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 – Patriot
Flagg 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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Comments
The AOC thing is just applied to the wrong congress critters.
The other stuff is simply not funny.
AOC got a multimillion dollar book contract right out of the shoot. If she isn’t worth more than 200K, what happened to the money?
No, she didn’t. Where did you get that misinformation? The same sewers as the $16M or $23M net worth?!
She has not written any books, has not contracted for any books, and has not received even one cent from any such contracts.
Also ensure that the source isn’t Gateway Pundit or the Conservative Treehouse. If you read something on those sites (and there’s never any reason to do so), always look for confirmation on a reliable site.
IDK man I like to use CTH as a reference point of where folks go off the rails a bit to kind of see where folks get their wrongheaded ideas. In general the site is intriguing to me for coverage of macro economic trends and in supply chain hurdles. The author’s supply chain posts are pretty good and his posting of labor/unemployment data and trends is useful. In essence I poke around there once or twice a.week to see what is going on and then go elsewhere for more detailed information and analysis.
In contrast political coverage at CTH borders on insane. It’s an us v them, Only Trump all the time show. Everything at CTH is filtered through that lens and there is more than a what of wild eyed theories and analysis that is dead wrong. Some of the stuff over there is crazy talk with the authors and commenters stating as ‘fact’ things that are easily proven false.
Today in the Gateway Pundit:
“Discord Leaks: China to Provide Russia With Lethal Aid in Ukraine War”
“Judge Hands Alvin Bragg a Major Defeat in His Lawsuit Against Jim Jordan – Legal Expert Mocks Bragg”
“Biden’s Broken Border: New Study Shows Illegal Immigration Costs American Taxpayers at Least $151 Billion Each Year”
“Primary Care Providers Receive Incentives to Push the COVID-19 Vaccine”
“New CDC Report: Suicide Is Now The Second Leading Cause Of Death Of Americans Under-35, Jumps 4% In A Year – Are COVID and Mental Health Medications to Blame?”
What reliable sources can I refer to that confirms the above? And if I can’t find any, does that mean those stories are not true in any manner shape or form?
There is information and there is propaganda. The above is either one or the other. Yet what really counts is who was proven wrong.
Did Trump and Putin collude with each other for Russian bloggers to hack Hillary’s emails and swing the election to Trump? That’s what the Reliable Sources kept telling us from 2017 to 2020. But not the Gateway Pundit or CTH. ]
Funny that.
Most of these stories can easily be found in reliable sources. If you can’t find one of them in reliable sources, then yes, that absolutely means that the story is not true in any manner, shape, or form, and that the Hoft brothers made it up, or are repeating a story made up by one of their fellow sewer-dwellers. There is nothing of value ever to be learned from that site.
Did you think that Trump colluded with Russia?
Yes — then you are a victim of propaganda since all the Reliable Sources spewed that story.
No — then you did not consider NYT WaPo CNN MSNBC ABC CBS NBC WSJ as reliable sources.
Yet CTH and GP stood alone against that narrative.
My point: EVERYTHING is a source. It’s what you choose to make of the information.
And you’re an idiot. No, I do not think that Trump colluded with Russia, though I wouldn’t have cared if he had. I don’t think he did, because the matter has been investigated thoroughly and not evidence of it has ever been found. And all of that was reported in the sources you mention. None of them ever cited any evidence for the allegation, and they all reported the investigation extensively, so I know it was thorough.
I don’t need a source to say that he didn’t do something; I need one to say that he did. And no such source has ever existed. Adam Schiff is in the same category as the Hofts; every word out of his mouth should be presumed to be a lie.
It’s not very smart to suggest that nothing from a particular source can be trusted, or to imply that people cannot discern the frivolous, the fluff and the fact, among other things, It’s part of the process of synthesis and analysis, and it’s the way to obtain knowledge.
For example, this post cites WAPO. Should it be dismissed out of hand? On the other hand, some dismiss information from FOX, when it’s likely they never watch it. The same with you know who. Many of the loudest critics never actually listened to what is/was said. Are these people on the right path to knowledge, or the opposite?
People should read those sites mentioned and others, and judge for themselves what to believe. They do not need protection.
No, WAPO should not be dismissed out of hand. WAPO has often been known to tell the truth. Not always, but often. And when it does tell the truth, you will find the same story independently reported in other places. That’s no guarantee that it’s true, because the same liars can and do “leak” their lies to multiple outlets, which are only too eager to publish them without too much verification, but it’s something. The more independent reports there are, even from the legacy news industry, the less likely it is to be a fabrication, though that possibility always remains. But a report from the Hofts is exactly equal to nothing at all. Unlike WAPO, etc., and like Adam Schiff, the Hofts lie as easily as they breathe. They have no preference at all for telling the truth over lying. So any story worth reading you will find elsewhere, and if you don’t find it elsewhere then you know it’s a lie.
Of course it shouldn’t. And neither should the sites you mentioned. Your blanket disapproval is unadulterated nonsense. When you say that a report from the Hofts is “exactly equal to nothing at all” and they “lie as easily as they breathe,” is that any more factual or credible than what you criticize? NO!
Yes, it is more factual and credible. It is a plain honest description of those slimebags.
Because you say so. Got it.
How else could it be? I have observed them for long enough to know what they are, and I am telling you what I have observed. Why are you defending them so strongly, unless you are a sewer-dweller like them? Would you defend Adam Schiff?! How do you know he’s a liar? From observation. Would you ever recommend giving his word even the slightest credibility?! Of course not. Well, how are the Hofts different?
Your observations are one thing. Your representations are another.
Not defending them. Another of your screwy conclusions.
The point is that blanket assertions as you made are ridiculous on it’s face and in substance.
And you can take your innuendo and put it in the same place as your representations.
A very brief and nowhere near exhaustive list of lies by GatewayPundit
1. Invented a brother for the SoS for Georgia who doesn’t exist to claim he works for the Chinese Government
2. Claimed PA got back more ballots than they sent out by using the number sent out during the primaries and comparing that to what they got back during the general (a deliberate lie)
3. Claimed Trump lawsuits got dismissed without being heard (a lie I have quoted from decisions by the judges in those cases here although a lot of cultists don’t give a dam that they got heard).
4. Claimed Trump was leading in Virginia inot the morning when Virginia ceased to count votes (again a lie Virginia was Biden the vast majority of the evening)
5. Claimed The Republican Party accused Broward County of voter fraud during the 2016 election (no such claim has ever come from any portion of the Republican Party concerning the 2016 election)
6. Cited a glitch on the Associated Press website that did not exist anywhere else as a claim that 10k voters had moved from Trump to Biden (no such thing ever happened in the actual counting of the votes in Wisconsin).
7. Claimed voter fraud in the 2017 Alaska Special Election they later cited a very obvious Reddit troll.
All seven of these examples are egregious and took deliberate action to deliberately lie and are a pattern of behavior. It is as Milhouse says exactly the same as Schiff.
I used to read GP back in the Tea Party days, but they went seriously off the rails at some point, and I stopped years (a decade?) ago. I wouldn’t say they lie so much as they are crazy for clicks, so they pander to the angst and paranoia on the right to make money.
Most recently, I was horrified that they actually claimed, despite including the actual video that debunks their claim!, that Soros endorsed DeSantis. That was the headline: “Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Endorsed by George Soros (VIDEO).” And it was a bald-faced lie.
There is no way that any thinking person can view the video and conclude that Soros backs DeSantis (of all people). I wrote a post debunking this crazy, but the rabbit hole divers just don’t care. If something they want to believe is stated anywhere, they just latch on to it, to hell with the truth, facts, logic, or anything but their emotions (all stoked to fever pitch by these horrible lying sites that are making millions selling snake oil to concerned patriots).
So what, Danny? If you cannot analyze information for veracity, that’s on you. But to pretend that EVERYTHING, NO MATTER WHAT is a falsity is just plain dumb.
Add to that:
Gateway Pundit claimed to have solid inside information that Darren Wilson suffered “an orbital blowout fracture to the eye socket”.
Gateway Pundit falsely claimed that Feinstein’s husband was a major investor in Dominion Voting Systems, and even posted so-called “evidence” of this, which didn’t support the claim in any fashion. Joe Hoft simply relied on his readers to be so gullible that they wouldn’t even bother to follow his link and read it for themselves.
It also falsely claimed that Pelosi’s former chief of staff was now a “key executive” at Dominion. Both of these claims were so clearly wrong that it’s impossible the Hofts honestly believed they were true.
One of the usual suspects here repeated the AOC lie, though a more modest version, claiming her worth to be only $16 million. That’s still nearly 100 times the real amount.
80 times.
Not nearly 100.
I expect better from you, Milhouse. 😉
We ought to do a site like that to fill Leftist heads with garbage…. …. — Oops! Too late.
MSNBC, CNN, WaPo, Slate, See B.S. etc already have that market cornered.
Ideological warfare comes with many moving parts. Agitprop has always been effective.
When evaluating information (or Intelligence) often times it is necessary to evaluate the subject and source separately. At times a usually reliable source can have some bad info- intel – while a oft times ‘junk’ source may just have some good info in spite of themselves.
Eg, ISW is a good source for on goings in Ukraine…but an outlet like Daily Kos who we here would most likely avoid can have some good bits of insight. For good reasons.
Yes. Dismissing information solely due to the source is the sign of an ideologue.
Credibility is important and GatewayPundit has none because it makes things up.
Extremist view. Plain and simple. Idealogues deal in absolutes.
While the posts by LI staff here are excellent, there are a number of commentators on this site and other conservative sites who fall for what America’s Last Line of Defense publishes. People want to believe what they want to believe, so they fall for this crap. And then they spread it all over the Internet and it makes conservatives look stupid.
The problem is not people flooding the internet with opinions, biases, lies, half-truths or even solid information. Most people have a functioning brain and can put two and two together. For the ones who can’t, well too bad, the rest of us shouldn’t have our speech restricted because of how some people will react (i.e., triggered).
The problem is government. How many people believed the covid vaccine would PREVENT them from getting or spreading covid? Way too many, because most people are not doctors or microbiologists. Yet many people were manipulated into hating and fearing the people who chose not to partake. Who did that benefit? Obviously the pharma companies and government. The former profited immensely and the latter profited from excising freedom from the people in the name of a crisis.
Read up on the writings of Joseph Goebbels on how to effectively sway public opinion. He is a very reliable source on practical disinformation.
I’m going to disagree. The problem is that too many people simply believe what they’re fed by their sources of choice. Not enough people are critical thinkers to sustain a republic. Until we educate (and evangelize) those folks, we won’t be able to vote our way out of a paper bag.
This satire is about as “funny” as the insufferably obnoxious and snarky Colbert.
In some ways, it’s really not satire at all . . . until you read the actual article, thus my use of scare quotes. They make up stories that they think their gullible rightwing readers will believe and then publish them with compelling headlines (see examples in my post above).
The Onion, though I haven’t read it in a long time and they may have changed their MO, and the Bee write actual satire that you can tell is satire from the headline alone (recent Bee headlines): “Sports Illustrated Puts Bikini On Walrus For Latest Body-Positive Swimsuit Edition,” “Biden Security Documents Now Included In Specially Marked Packages Of Lucky Charms,” and “Drunk Irishmen Say They Understood Biden’s Dublin Speech Perfectly.”
What this Dunning-Kruger and related America’s Last Line of Defense sties do is write headlines that lean into rightwing fears and biases and “sound” believable to the mis-/ill-/un-informed. The articles themselves are so ludicrous that if anyone bothered to read them, they would recognize them as lies/fake news/”satire.” But people on social media don’t read past the headlines (heck, some readers here don’t read past the headlines, right?), so the lie gets spread and spread until it become “I read somewhere” (another thing I see all the time in comments here at LI).
It’s just wise to stop and think before sharing crap that makes literally no sense (the AOC thing) or that is easily debunked with a quick internet search. For example, if the CEO of AB had quit or they had fired their entire marketing team, it would be in ALL the mainstream media, both left and right, not tucked away on the fringes where this stuff marinates and spreads.
Why are we worrying about a satire site?
Because some number of people are too dumb to check the source for certain things confirming their bias.
Agreed. It’s not like people don’t spread misinformation from a variety of sources across the food chain.
Generously, it is intended to notify people that such things exist and to stop falling for nonsense.
It’s clearly stated that it’s pure fiction; indeed, their “About” page is very clear about its content
Ummm, it’s right in the name. “Dunning-Kruger” is the whole thing where people think they are smarter than they are.
Guess you have to go to the site to be misinformed. Do that many people actually go there? With all the garbage that proliferates the web, this site seems par for the course. When it comes to any web site, without exception, caveat emptor.
They don’t have to go there; they see the story on Facebook, share it, other sites (including rightwing fringe sites) see it and use the story/headline, and viola! Utter crap wends its way from these leftist “satire” sites to the comment section of LI, where as has been pointed the AOC lie has been repeated (more than once), as has the lie about the CEO resigning, the AB marketing team fired, and etc.
We just have to make sure that what we believe is actually true. It’s not hard, but people have to be willing to check what they read online, including clicking on links to ensure that what is claimed is supported by the credible linked source (and we see very often–in fact, in some of your own comments–that this is not always the case, right?).
Trollong comments. Nice. What a waste of time. Next time it should support your point.
My comment does support my point.
So the side that prints all false news, is creating a site to print all false news. I give them points for originality.
Oregon douche bag singer from the 90’s ….Todd Snider predicted his make believe alternative grunge band that couldn’t play instruments, but just smashed them would be put out of business by an alternative band that not only couldn’t play but wasn’t even put together yet. Silence— music’s original alternative.
Satire us effective at de-legitimizing the establishment.
The establishment is currently 100% left wing.
Plus, in order to succeeed as a satirist, you must consistently demonstrate ibvious truths vs your targets lies. Attenpting the opposite is bound to fail.
Next time this new group makes the news, it will be when they announce they’ve shut down.
There cam be no left-wing version of Babylon Bee that succeeds. Not in the current environment anyway.
In a society with integrity whose partisans at least tried to hold themselves to their own rules, this would be canceled immediately.
Of course, progressive trolls don’t work that way. The end justifies the means so you can continue to warp your own logic as long as your side is insulated.
I’m sure this violates at least three -isms on principle and should definitely lead to cancellation for all involved (not just the duped). Look no further than the NYT and Twitter trying to take down the Babylon Bee.
The difference in both the bee and the onion from this junk is that this is dry “dinner for schmucks” type satire designed to sit there and continue to say “are you serious” with a straight face from a very partisan lens. In fact, it is literally designed to deceive rather than stoke satire. In this world without principles, the right would be wise to start a counter-offensive.