I’ve noticed what appears to be a huge media drop of dishonest ads. showing up on my Facebook, Twitter and You Tube feeds.
These ads seem mostly to be misinformation about COVID-19. The ones I’ve seen foment doubt in the public mind about the scientific facts of the pandemic and the medical advice we have received. They encourage people to ignore the advice they are getting from the doctors who are trying to save their lives.
I would guess that this blast of false news is being financed by people who want to see the economy re-open so they can make money. You know, the same folks who’ve been pushing to kill granny for the DOW and who believe that losing 2-3% of our children to the pandemic is an “acceptable loss.”
Many of the ads I’ve seen are about things that never happened at all. They are completely made up. They appear to be mostly coming from various extreme right-wing, Trump-connected media.
The ad I’m discussing here is a bit different. First of all, instead of making up “facts” out of whole cloth, its creators took an actual interview and edited it so that the people involved appear to be saying pretty much the opposite of what they actually said. Second, there is no doubt where this particular ad came from. It was created and released by the official Trump Campaign.
Trump’s campaign and its allies have done this sort of thing repeatedly. Just a few weeks ago, a Republican super pac released an ad that used edited quotes from President Obama that supposedly showed that Obama believed Joe Biden to be a racist. President Obama sent the pac a cease and desist letter and the pac ignored it, continuing to run the ad, anyway.
Before that, the Trump campaign released another ad attacking Biden than was aimed at Hispanics. The Hispanic community labeled the ad racist.
Trump’s campaign puts these things out repeatedly. They get circulated by his willing-to-lie-for-him followers, and the damage is done. By the time the people who are being lied about learn what’s going on, setting the record straight is like trying to put toothpaste back into the tube.
Trump has no shame about lying. He doesn’t care if people know he’s a liar. His followers, including many of his most self-righteously Christian followers, are slowly turning into people who lie as much as for him as he does for himself.
He’s not just crazy. He corrupts the people who adore him. If he isn’t a psychopath, no one is.
This particular ad is a Trump Campaign attempt to spin his abominable failure at handling COVID-19 as a triumph. It also attempts to claim — incorrectly it seems — that Biden “mocked” his ban on travel from China by calling it “hysterical xenophobia.”
While Biden did use that phrase, what he actually was criticizing was Trump’s disbanding of the White House pandemic unit and Trump cuts to global health organizations. A lot of people thought Trump’s cuts to WHO were destructive to our safety, and anyone with a brain can see that disbanding the White House pandemic unit — which was established by President Obama after we nearly had a worldwide pandemic of Ebola in 2014-15 — has proven to be tragic.
This whole thing is just Trump, trying to cover up the mess he’s made by lying his way out of it.
From the Washington Post:
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In