Someone “teaching pornography”? This is certainly a development since my school days.
But Cruz, who has a solid track record of sharing false information online, couldn’t resist the implication. Here was another left media loser trying to conflate white supremacy and the far right! He was just the type of guy the fake was supposed to bait, and he bit.
The fact that he thinks this makes sense is a phenomenon in itself. A large segment of the political right in the United States sees memes and online chaff as part of the political debate. It’s a space where cultural dominance is still evolving – or really big enough that you can sense broad success even if you carve out just an objectively small part of the conversation. The left cannot meme, goes the rallying cry, and the expectation is that the right can. That the most effective voices are those that can play on social media.
When his mistake became apparent (after apparently being pointed out, not after deciding to actually see if the article was too good to be true), he deleted the tweet. And then he rationalized sharing it in the most cliche way possible.
“Didn’t know it was fake,” he wrote in a subsequent tweet, as if as a US Senator he shouldn’t be expected to pre-verify information he shares with his 5 million Twitter followers. And then: “You guys are so crazy, that could have been real.”
