The following article by Michael Tomasky was posted on the Daily Beast website November 17, 2017:
The other day, some rabbit hole I was venturing down online delivered me to Snopes.com, which I’d not visited in a while. In my memory, Snopes was called upon to settle, if such was possible, the occasional political debate; but more often it declaimed on questions of the “is the moon really made of green cheese?” variety.
What I saw staggered me—and somehow made it starkly plain to me how close to the precipice we are as a nation.
As I toggled over the home page, I was flabbergasted by what a high percentage of Snopes articles now are devoted to debunking fake news. And I don’t mean CNN. I mean, if I may use the phrase, real fake news. Garbage. And more specifically, right-wing garbage. Some stuff that’s in the actual news, though completely distorted, and other stuff that’s just totally made up, that who-knows-how-many thousands, or millions, of people are out there believing.
We begin, of course, with Hillary. “Hillary Clinton Gave 20 Percent of United States’ Uranium to Russia in Exchange for Clinton Foundation Donations?” was the most-searched story on the site Thursday. All week. Probably all month. You know, I trust, the basic allegation, so I won’t repeat it.
Snopes rates this, of course, as “False.” Because it is false. In fact, it’s insane. She had no known role in the decision, and there is no American uranium in Putin’s power-hungry hands. But at least this one is in some sense tethered to planet Earth.
Now let’s move to Thursday’s most shared story. “Starbucks Refused Free Product to Marines Serving in Iraq?” This one dates back to a viral email from 2004 (?!) claiming that “Starbucks had not only refused a request for free product from some U.S. Marines serving in Iraq, but had retorted that ‘they don’t support the war [in Iraq] and anyone in it.’” It’s great and so entirely believable, you see, because Starbucks comes from dark-blue, surrender-monkey Seattle and is run by a guy named Howard Schultz, who is Jewish, and is trying to turn us into a nation of epicene latte-sippers. It is, naturally, “False.”
Let’s see. Here’s a good one. “Was Barack Obama President During Hurricane Katrina?” Stop for a minute and think about what a drooling simian you have to be to believe this. Find out when Obama was president. Find out when Katrina happened. Even for not-very-bright people that can’t possibly be more than 40 seconds’ work. But they can’t even do that! These people may be against evolution, but from the evidence I’d say they’re proof of it.
View the post here.