old news reports to find some family member of a fallen soldier who didn’t get a call from Obama. If they find it, that person’s story will then become the subject of a segment on Sean Hannity’s show, and it will then get retold on a hundred talk radio programs and conservative websites as proof that Obama was a monster and the media are all lying about this. (Trump’s insistence that there was “fake news” at work is another way of telling his supporters not to believe whatever they hear about this subject that comes from sources not explicitly supporting him.) And I promise you that if you took a poll two weeks from now, you’d find that 40 percent of the public (or more) believes that Barack Obama never called the family of any fallen soldier, and only Donald Trump has the sensitivity to do so.

(Open tag fixed. Darned computers expect you to splet stuf rite.)

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