There is a lot of disinformation out there on the right, so I thought it would be good to alert our readers to one of the biggest sources of lies designed to create paranoia and to divide the right: “America’s Last Line of Defense”. This is a leftist network that includes sites like Dunning-Kruger Times.
The “America’s Last Line of Defense” network—formerly, “The Resistance: America’s Last Line of Defense”—was created in 2015 by avowed leftist Christopher Blair with the specific intent of misleading careless right and right-leaning readers with over-the-top ‘satire.’
The Dunning-Kruger site’s recent contributions to the right’s increasing paranoia and outrage include “AOC’s Net Worth Grew by $23 Million in Four Years” (her net worth is estimated at $200k) and “TRUE: Anheuser-Busch Fired Its Entire Marketing Department Over ‘Biggest Mistake in Budweiser History’” (this is not–yet?–true), and “Anheuser Busch CEO Resigns As Bud Light Sales Plummet To Record Low” (again, not true, and the featured image is of Jerry Sandusky, a convicted child molester who is not in any way affiliated with Anheuser-Busch).
The site does not try to hide its role as pure fiction cum satire any more than do the left-leaning Onion or the right-leaning Babylon Bee. It’s clearly stated that it’s pure fiction; indeed, their “About” page is very clear about its content (archive link).
Dunning-Kruger-Times.com is a subsidiary of the “America’s Last Line of Defense” network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery, or as Snopes called it before they lost their war on satire: Junk News.. . . . Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined. Any similarities between this site’s pure fantasy and actual people, places, and events are purely coincidental and all images should be considered altered and satirical. See above if you’re still having an issue with that satire thing.
Further down, they even call out their right-leaning readers as “taters”:
“Taters” are the conservative fans of America’s Last Line of Defense. They are fragile, frightened, mostly older caucasian Americans. They believe nearly anything. While we go out of our way to educate them that not everything they agree with is true, they are still old, typically ignorant, and again — very afraid of everything.Our mission is to do our best to show them the light, through shame if necessary, and to have a good time doing it, because…old and afraid or not, these people are responsible for the patriarchy we’re railing so hard against. They don’t understand logic and they couldn’t care less about reason. Facts are irrelevant. BUT…they do understand shame.
The Washington Post—in an article tellingly entitled, “‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America—reported on this leftist network back in 2018:
A new message popped onto Blair’s screen from a friend who helped with his website. “What viral insanity should we spread this morning?” the friend asked.“The more extreme we become, the more people believe it,” Blair replied.He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”
WaPo continues with an illustration of how these fantastical ideas are conceived.
[Blair] noticed a photo online of Trump standing at attention for the national anthem during a White House ceremony. Behind the president were several dozen dignitaries, including a white woman standing next to a black woman, and Blair copied the picture, circled the two women in red and wrote the first thing that came into his mind.“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” Blair wrote. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem. Lock them up for treason!”Blair finished typing and looked again at the picture. The white woman was not in fact Chelsea Clinton but former White House strategist Hope Hicks. The black woman was not Michelle Obama but former Trump aide Omarosa Newman. Neither Obama nor Clinton had been invited to the ceremony. Nobody had flipped off the president. The entire premise was utterly ridiculous, which was exactly Blair’s point.
A recent example of utter ridiculousness is an article at Dunning-Kruger Times entitled, “Kid Rock Has Made More Than $30 Million From Bud Light’s Mistake.”
Without reading past the headline, we have to wonder how on earth this can be true. He’s not a politician, so there is no way to donate to him. What, people spent all their Bud beer money on Rock’s (actually quite good) music? Maybe, but “more than $30 million” in a week? Naw.
Let’s look at the article:
Since that magical moment, Kid Rock’s stock has been on the rise. First, he signed with Pabst to provide all the suds for his “No Snowflakes” tour for more than $120 million and then he signed with American Patriot beer for an undisclosed amount because I haven’t read that one yet.
And the author’s bio:
Flagg Eagleton – PatriotFlagg Eagleton is the son of an American potato farmer and a patriot. After spending 4 years in the Navy and 7 on welfare picking himself up by the bootstraps, Flagg finally got his HVAC certificate and is hard at work keeping the mobile homes of Tallahassee at a comfy 83 degrees.
Obviously, this is satire. Kid Rock signed a beer deal for $120 million, plus another “deal” with American Patriot beer, so sure, that adds up to ::: checks notes::: “more than $30 million.” It’s actually not all that bad as satire, even kind of funny. It would have been more amusing if the writer had chosen Michelob or Natural Light beer rather than Pabst since those are made by Anheuser-Busch, but still . . . pretty funny stuff.
And who can resist good ole “Flagg” and his other American symbol of freedom “Eagle/ton,” the “Patriot.” And potato farmer. This is a bit on the nose given the site’s obvious disdain for “taters,” but it’s clearly intended to tip readers off that this is all in good fun . . . at the conservative/rightwing readers’ expense.
Blair, for his part though, sounds like a truly horrible person, but that doesn’t let
his gullible readers off the hook.
WaPo’s 2018 piece continues:
Blair didn’t have time to personally confront each of the several hundred thousand conservatives who followed his Facebook page, so he’d built a community of more than 100 liberals to police the page with him. Together they patrolled the comments, venting their own political anger, shaming conservatives who had been fooled, taunting them, baiting them into making racist comments that could then be reported to Facebook.Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive behavior online. He had also forced Facebook to shut down 22 fake news sites for plagiarizing his content, many of which were Macedonian sites that reran his stories without labeling them as satire.What Blair wasn’t sure he had ever done was change a single person’s mind. The people he fooled often came back to the page, and he continued to feed them the kind of viral content that boosted his readership and his bank account: invented stories about Colin Kaepernick, kneeling NFL players, imams, Black Lives Matter protesters, immigrants, George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, Michelle and Malia Obama. He had begun to include more obvious disclaimers at the top of every post and to intentionally misspell several words in order to highlight the idiocy of his work, but still traffic continued to climb. Sometimes he wondered: Rather than of awakening people to reality, was he pushing them further from it?“Well, they never did have any class,” commented [name removed by FS], from Pahrump, Nev., and Blair watched his liberal followers respond.“That’s kind of an ironic comment coming from pure trailer trash, don’t you think?”“You’re a gullible moron who just fell for a fake story on a Liberal satire page.”“You my dear . . . are as smart as a potato.”
We all know that things are not right in this country, but we also have to remain rooted in reality not go diving down rabbit holes, particularly leftist-created ones. If what you “read somewhere” is not confirmed by a reliable source (such as LI), do a teensy bit of research, consider the source, and ensure that source isn’t actually a leftist ‘satire’ site. In short, don’t be a tater.
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